First day of school

Yesterday was Number One Son's first day of school. Not your typical first day, by any means; certainly no weepy young mom packing her darling five-year-old off to school, or even me, who was neither weepy nor young when NOS tripped eagerly across the threshold of the kindergarten classroom door—I was too busy wondering how I was going to shut up the two littler ones who refused to understand why they weren't going to "school" (daycare) that day, too, and whether our family was going to survive the somewhat rocky financial conditions we were in. One in kindergarten was a load off my mind for several hours a day.

No, this was NOS's first day at Blinndergarten, the knock-off name for the local community college that charges out-of-district fees because its main campus—half the size of the one here—is 35 miles away. And the course he's taking is called "Blinn 101" because it's designed for kids like NOS—coming back to the college whirl after a lot of years out of school. "Packing him off" in this case wasn't as easy as dressing him up in the new shorts and t-shirt his grandmother had bought for his first big day and hanging his bright new backpack on his back; no, this time it meant scraping out a part of my home for him to live him, getting him into an old, junker car that would get him back and forth to school, and helping him start dealing with several thousand dollars' worth of debt he's accrued.

But it was a good first day, I think. He came home a little irritated because his teacher had assigned the students to set up their Blinn email accounts before the end of class, but in his case the computers on campus were not cooperating. He was pretty sure Second Son had set up the account for him, and he was pretty sure he was making the right moves to get into it, but nothing he did at school had made it work. Somehow the "packing him off" part had also included my move to a newer computer so he could use my retiring one, and he flopped into a chair and went to work on it about as soon as he got in the front door.

Sure enough, within a matter of minutes he was in the email account, and he paused long enough to tell me his next assignment was to set up the debit card he had received a week or so ago to handle his school financial transactions. I had tried to spell out the need to do that when the card had arrived, having had the benefit of SS's job last spring with a call center for a university financial aid department; I'll bet SS had tried to explain it, too. As usual, NOS didn't want to do it on our advice, so I was tickled pink that he was willing to do it to satisfy the teach.

In fact, I'm pretty tickled that he's doing this, anyway. NOS got off to a fairly good start in school, but soon after he started kindergarten he started mirror-writing. I had documentation that he had been writing his name correctly for a year or more, so the reverse approach had to have started after he started school. When I asked, he explained that he was writing it the way his teacher did; in his five-year-old mind, if she wrote from the side where she held her pencil, he should, too. Since she held her pencil in her left hand and wrote from left to right, he held his pencil in his right hand and wrote from right to left. Why did I wait until the third grade to ask him that?

In the third grade, he was mirror-writing in earnest—and in cursive. That's when the teacher called me in to consider testing him for learning disabilities, which showed that—major surprise—he's dyslexic. Since he'd been mirror-writing since kindergarten, struggled to learn to read, and had a father, an uncle, an aunt, and a younger brother who all were dyslexic, I wasn't particularly surprised.

His real problems started in middle school, though. There, he signed up for band (his dad played the French horn in school and the cornet in the Marines) and basketball, but was prevented from participating in either of them when he failed a six-weeks period of Spanish. Without the band or the team, he was at loose ends and found other ways to amuse himself—with friends whose ideas of fun were mostly pretty far away from school. His dad agreed to let him help out at the bus station Dad ran, and that gave NOS a source of income and of pride.

Unfortunately, in retrospect the income may have also opened doors better left closed. He loved being outdoors, so Boy Scouts had seemed a good way to keep him occupied—until I discovered that the troop leader wasn't concerned that middle-school-aged boys were smoking on the camp outs. And his friends outside of Scouting had taken up the habit; if NOS wasn't buying cigarettes with his earnings, he was likely bumming them either from friends or from his dad, who frequently left parts of packs lying around and forgot them.

Before long, I could see that he was headed toward trouble, and I tried to get his dad to take time out of whatever it was he was doing (I still can't answer that) and invest some time and energy in his son; he was out of my control, and headed for being out of others'. Dad's response was a pretty clear "I can't," and our marriage was headed for the rocks over it; we split up about the time NOS got to high school.

For the first year after the split, NOS went to live with his dad, and things didn't get better; after a year, he decided to try living back at home. The summer went reasonably well; he passed driver's ed and I bought a used car so he could drive himself to work and play, and he enjoyed the freedom if not the rule that he had to have the car home by 11 o'clock .

Once school started, things got worse: he was caught on school property not only smoking but also carrying a small pocket knife, which didn't work in a no-tolerance zone. Having taught at the high school for six years, I knew the school staff enough to wiggle him down to a lighter penalty than he might have had, but I knew we were on a slippery road. Before the end of the year, he had decided to move on to a place where he could have his freedom from my rules—and from anybody getting him up and sending him off to school.

He rolled around for a couple of years before the school practically dragged him in and made him earn enough credits that they felt they could tack a diploma on him and call him a graduate. (I still don't think he really earned the diploma; I think the district was in trouble for having too many dropouts and needed every graduate they could dredge up, and he was one they could find. He was plenty smart to graduate—still is. I just don't think he legitimately did.)

After that, he spent a couple of more years living with friends and cobbling together a life, then he signed himself up for an auto mechanics program at a school in Austin. He took off to start his future against my better judgment, but things worked out mostly okay for him; ultimately, he got a decent job at a Goodyear tire shop, and he walked away with a really enthusiastic letter from his boss, assuring some future employer of the best traits I know of in my son: he's sincere, he's willing to work hard, he plays well with others.

What he doesn't do well is pay off his debts. Somehow, nothing he did in arranging for a place to live, food to eat, and transportation to and from work fit into his income level, no matter how well he did. And then last fall he went to Los Angeles to spend a few days with his sister. Little Sis has way more debt than he'll ever have; the difference is hers is all in college loans that she accepted when she signed on for them, and she has worked hard to pay them off and still make a life for herself. And it's paying off for her.

What he came away with was the perception that her degree was giving her a lifestyle that he could only sit by and envy. The difference, he decided, was in her education. When I was in Los Angeles to visit her for my birthday, he called me to announce that he'd decided to leave his job and go back to school. He'd landed on a position in radiation technology as a career he'd rather pursue, and he wanted to know if he could move back home, live with me, and get himself through school.

So here he is.

I'm not sure radiation technology is really the place where he needs to be, but I suspect that he's closer there than in auto mechanics; he has way too much heart not to work well in something in medicine, and if he's willing to stick to it, radiation technology may turn out to be "it." And if it's not, I'm willing to hang in with him while he continues to look.

And I was really glad to drive home from work yesterday to find him sitting on the front walkway reading a book, and to watch him bound down the stairs this evening to finish the last of his assignments from last night.

One way or another, we are going to make this work.