“Mrs. Moore, I’m Colonel Bowe, in the admissions office at Valley Forge,” the deep voice on the other end of the phone said. “While your son was here for summer camp, he took one of our assessment tests and he did very, very well. We have an opening in our incoming class of cadets and we were wondering if you would be interested in enrolling him in Valley Forge for this school year?”
While one part of my brain was pleased that Wes had scored well enough to be admitted, the practical side said that there was no way I could afford to send him there so soon. Just about every penny I made working, combined with the annuity I received after Wes’s death, went to educating all three kids. Over the seven years Wes and Shani attended Riverdale, the financial aid office was my best friend, allowing me the flexibility to pay as my freelance money came in. I knew there was no way I could finish paying my current Riverdale balance and add on an even bigger bill from Valley Forge.
Even though I was almost positive what my answer would have to be, I thanked Colonel Bowe and told him I would have to get back to him.
For the next week I scrambled to see if there was any way I could pull together the money I needed to send him to Valley Forge. Then my mom, the consummate teacher, interrupted me from my calls to friends and my neighborhood bank and told me that in every child there is a window, a little opening when you can reach the child and change the way he or she sees the world and interacts with it. If you act at that moment, you can reel that child back in, but if you let your self-doubt control you—or even financial challenges—you’re sunk. That moment, that open window, is unlikely to come again. She told me I had to trust that little voice inside me, the disturbance that told me this window for Wes was open now and likely just for a moment or two. If I didn’t act, both of us might be lost to one another for years to come. She and my dad offered to get a second mortgage on their house to cover the first year. The second year, well, we’d have to face that when and if this was a fit for Wes.
With tears in my eyes I gave my parents one of the longest hugs I can remember. Then I called Colonel Bowe. “Yes,” I told him, I was sending Wes to Valley Forge.
The next conversation was to tell Wes that he was going away to school. I hadn’t told him about the possibility before because I really didn’t think it would happen. But with the finances worked out, I braced myself. I knew he would be unhappy, but I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of his reaction, which rapidly turned from disbelief to outrage when I first sat down with him at the kitchen counter to tell him.
“Are you kidding me? Camp was cool but I’m not going to that school,” he said as though his was the last word on the matter.
“Wes, the last thing I want to do is to send you away, but right now I think this is the best place for you to see what you are really capable of doing.”
“I said I’m not going,” he said as he stiffened his twelve-year-old shoulders and stood up to storm out of the room.
Over the next few days, I filled out all the forms that were required and used my credit cards to shop for the items from a very long required supplies list. One evening, as I was sewing his name on practically everything he owned, he came into my room with a determined, almost military, stride.
“Mommy, we need to talk about this,” he said loudly.
For the next hour he went through his own particular stages of grief: First, defiance. “I’m not going anywhere, Mommy. You know you can’t get along without me here. You can’t make me go.” Then came the pleading. “I promise I’ll do better. You know I can and I will. I promise!”
I wouldn’t budge.
On the two-hour ride to Valley Forge that late August with his aunt Pam at the wheel, Wes just looked out the window from the backseat. As we approached the driveway where scores of families were saying goodbye to their sons, he looked pleadingly at me, and then at his aunt Pam, to see if he would be granted a last-minute reprieve. Receiving none, he unloaded his bags and boxes. He gave Pam and me goodbye hugs, but my hug noticeably lacked warmth.
As we walked to the parent orientation, he walked to the red doors of H Company, the residence hall for the youngest of the newly arrived, feeling, as he recalled later, abandoned. I tried to picture him in the bunk beds that night instead of his full-size bed in his room at home, and I felt tears begin to well up again. How could I bear not overhearing him talk to friends about a game-winning basketball shot or the newest rap song? I would no longer get his spontaneous bear hugs or the sloppy kisses he loved to plant on my neck. He could be so frustrating at times, but he touched every soft spot of my heart.
As the six-foot wrought-iron gates got smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, I was grateful Pam was driving. She kept the car moving forward when every molecule in my body wanted me to turn around and take him home.
Less than a week later the phone rang at one o’clock in the morning. No call coming at that time of night is good news. My heart started racing. It was Wes, who had just failed at his fourth attempt at running away from Valley Forge. Rather than an immediate expulsion, the night tactical officer let him call me at home.
“Mommy, I don’t like it here,” he began. “I want to come home, and I promise I’ll do better in school and I won’t mess up in school or at home. I’ll do anything you say…”
“Wes, you know I love you and I’d do anything for you,” I interrupted, “but you’ve got to give the school a chance… you’ve got to give yourself a chance to see what you can do. Too many people sacrificed to get you there. You’re staying.” I never told him specifics about my parents getting a second mortgage or how I had to scrape together every dime left after paying his sisters’ tuitions, denying them things that they wanted. That there were sacrifices made by others was enough information for him to know now that it was his turn to ante up.
Then I offered him a deal.
“After this year, I’ll give you the choice,” I said. “Do well and you can either stay there or come back to New York to attend school here. Just give it a try for one year.”
My hope was to put the power of “choice” back in his hands. If he really wanted to come home, he had to buckle down and do his best first. After that, the decision would be his. If he did poorly, though, he’d have no choice. I’d find a way to keep him in Valley Forge whether he wanted to be there or not.
I was praying that he could look beyond himself in that moment to see the bigger picture of family, of expectations, of compromise, and of sacrifice. These were the traits of the man his father and I and all who loved him wanted to see in him. I was counting on him to show me through his actions that he understood.
Now, Wes will be the first to tell you that his turnaround was by no means immediate. He still got his share of demerits those first few weeks. But slowly, as his grades improved, he started being recognized for the good he was doing. He started feeling better about himself and he began feeling more like a leader, instead of a follower. About a month later, when I received a “Cadet-a-Gram” postcard saying that Wes had excelled in his math class, I knew his metamorphosis had begun.
Six weeks later, I went up for parents’ weekend, the first time we were allowed to visit our sons. My first glimpse of Wes was in the staging area by Eisenhower Hall. Out of the sea of hundreds of cadets ranging in age from twelve to twenty-three, I spotted him as he lined up with the rest of H Company for their first official parade. I immediately noticed Wes’s glistening brass cap shield, the sign that he had passed all the requirements for him to graduate from plebe to full-fledged cadet. I thought about his dad and what a huge grin he’d have on his face seeing Wes on the parade field. I closed my eyes and pictured him sitting next to me and whispering that I’d done the right thing. As each company advanced to its designated position on the field and the marching band started playing the Stars and Stripes marching song, I watched Wes, head erect with his cap shield glistening from the sun, his shoulders pushed back and in perfect rhythm with the rest of the youngest cadets of H Company.
What I saw with each determined step was that he seemed to have found self-esteem and purpose, key elements in the arsenal he would need in his own march to manhood.
Wes got through that first year with vastly improved grades and stellar reviews about his behavior. Keeping to our agreement, I asked him that May what he wanted to do the following year.
“Mom, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to come back here,” he replied. I was delighted. He had found his stride in a place where he could become a leader and not get ridiculed or teased. He no longer felt compelled to be the class clown, or just to do his work, which he’d finally realized he could do and do well. He did so well that I was able to get substantial financial aid for him the following year and increasingly more aid every year after that. As he took responsibility for himself and his future, he actually helped ease the financial responsibility for his journey. The dollars I had spent on his education made sense, and I could not have been happier or more grateful that I had swallowed my pride and sought that initial help. Being able to take advantage of that open window made all the difference in Wes’s life and helped me and our family eventually take one step closer to financial freedom.
LESSON FROM A LIONESS: Parenting means making decisions that may not be popular.
Sending Wes to military school was one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make as a mother. It was a considered risk taking on such a financial burden, especially given all the other demands on my resources. I really wrestled with whether I was copping out of my responsibilities as a parent by taking money from my parents, and whether the whole thing wouldn’t be easier if we’d just kept doing what we’d been doing with Wes at home. But thinking of that time as an open window—that small moment of time when Wes was really vulnerable, at a major crossroad in his life—helped me see that the sacrifice was one that I could not afford to avoid. I was able to make an informed decision about what was right for my son at that point in his life. Military school is not for everyone, but for Wes it was the right decision and well worth the investment. Don’t be afraid to consider extreme measures, whatever the circumstances.
If you’re at a crossroads, think about what kind of decision you would make if money was no object. Would you sign up for that class, make that move, hire that help, send your kid to that school? If money is the only thing standing between you and an important parenting decision, trust your gut. It may not be easy but there are ways to get financing for a life-changing move for your child. That window will not be open forever.
From Cookies to Cosby: The Pam Warner Story
When you focus on problems, you’ll have more problems. When you focus on possibilities, you’ll have more opportunities.
—Author unknown
The year was 1984, and a new series had me and millions more glued to NBC on Thursday nights. It was The Cosby Show, a groundbreaking comedy sitcom that thrust Bill Cosby, Phylicia Rashad, and their television children into the ratings stratosphere. Sharing the everyday lives of an upper-middle-class African American family, it became the number one rated television series for five of its eight years on the air, becoming only one of two sitcoms in the history of the Nielsen ratings to accomplish this.
Current-day revelations notwithstanding, it was revolutionary for its time. With the exception of the 1968 series Julia, which featured Diahann Carroll as a widowed nurse raising her son, no other series dared a storyline featuring middle-class African Americans. And Cosby pushed the envelope even further by featuring an intact, two-parent professional family. The daughters were smart, beautiful, and talented and the one son, Theo, struggled academically but prevailed and excelled in the end.
While Theo Huxtable was the lone son in this idyllic two-parent family, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played Theo, was actually the only child of single mom Pam Warner.
Pam and Malcolm’s dad, Robert, had been childhood buddies, a friendship that blossomed into love and then marriage when they were both attending colleges in Illinois. Following his graduation they moved to New Jersey, where Robert was offered a job. In time, their family grew to include Malcolm. For a while, things were wonderful, but they grew apart and divorce followed when Malcolm was five. Now officially a single parent, Pam moved with her son to Los Angeles. Their first address was with her father, in a one-bedroom apartment over his garage. Malcolm slept in the bedroom and she slept on the floor in the living room.
I’m a little reluctant to say I was a single mom because once we got our act together, his father was very, very much involved in his life. I had help. Robert would send for him every summer so I had a three-or four-month break from parenting. I didn’t have the day in and day out, so that was my respite during the summer for years. When he came back from his father, Malcolm came back with suitcases full of new clothes, so all I had to do was fill in clothes during the year. But more important than the material things, we both missed each other so much, there was an emotional rebonding that would take place every end of summer and it was wonderful for our relationship as mother and son. In retrospect and even then, I never felt the burden of, “Oh, I’m a single mother, I’m by myself.” I just never felt that. I’m a single mother technically, but when you look at the big picture, I was not.
Because Pam and Robert made the choices they did, Malcolm grew up in an emotionally stable environment. However, the financial situation for Pam and Malcolm was anything but. Robert did what he could but he was in graduate school and had remarried. Pam did not have a college degree so her choices for work were limited. She would go to work in an office, for example, and work hard but could never advance.
I did a revolving-door thing for years. I would work and then I knew that I was not going to get a raise or a promotion, I didn’t have a degree, so I’d get tired of that and I’d quit that and I’d go back to school. Then I would get tired of really not having any money, then I’d go back to work, so I did that until I made a commitment that we’re going to have to eat beans and rice every day because I’m not going back to work until I get my degree. Malcolm was getting closer to going into junior high school and I knew that there were things that he would need because kids need things and they want to be able to fit in.
While she went to school, she received public assistance, calling it a means to an end, her “Forty Acres and a Mule.” She was determined that public assistance would never become her lifestyle once she earned her degree. But when she graduated, she couldn’t find a job. Depressed, she needed a jolt from a close friend to bring her back into a more positive mind space.
“Well, girl, just do something, anything,” she said. “You know, go sell sodas at the beach, do something.” I used to make cookies because I couldn’t afford gifts so I took her advice and I started selling cookies on the corner of Vermont and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
There was a bus stop right there and the welfare office was right down the street so I got all that foot traffic. That corner was great for me, I would sell out, go back to my Pinto station wagon where I was keeping the hot pots and boxes with more food, fill up my straw baskets, and go back to my corner and sell out again. I was on that corner, I would say, a couple of months. But eventually I knew I could go to the Crenshaw Boulevard area and get even more foot traffic.
Crenshaw was very different then. It used to have a lot of mom-and-pop stores along there. There were no Burger Kings, no McDonald’s, none of that. So I would stand out in front of the telephone company at the corner of Stocker and what used to be Angeles Vista, on the first and the fifteenth because I would make a lot of money. Those were the days people got their welfare checks and where they went to pay their bills. The security guards would make me move from in front of the telephone company so I would just shift to the shopping center parking lot, which was adjacent to the telephone company building. No problem. I just about sold out there too. If there was anything left over, I would go to some of those mom-and-pop stores and sell what was left to the store owners there.
One da
y a woman from one of those stores said to Pam that she loved her cakes and cookies but what she wanted was some meat. So Pam went out and bought two chickens. She fried one, and the other she barbecued. She cut them up and made sandwiches. They sold out immediately; soon, she went from two chickens to five, then ten, and finally twenty chickens a day. Soon what she calls her street-corner catering business included cakes, cookies, chicken sandwiches, collard greens quiche, hot links, and salad. She started cooking at the crack of dawn, stacking up the straw baskets, pots, and boxes on her small apartment kitchen table so that everything would be ready for her to sell by lunchtime.
Eventually, Pam found a rewarding office job with a chemical company that she likely would not have gotten without her degree, so she does believe that her education paid off. But until then, the income from her kitchen ensured they had a place to live, enough to eat, and enough extra to provide Malcolm with different opportunities to keep him busy, out of trouble, and on his way to following his passion, which turned out to be a theater group.
So that’s how we made it in those early years. While I worked I put him in the children’s theater group because I was looking for extracurricular activities for him. My philosophy was that you don’t learn how to manage your time when you’re twenty-five years old. It starts as a child, learning how to manage your time and having responsibilities. So I told him, “You’re going to do something else besides go to school, come home, and do homework.” He loved it. I would make it more difficult for him to go. I would increase his chores or have him help me more, just to see how badly he wanted it. His homework had to be completed, his chores done, and I told him that he couldn’t go unless everything was done. He would accomplish everything because he really wanted to act. This was my first indication of things to come.
The Power of Presence Page 19