My Husband, the Genius

If you’re tired of hearing me whine about my son Parker’s school problems, you can’t possibly be more tired of it than I am. Since the sixth grade, every term has been the same. If he misses even one day of school, it results in at least two weeks of misunderstanding the homework, doing it wrong, turning it in to the wrong place, miscommunicating with the teacher, redoing the homework for half credit—wash, rinse, repeat. That doesn’t even take into account the times he was so sure he’d handed in a daily assignment, but somehow it went missing. Doesn’t matter the school, class, teacher—all are united in one grand conspiracy to misplace just his papers.

I know he’s not ADHD. I had him tested. He’s just got a bad case of teenage brain.

The thing is, I can’t let it be. I feel I’m not doing my parental duty if I don’t try everything possible to prevent his permanent residency in my basement. But last term, after another stressful and unproductive confrontation, I realized I’d exhausted my arsenal. I had become that crazy person doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. In sheer exasperation, I took Parker to my husband Jason and poured out my mounting frustrations.

And my husband ever so gently asked me to stop talking because I wasn’t helping things.

I suppose that sounds rude, especially since Jason hadn’t helped things much up to that point, either. But my family knows when I get panicky, a simple “Be quiet” quickly calms me down. (Growing up, my sister used this same method on me: “The other car can’t hear you screaming. Shut up and honk your horn!”)

So I stopped talking—and this time, my husband did help. You see, Jason is a project manager. Basically, that’s someone who shepherds a project from start to end, making sure it’s completed on time and up to standard, no matter how many disparate department boundaries it traverses or how many recalcitrant foot-draggers cross its path. He keeps people on track so they can get done what they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it. Kind of like a professional mom. Which is good, because my amateur efforts were getting seriously substandard results.

That evening, Jason taught both Parker and me some simple project management concepts to help us manage the wide-ranging requirements of the modern high school experience. He helped Parker develop a plan to fill in the gaps where he was struggling. Later, he went with Parker to school to explain the plan to his teachers and get buy-in. Most importantly, he removed the negative emotions from the process and explained to us both that, when the plan fails (as it will in some cases), we don’t need to lose heart. We just need to tweak the plan.

Things are still tough. We’ve had to do plenty of tweaking, including the addition of exception reports, daily checklists, and a privilege-earning plan. But I have felt more peace and patience over the past several weeks than I have in a long time. My appreciation and respect for my husband’s skills—which I’d never really seen in action before—has grown enormously.

Still, one little question keeps niggling in the back of my mind: Why didn’t he just tell me to stop talking four years ago?

***

Since next Friday will be after Valentine’s Day, I’m posting a love poem today. I don’t write these often because it’s impossible to do better than what practically every poet on the planet has already done. But every once in awhile, I take up the challenge. This one is a little different in that the first line is also the title. In some cases, it works better to ditch the traditional capitalized title and just bold the first line so it can do double duty.

Like love,
you can only write so many poems
about the sky—

whether saturated with slate-blue clouds,
heavy as huddled bison herds
in leisurely migration
over valley grazing grounds,

or dry and flat
as bone china crisply glazed,
as lead crystal glinting
so it seems to ping
when first light hits—

but every time I look up,
heaven grabs hold and lifts,
pumps my heart as full
as a helium ballon, and I think:
This should be a poem.

Just like when you walk by
raining unexpected kisses
across my upturned face.

(Previously published by Wilderness Interface Zone)