I’m ‘home’ right now, as in back in the town I grew up in. Last night I happened across my mom’s ‘file’ on me that contains report cards, essays, notes, and various other memorabilia that she saved as I grew up, including the few rare post cards or letters I sent while at college etc. I’ve seen this file before but I guess I either skimmed it, or am looking at it in a new light now that I’m a parent.
Wow, I was such an ass to my family when I was in high school.
Really, I was an ass. I don’t mean to other folks my age, but to my parents, or my mother in particular. I don’t think I ever really looked at things from her point of view until now. Just skimming through my ‘file’, reading her notes, copies of her letters to my father about stuff I was doing and saying, oh and my bad grades in various classes in high school was kind of shocking, since I’ve conveniently forgotten about most of that stuff.
I don’t think I ever appreciated how lenient and patient she was with me when I was a real dick of a son at times. If you asked me yesterday what my teenage life was like here I’d tell you how I hated my high school, was bored living in the same town for 15 of my 17 years, wasn’t challenged in school, had no friends, etc. It’s become a speech. It’s pretty much true, but time has smoothed the edges and conveniently dropped details from my mind.
Looking at it from my mother’s point of view I was a spoiled kid whining about everything, not telling her anything about what I was doing, failing classes at the point where my grades were being sent to colleges, etc. I really had a major attitude problem, most of which was really just me copping that attitude, not because of my school, which wasn’t THAT bad. I was making my own drama to go with the real life drama. Suppose that’s typical teenage angst but I do think I scored some extra points on the pain-in-the-ass sarcastic know-it-all son scale of things.
For example, I didn’t remember I got an F in Honors Math in 11th grade before I dropped it and switched back down to the ‘normal’ level. Now that I think about it.. oh yeah.. Mr. Millet was an ass, and I just wasn’t catching on to whatever it was he was teaching. I’m sure if I had just gotten past the above mentioned attitude (and ignored the fact that he was really nice to Debbie Sundarum when she came after school for help in her cheerleading outfit, but treated me like crap) and just hunkered down I could have passed the class easily (hell I went through more than this at Antioch without any problem), but no, I convinced myself I wanted to be in the other math class and failed out of Honors math. Brilliant move on my part. Go Matt. That’ll show ’em.
Just kinda shocking to have this revelation now. I guess I’m now 17 years past being 17 so I can finally view the old me in a new light enough to want to go back in time and shake some sense into my self-righteous pompous ungrateful 17 year old self.
While I’d doing a core dump on this, I have to give my mom credit, she let me do my own ‘non-conformist’ thing in middle school and high school, even though it made no sense to her and I don’t think I really even understood it myself. She let me dress how I wanted, let me do my own thing with the friends I met either in school or online. She let me attend YRUU and Quaker youth conferences even when my grades were slipping. She let me spend hours on the modem (note, this was back in 1985 we’re talking, back before the internet, I was a BBS junky) and let me attend an expensive liberal college in Ohio sight unseen even though I could attend decent SUNY schools here in NY. Her lenience in these areas, perhaps unbeknownst to her, was really forged the Matt that is here today. I learned more about myself, life lessons and friendship in those weekend conferences and online than I did in all my pre-school thru high school classes and friendships. I mentioned some this in an earlier note I posted on here about strange social circles so I won’t elaborate more on it here, but suffice to say my mother was very trusting of me, even though I was showing signs of screwing up. I mean really, I dressed and acted like one of the stoner dead heads / junkies, partly because some teachers would automatically label me as such. But either my mom was very smart and could see the real me, or was just way to trusting of me, either way, it worked.
So the first step in the 12 steps to dealing with your past is to accept the fact that you were an asshole right? 🙂
Oh and if my mother ever actually reads my journal, and finds this section, first off EEK! (I believe Hopita pointed out an Onion parody article about “Mom finds blog“), and second… um… Sorry Mom!