In Trouble Again...or are They Just Overreacting?

James got into trouble again at school. Mrs. Marotta, the Lower School Head (who is as tall as I am), called me at work on a Friday morning to pick him up from school. I remained polite during the brief telephone conversation even though this was an appalling intrusion in my day. James was being suspended because he "used his fists again." What the hell....isn't that what little boys do? He is not a bully. He's a big softy...maybe a little impulsive at times. The thing is, he is so big that when another kid hits him, he barely feels it, but when he hits another boy (even--to him--gently), the smaller boy feels it big time. Well, fortunately, it turned out that the telephone version of the event was much worse than the reality, but I was still annoyed. I didn't want to leave work just for that. Not again. It meant having to devise yet another punishment (which always results in endless and desultory negotiation with a nine-year-old that exhausts me) and having yet another conversation and interrogation (why, why, why?). On the way to school, I imagined what I would say when I saw him. How stern should I be? To be honest, the main thing was not that he had hit someone but that I had to leave work because he had gotten caught. I know, I know....what kind of mother am I....

As soon as I entered Bell Hall, I saw him outside the Lower School Head's office, sitting on a chair, his big soft hands clasped together on his lap. He was looking down at the floor and heaving gently, trying very hard to hold in his tears. Any anger I had felt about the disruption in my day instantly vanished. I saw my son and knew he was hurting. He was confused and embarrassed. I wanted to hold him and make all the bad feelings disappear--just take them away. (Whenever he hurts, I wish to God I could take it from him, take it for him...let me have the hurt instead.) I sat next to him, put my hand on his shoulder and said softly, "Just tell me what happened." He cried then and shook and said only, "Mommy." "Tell me. Please tell me what happened." He said he did in fact "use my fist," but when the other boy didn't complain and it seemed that no one had even noticed, James actually turned himself in, a move for which he received no special consideration. He could have walked away. He could have ignored it, forgotten it....he could have gotten away with it. (And I wouldn't have had to leave work.) So there was now this new ethical qualm to deal with: get away with it or turn yourself in. True, he had done something--used his fist--he was not permitted to do but the incident, as it turned out, had been very minor: no one was the worse off, except possibly my boy who was the perpetrator and confessor.

In spite of himself, even when he does behave, he manages to get into trouble. A few days later, he took a current issue of U.S. News & World Report to school so he would have something to read on the bus. The cover had a picture of a handgun on it, and the big article was about gun control. He asked me about that, what did gun control mean, and I explained the pros and cons (as I knew them without having yet read the article) of these grim times, of gun control, of Charleton Heston and the NRA, of Columbine and big boys who make bombs and sneak guns into highschool corridors, of sociopathic college students who mercilessly turn on their helpless classmates. He asked if we had guns in our house, and I said no way, never (although once, in a pre-Columbine era, his father brought two small loaded pistols wrapped in a towel into our home which had caused me to panic and rant and rave...the guns disappeared shortly thereafter).

When James arrived at school later that morning, he took the magazine out of his backpack and put it in his "cubby." A classmate asked him about the magazine, and when he took it out to show the other child, their teacher saw the photo of the gun on front, confiscated it immediately and sent my child once again to the Lower School Head for discipline. When he came home from school, he hung his head and confessed, "Mommy...something bad happened at school again. I got in trouble and had to go see Mrs. Marotta." After a quick interrogation, I told him that in my opinion, the punishment (being separated from his class and lectured by an authority figure for an indiscretion he was completely unaware of) did not fit the crime...that, to me, no crime had even been committed....not even a rule broken--for how could he have known? I am not keen on disrespecting authority (no, wait....actually, I am....), but I believed his teacher had overreacted; in lieu of hysteria and confiscation, she might have been impressed that one of her third-graders reads U.S. News & World Report instead of making him feel like Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold. This wasn't Guns & Ammo or Shooting Times; it was U.S. News & World Report.

I told him to forget about it. I wasn't at all angry, but I did at least try to tell him about from where comes the current hysteria about guns--even pictures of guns, apparently--in school. His teacher telephoned me from her home that evening, and I politely told her that I believed she had overreacted but didn't say much more. She wanted very much to explain what had happened. But I already knew. This is the new Day. This is the regrettable and overwhelming pernicious hysteria, the omnipresent fear that even when things are very calm, something always could go wrong. In this new Day, at this time, it is imperative that we always be vigilant to take every conceivable caution against every possible danger lurking around every corner, in every highschool student's backpack and even, apparently, in every third-grader's cubby hole.