Back to the (School) Future

My kid had a terrible school year last year.

Like the kind of bad they write middle grade novels about, with bullying and misgendering and microaggressions and borderline hate crimes. Bug has always been a weird kid in public school, but we lucked into an excellent elementary school, so it was fine until middle school and then everything went sideways.

Parenting Tip: If your kid is neurodivergent, get paperwork your state requires done before you think you need it, while you're still working with an accommodating school. Last year would have been so much harder if we didn't already have that in place.

Their teachers were (mostly) great. The administration (mostly) took it seriously. But watching my kid get worn down by it, day after day, was probably the hardest thing I've had to do as a parent. Moth and I, and my nibling once they moved in, gave Bug all the support we could, listening, advising, hugging, emailing the administration, calling the administration, meeting with the administration… well, you get the idea.

I was amazed, though, how much Bug was willing to tell us about how bad things were at school. They've always been a really open kid with us, which I'm grateful for, but it occurred to me that all the things we were doing were things that, for the most part, were not things that happened when I was in school, despite a number of the situations sounding similar.

Multiple times they were similar enough that I was struggling to stay present for Bug because they were things that I had dealt with in middle school, some of which had escalated to worse situations because I don't remember my parents getting involved until the school called them. (Generally that was because I'd finally lashed out and gotten detention, but I'll maintain til I'm dead that they deserved it every time.)

Moth and I talked and talked and finally decided that no matter how tight the budget got, we couldn't leave Bug in that middle school. We found a tiny Portland-typical experimental type school and we worked through the long application process and finally enrolled her.

A week before the end of school, a boy laid into Bug and very nearly sent their head into a brick wall, and that was with the gym teachers allegedly watching. It was terrifying to hear about, but it vindicated our decision. So over the summer we uprooted ourselves, and it's a mess, and it's a huge financial strain, and it's terrifying.

And when Bug came home from the first day of school grinning, I still knew it was worth it.

(Written for September's Indie Web Carnival.)