Familyhood

by Paul Reiser

  But as our younger son was about to graduate—the school only goes to fifth grade—we had a big decision to make as to where he would go next. The public middle school of our particular district was not as stellar as the elementary school. So, as much as we were initially against the idea, we treaded into the murky world of applying to private schools.

  This is an exhausting and dispiriting journey for which I was wholly unprepared. The amount of planning and plotting and positioning and paperwork that goes into applying to private schools is staggering. And unsettling. Once you enter the arena, you are not only a stranger in a strange land, scavenging for morsels of information and access, but the jungle mentality permeates your every move. Other families—only days earlier your dear friends—are now the enemy, as they too plot to grab one of the precious few available openings. (Sometimes these enemies can throw you off balance with a disarming display of benevolence and shared information. “You know, if you get the applications in before next Monday, you get called in for the interview sooner, which increases your chances of admission.” Sure, it’s helpful. But don’t let your guard down; there are still only so many spots available, and if their kid gets in, that’s one less chance for your kid. Remember that!)

  STEP ONE. Determine which schools you want to apply to. This will be the last time you feel remotely like you have the upper hand, because the moment that application is in, the tables turn and you are at the beck and call of the admissions board, and for the sake of your children’s future, you will shamelessly jump through any and all hoops asked of you by these people.

  Step Two. Fill out the absurdly intricate application packets they send you, with all the idiosyncrasies of their particular admissions process—which can vary immensely, but all involve a labyrinth of forms, questionnaires, and requests for more forms and questionnaires and records from previous schools, the execution of which could be so easily mishandled, presenting you a myriad of ways to drop the ball and prevent your child from advancing his or her education—the one your child would have gotten had you not misread Form 17A, misplaced Request for Transcript 24, or had you seen the part where they ask for the kid to submit an original haiku.

  AN IRONIC TWIST of the whole ordeal is that while, theoretically, nothing could be more unifying for a mother and father than their joint attempt to advance their child’s cause, in reality, nothing could be more stressful or chisel away more relentlessly at the foundation of an otherwise vibrant family. There were many moments during the application process when my wife and I were genuinely ready to walk away from the whole thing—the school, the marriage, and the will to live . . . Everything.

  What was most jolting—and what I was least prepared for—was realizing that we were, for the first time, presenting our child for the approval of others. We know our children are extraordinary; an objective third party, however, might be . . . objective. This would not work in our favor. It becomes, therefore, our job to shine our children up and polish them, repackage and re-brand them before taking them to market—all in the hopes that they will meet with the approval of people we have never even met but already strongly dislike.

  Filling out those forms is an intensely sobering and emotionally draining experience. I remember vacillating between deep pools of insecurity and abject resentment. On the one hand, we worried that we had utterly failed as parents and set our children on a path to almost certain failure. (Nobody wants their kids judged unfairly, but I wasn’t that keen on having them judged fairly either.)

  And at the same time, I was offended at the insensitivity and audacity of their questions.

  “How would you describe your child’s intellectual interests?”

  I could try to impress: “He’s just finished reading all of Marcel Proust.”

  Or I could be honest. “He’s ten! He doesn’t have any!”

  Another bad question: “How does your child respond to direction?”

  I chortled. “Are you kidding? He hates it. I mean, he’s not a fire-starter or anything, but he’s not what you’d call a big fan of authority. A good kid, don’t get me wrong. But if there’s a laugh to be had, particularly at the expense of any figure of authority, he’s going to take the shot. In fact, he lives for it.”

  Upon reflection, I thought our son’s chances might be better served if I perhaps massaged the truth more artfully.

  “My son has never had a discipline problem. On the contrary; while he often engages in tomfoolery, if not outright hijinks, he virtually never gets caught, for which his mother and I are both enormously proud.”

  Or, as an alternative: “Our son recognizes authority. And like all good, patriotic Americans, he is often compelled to question it.”

  These were both shot down by my more levelheaded wife.

  SOMETIMES, these application questions were shockingly ignorant and ill-conceived.

  “What would you describe as your child’s greatest academic weakness?”

  Did they think I was going to tell them that? Did they really expect me to rat out my own kid? To “The Man”? What’s wrong with these people?! I put down, “How about this: You take him, watch him for a couple of years, then you tell me. See how good you are at eyeballing the problem areas.”

  But I chickened out and deleted it.

  Even when they invite you to be positive, the temptation to exaggerate is hard to resist.

  “What are your child’s academic strengths?”

  Okay, glad you asked. “Our son’s primary academic strength is his enormous untapped potential, much the way we as a society have yet to fully tap alternative, green energies, such as wind and solar power—which, by the way, our son shows tremendous interest in developing. He often speaks of his wish to save our nation from continued dependence on foreign oil.”

  Some applications are more encouraging than others. The nice ones give you ample room to expound upon your child’s virtues in your own style, uncensored and unrestrained. “Describe in detail all the great things about your child.”

  Are you kidding? How much time do we have? Pull up a chair. Call home, tell them you’re going to be late—we’re going to be here awhile.

  And then I started babbling on for pages about the virtues of my child.

  “Oh, well . . . he’s funny, he’s bright, he’s inquisitive, he’s intuitive, he’s got a killer smile, he’s sweet . . . Why, one time, we were at our friend’s house, and he saw this little turtle who was stuck in a—”

  “Um, honey,” my wife wisely interrupted. “It’s a school, not your mother we’re trying to impress here.”

  “Got ya,” I acknowledged sheepishly. “Sorry. Got a little carried away.”

  I was appreciative, though, of the schools that were more diplomatic and nurturing in the wording of their questions. Instead of, for example, asking you to spill the beans and “list your child’s weaknesses,” they might ask, “In what areas of your child’s education do you see the most opportunity for improvement?” Well, that’s different. Who could be against their child improving? So I begin to list:

  “Well, he doesn’t always pay attention, his work habits are shabby, frankly. He never studies an iota more than legally required . . .”

  “You really want to tell them all that?” my wife asks.

  “Okay, how about this?” I say, pitching another angle—the “Truthful But Still Sucking Up” approach:

  “He does very well in school when he tries, manages to do okay when he doesn’t try, and he could do even better if he tried harder at your fine school.”

  This was shot down as well.

  What we came to learn, with a bit of practice, was that with just the right terminology and turn of phrase, every “opportunity for growth” can be neatly spun into an incontrovertible “positive.” For example, “He gets easily bored” becomes “He really blossoms when actively engaged.” How about that, huh?

  “Hates homework and tends to stare into space” transforms into “Learns as much from interpersona
l activity and the world around him as he would from conventional texts.” See what I did there?

  “Once kicked a kid for looking at him funny” becomes “A respected leader of his peers.”

  I’m telling you: Once you get the hang of it, it’s a cinch. Just a dollop of creative writing and a pinch of sheer linguistic daring, and suddenly your kid looks like exactly the kind of kid they’d be crazy not to take.

  “HE MIGHT NOT GET ACCEPTED,” my wife felt obliged to point out, seriously dampening my fledgling optimism.

  Honestly, that had never even occurred to me—the idea that in the end, some school might not welcome him. I mean, yes, I understand it’s a competitive field, but with our newly sparkling résumé-writing skills, and with his natural charm and killer smile, how could they not take him?

  “You’re kidding, right?” my wife said to me, holding her head cocked at that special angle that is her encouragement for others to think harder and remember. I had, in fact, totally forgotten that we already went through this exact thing with our older son—only five years earlier. I think I blocked out the memory.

  In fact, that first go-round was, in some ways, even more excruciating, because our older son had specific challenges that made the choice of middle school that much more critical. We did extensive research and cherry-picked a few very specific, very specialized schools that we thought would be best for him. When they each, for various reasons, turned us down, I think I transitioned from “Ouch” to “The hell with them” so instantly and thoroughly that I now couldn’t even recall the horror of it all. (The human spirit can be impressively self-sustaining sometimes.)

  In our older son’s case, we elected to homeschool him for a while, which was great until he eventually—and understandably—decided he would prefer to attend school with other kids, especially other kids who were girls, which was not something we offered in our home academy.

  We have since found a terrific school for him where he thrives magnificently. (And while I’m not proud of this, not a day goes by that I don’t think about the schools that rejected us and wish them—if not ill—at least a severe case of painful remorse for having passed over the opportunity to spend time with our son.)

  Now, a scant few years down the road, here we were—doing it again. I decided that I would learn from the first experience and fortify myself with the knowledge that, come what may, we would prevail. Everything works out in the end. But let’s at least give it our best shot!

  So into the cold waters we plunged. We determined to do everything possible to get our ten-year-old accepted to the schools of our choice; we enrolled him in a four-month preparatory course, hoping to maximize his performance on the grueling standardized test they use to weed out your children. We gathered his transcripts, asked for letters of recommendation, wrote the essays, re-wrote the essays, had our son write his own mandatory self-evaluating essays . . . We did everything to the very best of our abilities and were starting to feel pretty darn good about the whole thing.

  The morning of the foreboding three-hour standardized test, as he reluctantly put on his shoes and packed his pencils and erasable pens and scratch paper and snacks, my sweet (and normally unflappable) ten-year-old quietly let fly his simple but deeply seated fear.

  “What if they don’t accept me?”

  Oh, how I hated these people! Why would they design a system that causes this perfectly confident, wonderful child to feel this kind of self-doubt?

  Though, deep inside, I knew it wasn’t really their fault. This is what life is. To be alive means you’re going to grow, you’re going to move forward. And that will necessarily involve making an effort. Trying, which by definition involves, if not failure, then at least the risk of failure. And rejection, and heartbreak. Ain’t no way around it.

  But the pain of your children being rejected—and witnessing them experience that rejection—is as brutal a part of parenting as there is. It taps into every skill set and deep well of character strength you hope you have. You ache to not only soothe their bruised hearts, but in the process, hopefully, also shed some light on the ways of the world that might make the next inevitable disappointment easier to swallow.

  More than anything, it was his simple use of the word “accept” that killed me. It was the very word we had bandied about for months—“Hope they accept us.” “Think they’ll accept us?” “When do they let us know if they accept us or not?” “The idiots better accept us!” and so on.

  But when my son said it, it sounded so painfully openhearted and vulnerable. “What if they don’t accept me?”

  I remembered a time when he had asked the same thing about me. I had just written a script I was really excited about and submitted it to some studios to see what “they” had to say. Its fate was no longer in my control. And it is not fun having the fate of something precious to you in the hands of others.

  One day the phone rang and my son—knowing how eager I was to get the “yes” call—came into the room and stood by me, listening to my end of the conversation, trying to read my expressions for a clue. Finally, ever hopeful, fingers to his mouth in excited anticipation, he whispered, “So? Did they accept you?”

  Broke my heart. That he saw it so clearly and honestly. Yes, nobody else’s opinions should ever impact so decisively anyone else’s sense of self-worth. But that’s how it always seems to play out; we feel “accepted” or “not accepted.” It’s really that simple.

  When my young son wondered if he’d be accepted to these schools, it was more than getting admitted to them he was fretting about; it was the universal acceptance of him. The very being of who he was. What would he do if they rejected him? he wondered.

  I assured him that first of all, I was more than confident he would do great on the test. Which was true; he’s a smart kid. But even if he didn’t do as well as he hoped, the test was only a part of what they looked at. They also considered his grades at school (all pretty good), his various activities (he was pretty darn active), his interests (he was very interested), and most importantly—himself. The sparkling, shining, wonderful him. When they sat with him for the obligatory interview, how could they not be impressed with what a gem of a guy he is? Why would they want to have a school without him in it?

  “They might,” he offered. “They might not accept me.”

  I had nothing else I could say. “That’s true,” I said. “They might not.”

  Unfortunately, part of being a parent involves explaining things to your kids that you yourself don’t understand. Best I could do, I decided, was to try to put things in perspective for him: enjoy when the judgments are in your favor, I suggested, and accept when they are not, but never put your faith in them entirely, because they are subjective, mysterious, and often meaningless things. No judgment can tell you who you are or what you can be, and no judgment is final as long as we are alive and able to put ourselves out there again and again.

  This either made sense to him, or he was so over the whole thing that he pretended it did. Either way, we were done talking about it.

  STEP THREE: The interview.

  We go visit the first of the schools to which we’ve applied (our top choice, actually) for our Family Interview. (Isn’t that nice—how they make it Fun for the Whole Family!) But I convinced myself that barring anything extreme—like my punching the director of admissions in the nose, or accidentally (or deliberately) besmirching their carpets—our kid was going to sink or swim on his merits alone.

  We show up on time and properly dressed—our son having consented to long pants, a clean shirt, and a perfunctory combing of his hair, but nothing so out of the ordinary that he would feel in any way not “himself.”

  They come to call him for his one-on-one with the director. Mom and Dad wait outside—our interview will follow his.

  As he heads away and down the hall, he exudes not only his usual confidence and sparkle, but a freshly minted surge of independence. He avoids even making eye contact with us, assuming f
ull responsibility on his own shoulders. He has accepted that he will make it or not make it entirely by virtue of what he and he alone can do. His mother and I do a reasonable job of containing our tears of pride and sniffles of wonderment (which, as you may recall, was also the name of the band in the late sixties most famous for their Top 40 hit, “Dream Tissue”).

  Thirty minutes later, our son and the director emerge from their closed-door meeting. The poker-faced ten-year-old reveals nothing as he is guided to a work-desk for further “evaluation.” The school director invites us into the same room where he just sat with our son. He closes the door.

  We make some small talk, and in very short order he smiles and can barely contain himself when he confides that our son is exactly the type of child they want in their school. Possibly the very epitome of what they’re looking for. The clearly brilliant educator proceeds to list all the qualities that our son was able to manifest in their very first—and brief—encounter. “Well, obviously, your son is exceptionally bright. He’s inquisitive, he’s intuitive, he’s courageous and spirited, he looks at things from a very fresh perspective . . .”

  We could not have asked for a better outcome. We were thrilled—not to mention enormously relieved—that the worst of our fears would not come to pass; while he might not be accepted to all the schools he applied to, our son would at least not end up “school-less.” He seemed all but guaranteed open-armed admission to this school. And, equally important: he would be spared the pain of being resoundingly rejected.

  This was a perfect day.

  As we walked through the school on our way out, we saw even more confirmation and validation. The kids that went to this school—as much as we could tell from peeks through classroom doors and their effervescent strides down the halls—seemed to all be happy, confident, well-adjusted young boys and girls. In fact, the boys who were about our son’s age even all looked and dressed kind of like him. This seemed, indeed, to be a perfect match.

  As we strutted victoriously toward our car, our only-moments-old sense of relief and confidence slowly began to give way to other, less healthy impulses. We each—my wife and I—independently started to wonder if perhaps this wasn’t too close a match. Maybe this school wouldn’t stretch our son as much as one of the other schools might.