Into the Fire

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "Age and Death," Afterthoughts, 1931

Memory is a funny, sometimes maddening thing. Given ample amounts of time, I have a tendency to look back on bygone events from my school years and exorcize all of the negatives (like believing that I won my first fistfight in the fourth grade but forgetting the black eye that appeared on my face the next day). Much like a revisionist historical text on the Pilgrims or Spanish Conquistadors, its much easier to forget the negatives and accentuate the imagined good.

Now, thirty years after my graduation from a small high school in the Midwest, my memory has grown still fuzzier on those details, and with each passing year I find myself selectively recalling only the good times, while with the precision of a surgeon’s knife, cutting away at the heartache, humiliation, and insecurity that accompanied me through the doors of the school every single day.

That is, until my first born son, Ethan, left the relatively easy charity of elementary and middle school, and entered into the abyss commonly known as “high school.”

Gone forever are the days when homework consisted of a spelling review and math worksheets, a mere thirty minutes of additional work before he could play with his friends in the backyard or sit mindlessly in front of the television set or computer. Ethan’s once simple life has now been replaced by weeknights consumed by history project deadlines and endless chapters of American classics. Much to my delight, he has embraced this challenge with his usual laid-back, dutiful recognition that good grades in high school begets a college education and the possibility of achieving the “American Dream.”

But what escaped me until now (that damn memory thing again) was the difficult tribulation of assimilating in a closed, semi-adolescent society of your peers. Everything is magnified in the high school arena of academics, athletics and extra curricular activities. The pressure to succeed is enormous, and while my focus has been on stewarding Ethan through homework and sports, I completely overlooked the internal pressures he is reeling from while trying to fit in and define himself as a person.

Recently, a déjà vu moment woke me up to this egregious oversight. Ethan had a rather one-sided argument with a longtime friend (via texting and online gaming, of course) that turned rather ugly when the young man accused him of always siding with another friend whenever they had a disagreement. Unlike his father, Ethan tends to be the living, breathing equivalent of Switzerland when it comes to an argument, but in this instance he was very distraught that one his best friends could accuse him of disloyalty.

“I’m just sick of it, dad,” he said, as he sat at the computer and pulled up his Facebook page. “I’m tired of getting stuck in the middle whenever my friends have a disagreement. I don’t even want to hang out with some of them anymore!”

Later, after he cooled down (his friend texted him, apologized for his outburst, and Ethan graciously accepted his apology), we talked about the ramifications of possibly shutting the door on his friendship with the boy. In a stunning, heartfelt admission, Ethan told me how painful it had become to watch as his friends, many of whom had been his baseball teammates for years, broke off into smaller groups or cliques, and how difficult it was to be stuck in the middle trying to please everyone. Trying to fit in and trying to be a good friend was tearing him apart.

Looking into his soft brown eyes I could see the innocence was slipping away, and it broke my heart.

Friendships that were so easy on the ball diamond and the long, careless days of summer, had suddenly become as fragile as egg shells under the glaring lights of the school’s unofficial system of self-segregation. I had tried to prepare him for this day. Small, fractured statements, sometimes delivered with caustic sarcasm and at other times, gently; always trying to accentuate the positives without sugar-coating the reality that who we are today is not the same person we will be next week, next month, or next year. People change and you have to accept the disheartening reality that some friendships won’t last forever.

I think he’ll be okay. He’s a good kid, and a respectful, trusted friend to his peers. He has a strong sense of who he is and where he wants to go in life. I just wish there was some way to douse the emotional fires of high school life and let him know that in time everything will be alright.