Surprised by empathy

I think most parents are like me in that as soon as we send our daughters off to school, we know on some level that the day will come when we’re drying her tears and trying to come up with answers about why kids sometimes don’t always treat each other too nicely. No matter how closely we read Reviving Ophelia or Queen Bees and Wannabes, or attend anti-bullying sessions sponsored by the PTA or listen to the counsel of friends with older kids, we wonder how we’ll help her navigate this particular age-old maze.

I don’t mean to sound sexist; boys have friendship issues too, but in my household, that part has been easy. Tim is something of an introvert; he gets along with lots of kids (being a good athlete always helps, as you’re always in demand for a pick-up game at recess) but sticks with a small number of good friends with whom he’s been close for years.

For Holly, it’s more typically complicated, and I consider myself lucky that it’s no more than every few weeks that she comes home on the verge of tears with a friendship issue to vent. I’m definitely no expert, but I do my best at those times: I listen to her account of what happened (which usually boils down to who was excluded from what by whom), offer perspective, reassure her that this too shall pass, and sometimes try to subtly clue her in as to which friends tend to get mixed up in these problems more often than others.

So earlier this week when she said she wanted to tell me about a problem, I automatically pictured the fairly large circle of girls she normally socializes with at school. I wondered which girl had snubbed Holly or said something that was open to misinterpretation this time around. But what I heard instead surprised me. With tears rolling down her cheeks, Holly told me a story about being excluded in the cafeteria – except it didn’t involve her at all. It was a boy in the class who was having trouble fitting in with the other boys whose attention he apparently coveted.

Accustomed to discussing girl problems with Holly, I was a little bit perplexed. I suggested that she could invite the boy to eat lunch with her and her friends if the other boys were excluding him, but she retorted that my solution was not what he wanted. “I understand that he wants to be with the boys and not the girls, but wouldn’t being with the girls be better than nothing?” I asked. But this is fourth grade, the height of the boy-girl voluntary segregation phase. It was unthinkable to her that eating lunch with the girls might be a reasonable second choice for this boy, and my attempt to suggest that having the girls desire his company might in fact make this boy more impressive to the other boys in the long run made even less sense to her.

I wasn’t much help, but what struck me was the depth of her empathy. She almost never cries when she confides to me about her own friendship problems, but she was crying over the fate of a boy being left out. “They’re just so wrong to think they’re better than him!” she wailed in describing the other boys’ behavior.

Her frustration and anguish made me sad, but her empathy surprised me and gave me a twinge of pride. Holly is almost always cheerful and pleasant, but I don’t necessarily think of her as empathetic. I felt sorry that she was experiencing so much sadness over the schoolroom situation, and I felt concerned for the boy whom she perceived as being victimized. My hope is that this situation will pass. But underneath that feeling is a fundamental belief that her empathy for those in difficult situations will last a lifetime, and that almost makes the tears worth it, this time around.

She's with the band

Fourth grade brings with it the opportunity to start studying a band instrument, but throughout the summer, Holly had been indicating that she was unlikely to seize that particular opportunity. She likes to do things her own way – which means she’s a very creative person but not generally fond of lessons and instruction regarding those creative pursuits.

But after the band director talked with the fourth graders on the first day of school, she had a change of heart. She did indeed want to play an instrument – the clarinet, she thought.

I greeted that news with delight. I wanted Holly to study an instrument, and I welcomed the thought of one as traditional but also gender-neutral as the clarinet. (Moreover, when it comes to instruments that need to be carted to school for lessons and practices, the lighter, the better.) Holly playing the clarinet? I could already picture it and even imagine the lovely tonalities she would learn to generate. She'd take out her clarinet at family gatherings to play a tune or two. Sure, the learning curve might be steep – and painful to the ears – but I was ready for that. (My sister is a strong proponent of choosing your child’s instrument based on what you’ll find the least painful to listen to as it is mis-played. Yet she nonetheless survived raising a violinist.)

The fourth graders spent every recess last week trying out different instruments. Holly dutifully took her turn with the trumpet, the saxophone, the flute and the oboe as they were trotted out one day at a time, but she continued to say that her interest remained with the clarinet.

And then she came home Friday, crestfallen. The clarinet test hadn’t gone so well. “I could barely make a sound,” she told me sadly.

“Reed instruments are difficult,” I said. “Lots of people find it hard to get the right touch at first.”

Unfortunately, though, Holly had been right there in the music room watching as – according to her -- every other kid in line had had more success with the clarinet than she did.

I offered to ask the band director if Holly could have another chance to try the clarinet. Knowing the band director and his eagerness to engage kids in the program, I was fairly sure he could accommodate this request.

But Holly said no: her romance with the clarinet was over, never to be rekindled, she was quite certain.

I wasn’t expecting what happened on Monday when Holly climbed down the steps from the bus. “I want to play percussion!” she exclaimed. “I tried it out today and I liked it!”

Percussion. Wow. That’s not what I was picturing at all. My visions of Holly all dressed up for the December band concert, sitting toward the front of the stage with the woodwinds, dissipated instantly. I tried to imagine her all the way at the back, standing behind the tympani or a set of snare drums. I tried to imagine her taking out her drumsticks at our next family gathering, tapping out a rhythm to impress her grandparents.

I don’t even know what learning percussion entails, exactly. There aren’t scales or notes to go over. I can’t picture what lessons would be like, or even practice sessions. Never mind the fact that I can’t picture Holly marching in the Memorial Day parade hoisting a bass drum at the back of the line.

The important thing is that trying out the percussion instruments renewed Holly’s interest in music lessons. I wondered briefly if I should have pushed her harder to give clarinet another chance, but this choice is hers to make, and it’s fine that she didn’t make a choice I expected. A lot of kids stick with instrument lessons for only the first year or two, but in those early days, all the parents dream of greatness. So now I’m dreaming of my future as the mother of the drummer.

Not what I was picturing. But it could still be fun.

Fill in the blanks

The first few questions on the fourth grade parent questionnaire were easy enough to fill out, and those were the only ones we were required to answer. Parents’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, preferred method of contact.
The questions on the reverse side were optional, Holly’s teacher emphasized, but would help her in getting to know each child better. I studied the questions.

“My child is particularly interested in ______.”

I thought about all the ways I could answer that. The TV show “I-Carly.” Finding new and unusual ways to irritate her brother. Who wants to sit with whom on the school bus.

“Learning about other cultures,” I wrote down. Sure. Such as the culture inhabited by the teens on the show “Suite Life on Deck with Zach and Cody,” or, as I like to think of it, “The Love Boat, Junior.”

“My child is great at _________.”

That’s not the kind of statement I ever make. Holly is good at plenty of things, the kinds of things you would expect a nine-year-old to be good at: art projects, making up stories, building sand castles. But I’m just not the type of parent to refer to my child as great at something.

Even though it’s only the third day of school, I already know Holly’s teacher fairly well, because she was Holly’s second-grade teacher two years ago and we run into each other frequently on campus. I know that not only is she an excellent teacher but she’s also an unfailingly well-meaning person tremendously dedicated to her students, and therefore I know her only intention in asking these questions was to get to know her students better. But I couldn’t help feeling irrationally like the questions were a test, to see what kind of parent I was. The boastful kind? The stage-mother kind? A parent quick to promote her child’s talents, or one genuinely concerned about meeting the curricular benchmarks for the mathematics program?

But the hardest question was yet to come: “List the three words that best describe your child.”

I didn’t second-guess myself until after I’d written them down. “Creative. Cheerful. Self-absorbed.”

Wait a minute, my conscience spoke up. Self-absorbed? You’re not supposed to say that about your own kid! It’s so critical! So negative! You’re supposed to have nothing but positive comments, remember? Otherwise along with “My child is great at _________” there would be a question that said “My child is seriously deficient at ________,” and you didn’t see that one, did you?

I looked again at where I’d written “self-absorbed.” I didn’t mean it in a critical way, just an honest one. Holly spends a lot of time thinking about Holly, that’s all. But what nine-year-old doesn’t? Were there actually parents in the class filling in that line with “altruistic”? Wasn’t self-absorption in a girl Holly’s age to some extent just a manifestation of positive self-esteem? She’s a young girl. She’ll spend plenty of time in her life thinking about other people: friends, romantic partners, bosses, clients, spouses, children of her own. Is it so bad that at the age of nine, her primary focus is herself – possibly for the last time?

I believed in my own argument, but I didn’t want to start off the year on the wrong foot, with her teacher thinking I was overly critical. I deleted “self-absorbed” and changed it to “self-confident.” It’s not quite the same, and frankly it’s not quite as close to what I was trying to say.

But that’s all right. It’s the third day of school; Ms. McCabe has the next nine months to get to know the kids and evaluate the parents’ assessments of their own children. Her primary interest is in the make-up of her classroom, not the way parents fill in blanks. I’ll let it go for now. Ms. McCabe has her own challenge ahead, similar to this one but tougher: coming up with adjectives for Holly and every other kid in the class when report card time comes around.