Faith Of Our Fathers?

Explosions In The Sky--"A Song For Our Fathers" (mp3)
Arthur Pope--"Lies Of Our Fathers" (mp3)

I usually get depressed every year at this time.

The first reason, as I've known for awhile now, is because in working with seniors, I am in the odd situation of mourning their departure at the very time when they are celebrating their graduation. The job is bittersweet; I start the journey over again every year. I start it today.

The second reason was confirmed concretely Saturday night. Those of us who work in schools, unless we are the ones who get most of the phone calls, get to operate in the mostly blissful ignorance of where our students come from each morning and return to each night or, in the case of boarders, where they go during weekends away and breaks. But Saturday night, at a reception for seniors and their families, I watched and was even a part of too many uncomfortable interactions between students and their parents.

There was the father pretending that he had heard his son talk of me many times, when it was clear he had little connection with the boy at all; in fact, neither father nor son was staying at the reception. Both were headed out with friends. And though the father gave permission to his son to go to Mellow Mushroom, it was clear that said was for my benefit. The son wasn't asking. There was the boy who had arrived here emaciated a year and a half ago after struggling through life with his alcoholic mother in New York City. He lives with distant relatives gracious enough to take him in, but I didn't see them at the reception. There was the boy who wasn't at the reception at all, who wasn't coming to graduation either, his alienation from the entire senior class largely due to parents who move him from school to school because no school ever recognized their son's talents and greatness, a circumstance neither they nor he could handle.

In a pamphlet called "Understanding Independent School Parents" that I read a couple of summers ago, author and PhD. Michael Thompson, who specializes in children and families, argues that if we, as teachers, are going to love our students, we've got to love their parents as well. It made perfect sense to me at the time, and, in fact, I spouted this wisdom on more than one occassion.

Today, I think it's pretty much bullshit. Yeah, it's an important stance for professional behavior, but if we were candid with ourselves, those of us who work with children spend a lot of our time trying to help children cope with the damage their parents have done to them. If we're lucky, we have the occasional opportunity to undo some of that damage. If we are aware enough, we have a chance to keep from feeding the fire.

To know that those children are sometimes trying to survive in the happy din of a graduation reception, perhaps dreading this night as much as any all year, perhaps putting on the necessary show to be part of the happy din, that is information I wish I did not have. And, no, I do not "love the parents" who are responsible for these situations. I do not love the parent who is selfish, childish, narcissistic, demeaning, destroying, disconnected.

But do I think I've got it figured out? Not really.

As Philip Larkin notes in his poem, "This Be The Verse:"


They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.



I appreciate Larkin's sense of irony. I appreciate the gentleness of his wisdom. And I think he's absolutely right. But it doesn't give me any sense of compassion for a parent or a set of parents who have put one of my students through hell this year. And the poem doesn't give me any feeling of superiority; Larkin has cleverly sucked all of us parents into his vision, even those who work at being good parents, at being selfless or involved or any other "good" quality.

You and me, good parents that we think we are, don't fuck 'em up any less, necessarily, just in different ways. And that is depressing. But, of course, I don't really believe that. And neither do you.