I Hated School And I Am Pretending I Did Not

Something comes up in you at that table and it is not about your child.

You will have noticed it. There is a flash of something when the book opens, and it arrives before any of the actual work does, and it is out of proportion to a page of sums.

Because you have been here before. Not at this table. At a different one, thirty years ago, with somebody standing over you, and the feeling of not being able to do the thing while somebody watched.

And you are sitting in that chair now as the adult, doing your best, being encouraging, and underneath it there is a whole other conversation happening that your child cannot see.

I want to say two things and they sit together.

The first is that what happened to you was real. If school was where you learned that you are not clever, that is an injury and it was done to you, most likely by people who did not know what they were doing and thought they were being firm.

The second is that it is not happening again. That is a different table, a different child, a different century of teaching, and the fear moving through you right now is a memory rather than a report about what is in front of you.

Both of those are true at once, and this article does not require you to have resolved the first one to be useful at the second.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle

There is a line in the psalms about what God does with the crying nobody else saw, and it is stranger and better than people expect.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Put thou my tears into thy bottle.

That is an odd picture and it is worth staying with. Tears collected and kept, deliberately, as though they were valuable, by somebody who wanted them not to be lost.

And then: are they not in thy book. Written down. Recorded. Not forgotten, not filed away as trivial, not dismissed as something that happened a long time ago and should be over by now.

So the crying you did at nine years old, that nobody knew about, that you have never told anybody about, that you would feel ridiculous mentioning now, is in a bottle and in a book.

Nobody in that verse is being told to move on. There is no timescale attached, no suggestion that it should have stopped mattering, and no requirement to have made peace with anything in order for the tears to be kept.

You are carrying something that heaven collected and wrote down, and it has never once been too old or too small to have been kept. Psalm 56:8 has the tears gathered and recorded with no timescale attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific to a nine year old nobody knew about.

Do not hand it to the child

Here is the thing to be careful about, and it is the reason this row has to be written carefully.

Your history is not your child's to carry.

There are two ways it gets handed over and both are done with love. The first is turning the table into a battle against your own past: this child will not be like me, and so the work has to be done, and it has to be right, and the stakes on a Tuesday become enormous for reasons that are nothing to do with them.

The second is the opposite: I was no good at this either, said as a comfort, in a way that quietly gives them a place to stand that they had not asked for. A child can take that sentence and make a whole identity out of it.

What is safe to hand over, and what is genuinely good for them, is not the wound. It is one small honest story.

Not I was terrible at school. That is a verdict. Something specific and finished: I could not do long division for about two years and I used to hide the book. There was a teacher who made me read out loud and I dreaded Wednesdays.

Specific, short, true, and over. That does something a general confession does not: it tells them that difficulty is survivable, and that the adult in front of them survived it, and it does not hand them an inheritance.

You are able to give them one true story without giving them your history, and it has never once been the same act. The written word keeps a person's tears rather than passing them on, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates what should be told from what should be carried.

One short story, tonight

So here is the assignment.

Tell your child one true, short story about school being hard for you.

Short. Under a minute. Specific: one subject, one moment, one thing you could not do, and preferably something with the detail still in it, because detail is what makes it real rather than a lesson.

Do not add a moral. Do not finish with and that is why you need to work hard, and do not finish with so it does not matter either. Both of those turn a story into an instruction, and they will hear the instruction and lose the story.

Just tell it, and let it sit, and go back to the work.

And notice what it does to the table. Right now that table has a competent adult and a struggling child on it, which is a bad arrangement for everybody. One honest story makes it two people who have both found something hard, which is a completely different table.

Psalm 56:8 has the difficulty kept rather than tidied away, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a parent says one true thing to their own child.

You are able to tell one story and stop, and it has never once needed a moral to be worth telling. Psalm 56:8 records the tears without requiring them to be resolved, and the Spirit of God is the one who is at the table when you say it.