In Which I Cry and Scream and Stamp My Feet, But a Larger Issue Lurks Beneath

When I was thirteen years old, I got into one of the only huge fights I ever had with my parents.  My grades had been slipping, from straight As to Cs and even Ds in the span of just a year and a half.  The cause was not clear at the time, but it seemed to coincide with a few significant events in my life: puberty beginning and a supposed-seizure that I suffered while in the lunch line at school.  Years later, I would see how I had connected the two events, and reconfigured the seizure into a kind of punishment being visited upon me by my changing body.  Whatever the case, the real concern for my parents was my rapidly declining academic performance. 

This was 1996, so I suppose it was a sign of the times that my parents felt I should get tested for a learning disability.  Still, this felt (and still feels) like the prototypical response of my parents: "If things aren't going well, then something must be wrong with our son, so let's pay someone to test him and make something up."  I mean, that's not really give them enough credit, of course.  I'm sure what was going on in their minds was far more complex and fraught—all I can do is describe what it has felt like to me, particularly since I was never granted any alternate perspective.  At any rate, they eventually did find someone who would say I had a learning disability.  Dyslexia?  ADD?  Dysgraphia?  CAPD?  Nope, nope, nope, nope.  The "learning disability" I was diagnosed with?  "Daniel learned how to deal with his school work in a haphazard fashion, and now that it has become harder, he does not have the preparation necessary to properly plan for his work."  In other words, bullshit.

Well, not according to my parents.  According to my parents, it was now time to share these results with my teachers, so that I could receive special awareness and treatment.  I learned of this plan of theirs when my psychoanalyst told me about.  He'd been asked by my parents to be their representative speaking to my teachers.  Fortunately for me, he refused to do so without first getting my permission, as he didn't want to jeopardize our relationship.  So, he asked me if I was okay with this, and that was the first I'd heard about it.  I was shocked, I was hurt, but mostly I was angry.  When I got back home to my parents, that's when the fight began. 

I don't remember too much of it, except a lot of crying and yelling, almost entirely on my part.  I think my mom did some yelling as well; my dad probably didn't do much except look disappointed.  I was told that this was for my own good, and that it was to my benefit for my teachers to be aware of this.  I told them that I didn't have a learning disability, and that maybe my grades were dropping because I was just stupid.  That was a refrain I repeated over and over again.  I was told that I was being childish.  I told them that I was being treated like a child when I didn't deserve to be.  I told them that this was a decision that affected my life, and I should be the one to make it.  They told me that "parents have to make decisions for their children, when their children aren't old enough to know what's good for them."  That's the line that stuck with me all this time—it still resonates.  I remember yelling back through my tears, "at what age do I finally get to make my own decisions, then?"  No answer was given.  To this day.

Eventually, my parents got the woman who tested me for the learning disability to talk to my teachers.  I learned of this through my psychoanalyst, and before she got a chance, I looked up her number in the phonebook and left her a long, angry answering machine message about the ways in which she was betraying her patient (me), and was therefore a disgrace of a supposed doctor.  I honestly don't know if she ended up doing it.  I never pursued the matter any further and, in typical fashion, I just pretended like none of this had really happened and tried to keep on living.  Eventually, through a lot of hard work and talk therapy (as well as a lot of bullshitting), my grades rose again, although never again to the same level where they had once been.

I remember spending a lot of time thinking about that line my parents had delivered during our fight, that parents have to make decisions for their children.  Where is that line drawn?  Eighteen?  That's such arbitrary distinction.  I couldn't drink until I was twenty-one, and I couldn't vote until I was eighteen, but I could be tried as an adult and executed at the age of sixteen, and theoretically even younger.  So my age was arbitrary to my theoretical maturity when it comes to the interests of justice and punishment, but not when I wished to exert control over the direction of my life.  That was the answer I seemed to get from the United States government, and I wasn't getting any kind of answer, either direct or otherwise, from my parents.  No wonder that terrible movie North, about a kid who gains emancipated from his parents, had such appeal to me (until the day I actually saw it).

Once I became a dog owner, my perspective on the issue changed, as did so much else.  This fragile, little life is in my care, and I feel a responsibility for her beyond just ensuring that she lives through each day.  I feel it is my duty to keep her happy, healthy, entertained, and enjoying life for as long as possible.  If Rosie had her way, she'd eat and eat and eat until she vomited, and then she'd eat and eat and eat some more, until she finally died from a burst stomach.  Or she'd follow some interesting scent away from me and get hit by a car, or at best get lost and picked up by some other family (that's how she found her way to me in the first place).  And not all the decisions I have to make for her are as simple as whether to walk her on a leash or make sure she only eats as much as she needs.  It took a great deal of personal struggle and realization to finally start training and disciplining her, and realize that instead of having her resent me for it, she became calmer, happier, and generally more at ease.

A dog is not a thirteen-year-old boy, though—far from it.  My experiences as a dog owner with Rosie have tempered the resentment I feel towards my parents about that incident, but it doesn't explain anything.  I suppose an explanation isn't really what I'd be looking for, anyway, as no explanation will ever change the way that it made me feel—like I was unimportant, uncared-for, and generally just an inexplicable aberration in their otherwise normal lives.  I don't seek to have a conversation with my parents about it; I'm fairly confident they wouldn't even remember much about the time, and I see no point in dredging up hurt feelings just to make them feel bad.  I love them and I have no desire to seek retribution for my own pain by causing theirs.  There is no closure to be gained externally, only internally.

As the years have gone by, I realize my slipping grades for what they were: a call for attention.  When I yelled at my parents that I was stupid, I was really yelling for them to care for me directly, instead of through paid professionals.  When Rosie and I were going through the darkest period of our relationship—she was having chronic housetraining issues and separation anxiety, and I felt that I didn't know what I was doing and was ruining this poor, inscrutable creature's life—I desperately wanted to pay some high-priced trainer to deal with her for me, to make the problems go away.  I'm glad that I wasn't able to.