"Austin and Rebecca"

I have written one hundred fifty six Bailey Posts in 4+ years and I have never written one about my son. I never wanted to be one of those parents that overwhelm people with seemingly endless stories, anecdotes, pictures and so forth. I mean let’s face it virtually every parent thinks their kid(s) are special and they are, especially to them. The readers of The Bailey Post that have kids are rightfully proud of them. All of our kids are doing their best, moving forward and being good people. I am not referring to that kind of parental pride. We all have that. I’m referring to the parents that make you look at hundreds of pictures of their kids: “oh look, there’s Reggie spitting up his applesauce”, “oh look there is another one of Reggie spitting up his applesauce, oh no, I don’t know what little Reggie is spitting up in this picture but isn’t he sooooo cute”?  What are you going say? “Wish I had a picture of my kid doing that”?

Today, I am going to write about my son Austin and his fiance Rebecca. Austin recently completed his Master’s Degree with an emphasis in American and British Literature.  His finance Rebecca earned her Master’s this semester too in English with the same emphasis. Both graduated “with distinction”. Rebecca will pursue another Master's in Education. Austin was accepted at the Graduate Center in Manhattan, where he will pursue a PhD in English starting this fall. Austin also won the Helen Gray Cone Prize for Excellence in Scholarship at Hunter College and his Master’s Thesis won for best Master’s Thesis of the Year. The title of his Thesis is: “The World is Full”: Emerson, Pluralism, Nominal and Realist”. Rebecca’s is: “Jane’s Women: The Formative Roles of Female Bonds in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre” Rebecca has her Master’s at the age of 25, and she was a Macaulay Honor’s Scholar. So those are the facts (end results) but what I am the most proud about Austin is how he got to where he is.

Austin accomplished what he has with virtually no help from me. Yes, I gave him some moral support and on occasion when his loan money ran out some financial support. But other than that; he did all the work. He didn’t ask me to edit papers, pick my brain about authors, nothing. I offered to do so but he said he wanted to do it on his own and he did. He also had to teach himself how to be a good student and do it when he got to college.

You see he wasn’t always the scholar. He would be the first to tell you that. He barely graduated from high school. Hold your thumb and forefinger together and then barely separate them. That’s how close it was. I didn’t know whether or not to order a cap and gown until a week before the ceremony. School held very little interest for him in K-12.  Only his third grade teacher gave him satisfactory marks. Every other grade and teacher told me every year: “Austin needs to work harder”, “I like Austin and the other kids do to but I don’t know what he’s learning”, “Austin seems to have his head in the clouds”.  His kindergarten teacher told me after 2 ½ months of Kindergarten that he was already behind. I said, “How can you be behind in Kindergarten, I mean what? Is he finger painting with only one finger”? “He eats the glue stick”?

He was placed in Special Ed in first grade because he needed help with his reading. In those days the always “cutting edge” “progressive” (I’m being sarcastic) Poway schools had gone to the new reading program called Whole Language. Some kids need to learn how to read by using phonics. Austin was a phonics kid and after year or so of phonics he tested out of Special Ed. Once he got the reading down he began to be an avid reader. Don’t misunderstand me. I was concerned about what was or was not going on with he and school. I wasn’t shrugging my shoulders and saying oh well. But I also knew what I had observed about him early on.

When I watched him play video games (ages 4-8) he was relentless about mastering whatever game he was on. He didn’t get frustrated, didn’t get mad like I saw other kids get. It was interesting because it almost seemed like his view was I will master it, I just have to take my time. So he focused harder. He had strategies on how to improve, he thought his way through it, made adjustments, tried new things. Most of the games he did master. Then it was skateboarding and he studied it, watched others and kept working at it. Finally at age 12 he decided he wanted to play the guitar so I got him one. I showed him how to use a pick, how to form several chords and string some chords together.
The first 2-3 days he struggled to get his fingers to hold the strings down without creating a muffled sound. I thought he was going to give up. He really was frustrated with this.  A couple of days later though, I was walking down the hallway and when I went past his room I heard him playing a song on his guitar without that muffled sound. He was whipping through chords and playing like he’d been playing for months. I asked him who taught him how to play the song he was playing (Nirvana) and he said he had the song on a CD and listened to it until he figured it out. He played every day for hours. He became a good enough guitar player to be asked to play live on the #1 rock station (in San Diego) at that time. He was I think 13 ½ and he played with a pro named Gary Hoey. (See pic)

My point is, that while school wasn’t going well, I saw some signs I liked, his determination, his patience with himself, his desire to figure out things and do them right. I didn’t know if school would ever fit in with this but I thought whatever he ends up doing he’ll give it his best.  I also knew that I could not badger him into doing school work. He was always independent minded and I encouraged him to think for himself, come to his own conclusions about things. When it came to issues of health and safety there was no debating things. One thing I had going for me was he loved me, and he didn’t want to disappoint me so he almost always tried to make good choices.  I left him alone to find his own way. Some kids you can do that with, and others you can’t.  

He didn’t get to go to his 8^th grade graduation because he didn’t pass enough classes, and I thought he would be really upset not being with his friends. He was quiet that day but was not really upset. It was like he understood that if you don’t put in the effort you don’t get the prize and that was what he’d chosen to do. I told him early on I would not use my position as a teacher to run interference for him or do any negotiating for him. I had other teachers lean on me to give sweetheart deals to their kids and I was not going to do that. I didn’t and he never asked me to.

After HS, he began taking a night class here and there through the local Community College but spent most of his time working a job and playing music with his band. One night when he was about 20 he asked me, “Dad, what does it take to get a Bachelor’s Degree and what does it take to get a Master’s”? I told him and he just went, Huh, kind of quizzical like; like he was thinking, “so that’s how it works”. He said nothing more at that time but the next semester he began to sign up for more classes.  I told him a few days later, “you know Austin if you want to make a run at getting a college degree you are going to have an uphill battle because you didn’t take the classes the other students did in K-12”. He looked at me for about 15 seconds and then said, “So you’re saying I should have worked harder in school”? We both cracked up but he knew what I meant. So it took him longer than the usual whiz kid racing through college but he did learn how to be a really good student.

The point where I started to relax was when Austin was a junior in HS. One day I knocked on his bedroom door and went in. He was on his bed reading a book with another one next to him. I asked him what they were and one was: Poems by Walk Whitman and the one in his hand was the philosophical essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was reading the Emerson essay on self-reliance. I asked him if they were homework and he said, no, he was just curious about them and wanted to read them. I said well, let me know what you think of them, and he said he would. A smile began to form and I thought, "He's going to be fine".

 Rebecca was 180 degrees the opposite of Austin. She is brilliant, skipped at least one grade, sailed through high school and graduated at 17. She was a Macaulay Honor Student at Hunter College with a full ride scholarship. She had a Bachelor’s degree before she was old enough to order a glass of wine.  Two completely different stories, with just about the same ending.

                My point is every kid creates their own path and no paths are identical. As long as they are moving forward, trying and are good persons they are successful.  Like I told Austin more times that he wanted to hear: your job is to be a kid and my job is to be a parent and if we both do our jobs the best we can, things should work out.