Sean

By Lucy S.

This was one of the short essays which for some reason, I never put in my honors thesis. I wrote it in September 2010.  I am putting it up now in honor of Sean’s upcoming birthday on April 2. I will add a postscript.

While I agonize my way through this thesis, sitting in my room with my laptop on a pillow for far too many hours, Sean comes in over and over to ask me questions that cannot wait.  “Mom, Justin and I are thinking about moving the Hawaii trip up to 2012 instead of 2014 in case they're right about that ending the world thing in December of 2012.” He walks in shivering exaggeratedly.  “Did you know there's no anti-venom for the Six-Eyed Sand Spider?”  Or laughing. “Mom, don't you think it's funny when Chevy Chase is flipping out in Vacation?” 

The odds are, no movie is on, but in Sean's head, I think movies are always playing.  Nodding, smiling, I make vaguely affirmative sounds.  Sometimes – not often enough – as he's walking out, I realize how paltry my response has been and add, in a louder voice to bring him back, “So what month do you think you would go?” Or, “Where do they have those sand spiders?”  Or, “So which of the Vacation movies do you think is the best?” Involved, extended conversations aren't usually what he's after; he mostly answers these follow-up questions with shrugs or the least amount of words needed.   What Sean wants is frequent interaction connected to his current intense interests, which are the books he's writing or planning to write, an interest which arose from a movie (spiders, Hawaii, etc.), and most of all, always, the movies themselves.

 

At times, I've been embarrassed that his foundational interest – the one that drives most of the others – is not something more earthy or intellectual or overtly progressive.  Posters of Sean's favorite movies cover the walls of the small family room in the basement.  They aren't from quirky, independent films.  They are mainstream: Braveheart, V for Vendetta, Jaws, Rudy, Napoleon Dynamite, The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, It's A Wonderful Life, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  There are photos of Moe, Larry, and Shemp from Three Stooges episodes.  When people go down there for the first time, I end up explaining that Sean shares a room with his younger brother, and so we've given him this other room to put up his posters. That at least says the posters weren't my choice. Why do I not have more confidence in what we do, after all these years?  But I know that Sean absorbs compassionate, responsible values as well as specific skills and blocks of knowledge – that he learns in his own way, at his own pace, applying it all in ways that make sense to him.  What I am afraid of, then, is being judged, summed up, by people I like, people who mean well but haven't learned what years of living with Sean can teach.

From IMDB (International Movie Data Base), he finds slews of facts about specific films and the people who made them.  Often, what will be this week's or month's hit movies in our home come out of Sean's almost daily forays into IMDB's website.  He'll exclaim something like, “What's Herbert Lom doing in this movie?!” while the rest of us have to ask who the heck Herbert Lom is (he's Chief Inspector Dreyfus from the old Pink Panther movies).  More than any other single factor, IMDB elicited from Sean the desire to learn to read well.

 When he was six, seven, eight, and nine, I tried to teach him to read using one of the phonetic systems, making the sounds with him: “C – A – T.”  The book said to gradually make the sounds blend into each other, but all Sean did was speak each separate sound louder and more frantically when I did this. 

His fine motor skill difficulties also make writing by hand hard for him.  When he was ten and in a Mighty Ducks phase for a few months, he began painstakingly penning lists of who would be on his imaginary opposing hockey teams. (“Mom, you're on Team A with Justin and Grandma.”)  He asked how to spell our names and copied individual letters from books or sometimes had us write them.  Soon after that, Justin showed him IMDB on the internet, and Sean was reading.  Even before then, when he could read nothing else, he read the names on the sides of video tapes. 

I was embarrassed to say I wasn't quite sure when and how the leaps had occurred. But Sean has always made his own leaps.  Until he was eight, his way of playing with Legos was to have his brother, Jonathan, make things with them while he watched, or put just two pieces together to pretend it was a 'guy.'  And then one day, he showed me a complex helicopter he'd made.  I was shocked; Jonathan confirmed that Sean had built it by himself.  Sean's learning occurs in ways that don't fit into step by step educational theory parameters.  By eleven, he was reading the Harry Potter books, then Jules Verne; last week, he decided he wanted to read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.  IMDB remains his continual text.

Knowing the political affiliations of actors is important to Sean, and I think he gets this from IMDB as well, although I'm not positive because I never read it myself, unless he makes me look at some small fact on it.  He doesn't understand too far right now beyond the categorizing of Democrat and Republican.  His binaries are simple; for him, Democrat equals good and Republican equals bad.  This year, he turned eighteen and voted for the first time in the primary. 

Being good is very important to Sean, and he makes up rules for himself based upon how he interprets the pieces of information that seem to sort things out into right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, and so forth.  When he was fifteen, he decided he'd be allowed to see Saving Private Ryan when he was twenty-one, then lowered it to eighteen, until he later said, “Mom, I'm sixteen; I think I'm old enough!”  He does this sort of thing all the time.  I, as usual, answered, “Sean, it's up to you.  You're the one who made the rule.” 

Being kind is a fundamental part of Sean's code of ethics.  Often, while I'm writing, he asks if I want water or tea.  He checks the status of my library books online almost every day, renewing them, re-requesting them when they've reached their renewal limit. If I ask him a question and he answers in a slightly terse or even just neutral voice, he almost always comes back over to say, “Well, sorry if I sounded a little mean.”  In this frequent anxiety over offending or hurting people, he is a greatly magnified version of me.  Unlike me, though, he seems unable to get very mad, and so has little defense when he himself is hurt. 

I used to say that it was a good thing Sean had never been to school.  The negative far outweighed the positive for Justin, my oldest son, when he was in school.  Weird things happened, almost fantastical.  Melting another child's Ninja Turtle in a double boiler was how his kindergarten teacher responded when the kid was playing with it when it wasn't Show and Tell time.  She had the kids pass it around afterward.  Her usual way to silence the class was to exclaim, “Be quiet!  Everyone in here sounds like a bunch of stupid babies!”

 Justin came home one day from second grade, when I was pregnant with Sean, excitedly telling me about bears they were making in class for art.  “I want mine to be for the baby!” he said.  Then, a few weeks later, he started to quietly cry when we got home.  “What happened?  What's wrong?” I asked.  “The teacher threw my bear away.”  “What?!  What do you mean?  Why?”  “Because I forgot to put my name on it. She was handing them out after they dried, and she said some were left without names and they would be thrown away.  I kept saying, 'Please.... I see mine,' but she wouldn't listen.”  I went to talk to her in person and she proudly defended her stance, giving me what I would come to know as the familiar, “They can't get away with this in college” spiel.  With painful effort, I restrained myself from adding curse words to the statement, “That's not true…”  I'm not one of those people who glory in aggressive statements, but I hate cruelty, especially toward the defenseless.  I said, “That's not true.  I've seen teachers hand back essays and ask students to please come forward to claim the ones without names.” 

Not all school experiences are like this. But for whatever reason, we kept having them. All over. Different teachers, schools, states.  In seventh grade, Justin was getting punched hard in the stomach almost every day by a kid he didn't know and couldn't identify.  Finally, we'd had enough.  He homeschooled after that.  Justin has no learning difficulties; he's a student at this university right now and a tutor at the writing center.  He would not be diagnosed into that broad common catch-all called autistic spectrum, as Sean probably would be.  If Justin went through that much hell, who knows what Sean would have gone through, I thought.  Three cheers for homeschooling.

Maybe it's true that Sean was better off outside of school.  How can we know?  What I wish for are learning communities of some kind, people who stay connected, who care deeply about one another's well-being and mutual growth.  Friends for life.  My friend, Josefina, is back in Sweden right now, going to a folk school for a year to learn weaving and dyeing; she says it's a little like that.  If it is, I wonder why these manifestations of community always seem to be somewhere far away, in some other place or time.

I tried to help create a homeschooling group of about twenty families like that here in my town.  The group version of infatuation got us through the first year.  Then, as in all relationships, the time came to find out if we really had the same values, beyond the fuzzy mission statements that people love. 

What happened may sound so trite, so ordinary, I think, to people who don't know Sean.  One of the teens – someone Sean called his “good friend”– had a birthday party, and invited every teen in the group (about ten), except Sean and one other teen.  We knew the family well.  Sean found out, saw the photos on Facebook.  When he talked about it, he said he was mad, but he never sounded mad, and I kept seeing him wince.  I emailed the teen's mother, who I'd also thought was a good friend to ask her how she could let her son exclude two kids like that.  That's an aggressive beginning, not too conducive to dialogue, but I knew our very different beliefs couldn't be left off to the side after all.

People should do “what makes them happy,” she fervently believes, “attracting positive energy from the universe.” She abhors all forms of guilt, says if she could wish for anything for humanity, it would be “self-acceptance.”  Not an end to poverty – not full implementation of human rights – but these would come to pass, she knows, if everyone truly accepted themselves.  The Secret, the same best-selling book Oprah claims to follow, is her guide.  Its primary premise is that we mystically draw to ourselves what we focus on, so its adherents try to concentrate on good health, prosperity, and all else personally beneficial.  When I asked how this worked on a mass scale, whether she believed Haitians had attracted poverty to themselves, she looked uncomfortable, then quoted another guru for the Law of Attraction crowd.  “Louise Hays says that even if you redistributed all the wealth in the world, pretty soon, the same people would be rich and the same would be poor, because they attract those things to themselves.”  This is an amped up, mystical version of the rah-rah positive thinking all mixed in with meritocracy myths and capitalism which inundates too much of U.S. society.

But I knew her while she cared for her dad as he slowly died of Parkinson's, knew her well enough to hope that she was better than her ideology.  I hope this about most of the people I know. So many people have such cruel beliefs at the kernel of dressed up doctrines of joy, success, and redemption for some.  For winners.  But my friend was as adamant in her belief system as Justin's second grade teacher had been in her own, and so I had to deal with it in practice, not in theory.  Now we are polite acquaintances, no longer friends.  For one of the few times in my life, I told someone off, and didn't even apologize afterward. Later, I said if she still wanted to pick up her bulk organic food here, she could (we are a delivery point).  She thanked me and said she would.  We decided to leave that group, though not on bad terms.  Sean didn't want to go back; Ryan, his younger brother, was upset about what had happened as well; and I had lost heart.  Had I been the uninvited one, I could have let it go.  But it was Sean.

I'm tempted to erase this whole account.  I wonder if it bogs down what I'm saying about our relationship with Sean and how he learns; I wonder if it seems mean-spirited, or just petty in the depressing details of human relations.  But when those details get left out, these accounts become, perhaps, more dramatic yet less applicable to real life.  Years ago, struggling with deep depression after leaving college to live in Germany for my spouse's three year Air Force assignment, I went with him to see a family services counselor who said I could “easily” stay in college because the base had a satellite university with night classes. When I explained that I had two one-year-old babies and a five-year-old, that my husband's schedule rotated continually, that the day care places were closed at night, she told me that was only a “cop-out” because she had finished her degrees while married to someone in the military.  Did she have kids, I asked; she didn't, but she said we all have our obstacles to overcome.  Annoying, trivial details do not play well in success narratives, unless they can be quickly skimmed over to reinforce the meritocracy myth.  But we live in the details.

 

School defenders sometimes make the point that homeschoolers retreat to their own private solutions rather than staying engaged, working to make the schools better for all children.  I imagine them saying to me, “What did you expect?  Of course that woman only cared about what her own child wanted.  That's how homeschoolers are.”  I struggle with this issue.  The reality, I believe, is that whether people are among the small percentage of homeschoolers or the large majority whose kids go to school, we are trained and pressured continually to opt for private solutions, to operate only within the logic of our own life, or even fragments of that. 

Putting my kids in the competitive, funneling system of schools in a capitalist system does not in itself constitute a serious effort to create a better world for everyone.  Neither does embracing only our personal bliss as homeschoolers.  Children grow up and soon face that capitalist system with polluted, collapsing ecosystems and myriad forms of violence – all consequences of an 'as long as I got mine' value system.  The only way I know to stop retreating into private solutions is to erode and ultimately get rid of capitalism and whatever it is in people – some combination of selfishness, greed, and a desire to dominate – which drives capitalism.

This is not a popular, common belief in the times and places in which I'm living my life. I didn't come to it by reading Marx. My kids, other people's children, and many loved ones gradually led me to it as I witnessed how we all fared in a society structured around competition and greed, and mulled over the implications.  Sean watches movies to try to understand how people relate to each other, watches the same ones over and over until he has absorbed something from them which sometimes eludes him in the confusing jumble of real life.  In some similar way, I've watched him, absorbing lessons that might otherwise never be noticed.

Like this section of the thesis – upside-down by academic terms with no opening to explain the overriding premise and give readers a sense of where it was going – life with Sean is not at all teleological. We don't have goals and outcomes figured out every year for him.  His story unwinds continually, leading us to insights and new knowledges that we could not have mapped out.  Our pedagogical practice is simple. We love him, so we try to help him do what he is ready to do at any given time.  We try to enter into his joy with him, when we are able to. 

And Sean surprises us all the time.  Earlier this year, he insisted he wanted to take community education classes in Latin dancing – the rumba, the tango – by himself.  He volunteers now at the library and at a nature center.  He's saving up for that Hawaii trip with his best friend, his brother, Justin, who he refers to as “Buddyyy!”  Always exuberantly.  Sean delivers the weekly free paper in our neighborhood for $13 a week and spends almost nothing, so I think even with this job, he can pull off the Hawaii trip.

 

Making movies is his big dream.  He always has stories and screen plays he's working on – 1950's style horror movies (like The Blob).  One epic night, a couple of years ago, after he'd finished his eighty plus page script, The Funnel Web Spider, Justin made multiple copies at the printer's and we did the official full reading. Per Sean's direction, I got to play all the female characters, including the main character's eighteen-year-old psychologist girlfriend, Kelly Gordon.  Now, a very authentic-looking movie poster advertising The Funnel Web Spider is on the wall with Sean's other posters.  Justin created it and had it printed. 

In a film studies class, Justin mentioned to the professor that his brother would love to be in the class; the professor said to bring him along.  Sean says he wants to take other college film classes, but I know that unless he makes some more huge skill leaps, he can't pass the placement tests to get in.  I nod when he tells me his plans.  How can I say what's possible?  Even in the midst of my too frequent despair, I continue to hope for those learning communities in which Sean can be in classes just as he is.  But maybe we have them.  He already found one teacher who let him into one class.

Although the system is capitalist, we remain human beings, severely constrained by our economic structures, but always more than them.  In her memoir, The Sum of Our Days, novelist Isabel Allende, niece of the former president of Chile, Salvador Allende – ousted and killed in a C.I.A. supported coup – celebrates what she calls her tribe, the family and friends she's woven together in her California life as a Chilean refugee.

Less than a year ago, shortly after I came back to the University of Minnesota, I wrote somewhat disdainfully of professors creating small spaces of resistance rather than bringing on a real revolution.  I was wrong. Without the small spaces, there will be no revolution.  They do in their ways what I've tried to do in mine. We need those spaces to survive, to find our tribes.

***

My feelings about schools and education are even more torn than when I wrote this. A good friend of mine is a high school teacher now, and I wholeheartedly support her work. My sister's kids are in a school in which they thrive. I think that many of us are trying as best as we can figure out to care for one another in our society. 

Sean and Ryan and I still read together. Right now, I am reading the great environmental classic, Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, to them. And they are reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States together. My good friend, Sue, bought the first copy for my son Kevin years ago, and now I've added one more so that they each have a copy when they read it together. Sean has continued to make huge leaps, and he still volunteers at the library and the nature center. He also still delivers the papers. Sean has not made it to Hawaii yet, but he continues to save and plan. 

The Braveheart poster finally left our family room downstairs. The others remain, and I don't worry anymore or explain. Tonight's movie for Sean was Hotel Rwanda. He watched it while he bagged the papers to deliver tomorrow.

When Sean was born, he struggled for the first week with pneumonia. I remember how I thought of him as a little Irish warrior then, angry enough to fight to get stronger. That was one of the only times I thought of him as being angry, and it was a good anger. 

Mostly, he has a good-natured determination. When he was under a year old and not walking, instead of crawling, he for some reason pulled his whole body by using his arms - more specifically, his elbows, pushing on the floor - to pull his whole body. It looked like such hard work. His three older brothers would run freely from one part of the house to another, and he'd work so hard to get over to them, only to have them start running somewhere else. I'd say, "You guys, he just worked to get over here with you!" There was a step up into the kitchen, and the older kids and I remember the time when Sean was trying so hard to pull himself up that step while we kept singing the Jamaican (Jimmy Cliff) song, "You Can Get It If You Really Want" and clapping. At last, he succeeded. We cheered and clapped harder and whooped, and Sean was so happy.