It's Not About The Damn Gym Socks

The Pony started middle school this year, and it's been a hard time. Her lower school experience was exactly the right thing for her--starting kindergarten was like putting a fish into water and letting it swim. Every grade was a better experience than the last, and by her last grade in that building she was able to say it was the very best of all.

Middle school changed all that. It was harder--the teacher's expectations were higher. Suddenly she was exposed to the threat of detention for forgetting an instrument, or punitive laps for being late to gym class. Not that she herself did these things, but she saw them happening, and they scared her.

The class sessions are longer--80 minutes each, and there are no bells or designated passing times, so she's sweating the fact that she is released from one class at the exact time she is supposed to be at the next one. She's discovered where the clocks are not perfectly synchronized, affecting how timely she can be to classes.

It's been hard. Hard on her, and hard to watch. As a parent, there is little that I can do--I can't change the schedule for her, or assign less homework, or really anything. These are the things that we all have to learn to handle, and better she learn it now, where she is in an environment where people really care about her, than when she goes off to college and has to do it all alone.

One day she was in the car, crying, listing all the things that went wrong that day, and the last thing on the list was "the gym teacher yelled at me for not wearing socks. I had socks, I just don't like to wear them and they yelled at me."

I had to put away my tool belt--as much as I wanted to fix it, the gym socks were not the problem. They were, at most, a symptom of the problem--of being overwhelmed by change. I had to be patient. I already had faith that she could handle this new school--and her mid-trimester marks show that. It was up to her to learn to have faith in herself and her ability to handle it all.

Today, it was better. Today she came up to me, loaded down with all her books and materials for school and she said "I think 6th grade is the best grade."

She had reasons for it, which I asked about and heard, but again, it's not about the particulars. It's about the global problem of handling it all, and it sounds like she's doing it. Plus, now she wears socks to gym class.