Sense and Sensibility

Do I really have homework at this age?

My son has homework — And that, in the modern parental translation, means I have homework.

So, when my son comes home and tells me he does not want to do his homework, I am puzzled. Why shouldn’t you want to do your homework? It’s your duty, I think. Ever the faithful catechist, I try to impress this on my son. “You think I want to go to work every day?” I ask. “Of course not. But I do it. I do it because I must.”

Unsurprisingly, this fails to make an impression. My son is near tears, and I feel like one of those sadistic Magdalene Sisters, absent only my cassock and rapier ruler.

Now, I am a working mother and don’t relish the thought of coming home at night and cracking the whip on my 8-year-old. There is nothing more I want to do than to cuddle up with my son and a bowl of Pepperidge Farm gold fish and read “Geronimo Stilton” for the 437th time. I am exhausted and not up for another fight.

My son is a bright boy and clever, in the way only children can be. He learned to read at 4, and I’d like to take credit for it, but, the truth is it just seemed to come easily to him and he enjoyed it. Intelligence, I am quickly beginning to believe, seems coiled up in some strand of DNA and needs only a flint or two to ignite.

But discipline, where does that come from?

My youngest brother, Michael, used to get up every morning at 5 a.m., mix himself a batch of Aunt Jemima pancakes and study before the sun came up. Nobody told him to do it and nobody ever needed to rouse him. He just did it. Unsurprisingly, he excelled.

I, too, had a monkish addiction to routine and regimentation, and the quality served me well. But where did it come from? Beyond a vague presumption that my siblings and I would attend college, unlike my high-school educated parents, I don’t recall any punishing rituals or demands from either of them.

What I do recall, however, is fear. Most of my academic success was rooted in a deep panic that I would fail at school, lose my scholarship and chance for economic success and end up scooping mint chocolate chip at Friendly’s for the rest of my days.

Panic can be a motivator, but my son, the progeny of two middle-class college graduates, has none of that. What he has is presumption. Presumption that he’ll go to college. Presumption that he’ll be a home owner. Presumption that he’ll be a contributing member of society.

What it means to be a middle class, college-educated parent is that your children assume that all you have gritted your teeth, sacrificed and beared down for will accrue to him as naturally as the new pair of shoes that appear, miraculously, in his closet.

Discipline is a quality I will have to instill in him. It is no fun.

What it means is that I get to come home after an exhausting day and push him. I will sit there with a pencil in my hand and irritation in my bones and try to get him to make 89 cents with eight coins. It means I will have to try to solve for x, recite the 14th Amendment and distinguish between the Federalists and the Republicans. It has meant, so far, that I have had to hold my son in my arms and comfort him, because sometimes the homework is too hard. It has also meant that we have had some big belly laughs over Mommy’s math deficiency. It has meant making dance routines out of vocabulary lists and Mommy reduced to shouting “Think!<$>” with a condescension that disgusts me.

Some nights, I hold my head in my hands and think of my son 20 years hence remembering me as a drill sergeant. “I didn’t sign up for this,” I tell my husband. “I want him to remember me as loveable.”

He will, my husband assures me. There is a great love in discipline, even if it seems so painfully elusive.