Our thirty year class reunion was last August. It seems like every since I have been taking many strolls down memory lane regarding my childhood I have been spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about my past. It is amazing, to me, how much of my happiness has been in the past 10 years. True, contented, happiness.
I have heard some people say they had idyllic childhoods or that they peaked in high school. When I think back to those years I know I can look forward because the best is yet to come.
I have great childhood memories, some good grade school memories, and ok Jr. High School memories, not so fond of High School memories. It seems so weird that my hubby plays either no role or a negative role in those memories. The man who is now such a pivotal part of my life wasn't in those years, and yet, now, my best times have been with him.
Conversely, my worst times have also been with this man. The bad memories I have from school appear to have something to do with him. And, in the twenty plus years we have been together we have been through some real, real bad times. But, as everyone knows, bad times do make good times all that much better.
Hubby and my memories of school helped us to come to the decision to homeschool. It had very little to do with the kids and everything to do with the teachers. When a certain middle school principle condescendingly told hubby and I to harken back to when we were in school. He actually told us he was the same man that was our principle (he was the vice principle) and we should have just as much confidence in him now as we did then. We both realized we did and we yanked our kids.
It dawned us both that those teachers would have our children 40 hours a week. Those teachers who threw chalk and erasers at kids out of frustration, anger, teaching apathetically or even those who taught passionately but just from their point of view and then tested kids based on their slanted viewpoint of life.
One of the cool things of marrying someone from school who was in the same grade but in a completely different circle of friends, as well as a different religion, is that we have been able to compare stories. I learned that all those times that hubby and friends skipped school were not spent drinking and partying. They had an elaborate forest treefort, actually more like a tree village, that they had all built and which they spent many long days defending in bb gun wars. This continued on up into high school. Many battle scars are from bb gun bullets shot at too close of range or if someone had pumped more than they should have, making the shot more powerful.
I learned that the spit wads in my hair in ninth grade English were my hubby's doing. No, nothing so romantic as love, or like, in the least. I was the weirdo Bahai with "stuck up" friends. Ninth grade English was miserable for me. None of my friends were in it and I was plagued by hateful boys sitting in the backrow. Hubby is shame faced about it now. More so because he sees it not only as my spouse, but as a Baha'i himself.
For me, that was the hardest. Baha'i camps and retreats were these totally awesome places. You didn't have to fake being anything, you could just be you. No one ever called someone a "fag" people didn't stare at black people and call them names behind their backs, two girls could actually hold one another's hands, even in eighth grade, without hearing snickers. And there were no wall flowers at the dances. No one ever said "no" if you asked them to dance, and you never said "no". The older kids always looked out for the younger ones. It was so "cool" to have a college boy ask you to dance, which made all the other guys want to dance. Our dances weren't divided up into ages. So you had everyone out there dancing.
The camps were family camps, mostly, and so there wasn't the "oddness" of jamming this group of people, all the same age, together to try to figure out life using all the same half assembled tools and coming to the same, untried, sophomoric, answers. You were with a diverse group of people of all ages and races and they were electric! Then you would come back home to plain, old, boring "vanilla."
After hubby went to his first camp after becoming a Baha'i he exclaimed, "THATS what you got to do on school breaks?" He was flabbergasted at how I could come home from something like that and turn around and go to school on Monday. While it often was reinvigorating, around the second or third day back I would hit a wall, and it would be depressing for a day or two. It wasn't just the kids. It was the teachers. We were living in pretty hopeless times, then. It was the '70s. We had been lied to by Nixon, we knew that the Russians had "the bomb" but we also knew that crouching beneath our desks wasn't going to save our butts from anything! Our school had a bomb shelter (the locker rooms) city hall had a bomb shelter, and I can't think where else but I do remember learning in our health class how to look for the upside down dotted triangle signifying a shelter was nearby.
While our Faith taught us we were at the beginning of a new 500,000 year dispensation our schools told us to prepare for the end of the world. Our graduating class, if I remember correctly, was called one of the most apathetic that our high school principle had ever encountered. In our health class our teacher, Ms. Brown, taught us that if we were abducted, to submissively follow the captors orders as our chances of being released alive increased for submissive people, while fighters died. How weird, I thought, to teach a classroom of sophomores to be submissive.
Being the naive person that I was, and thinking teachers liked input even when it countered what they said, I piped up, "My mom told me to never, ever go with anyone who tried to grab me. I am supposed to fight, scream, and do anything to draw attention to us." Ms. Brown fixed a glare on me, "Even if he has a gun?" she sneered. "Especially if he has a gun. My mom says if he is showing a gun and his face he's probably going to shoot me anyways and I have a better chance of getting help if I am shot downtown Astoria than out of one of the logging roads." I didn't think then was the time to add what else my mom had said, "And if you do go with the man and we find your body shot and mutilated I will scrape it up off the logging road and beat it." Somehow, it made her sound a little crazy and took away all the logic of the first part of her advice.
I remember that the teacher was not thrilled with my answer and commented dryly that while we needed to follow the advice of our parents and our own safety plan for the sake of the test HER answer was the "correct" one. Another reason we homeschooled our kids. Deduction and reasoning not allowed, one correct answer for the masses and only one.
Then I remember being frightened so often. What would friends think if I said this, wore that, did the other? What if I don't know the answer? What if I do know the answer? Can't be too smart, can't be too dumb. So much of my life seemed to be controlled by what others thought about me. What is funny is I can't remember when I stopped caring what others thought. Not the "in your face" not caring, but the true, not even realizing it, not caring.
I know that now there are times when I care, but it is times I consciously choose. There are times when feed back from others is something I would like, but somehow it has morphed. Then it was friends, teachers, co-workers and bosses. Now it is husband, parents, children, grandchildren. Wow, I have grandchildren! Yeah, it is great when a story I have been working on for weeks, or sometimes months, gets noticed and complimented, but I wouldn't stop writing if I didn't get it. If I didn't KNOW that my husband had my back? It is something I cannot even conceive of. If I didn't KNOW I had my children's love? Chilling thought.
Then and now. I like now. Even with the gray hair, sagging skin, wrinkles and pains. I choose now, and I look forward to tomorrow.
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