The Year of Living Hopefully

About the time I gave up trying to get Maddie to school last month, I had a great discussion with my therapist. As usual, I was lamenting my dilemma and my inability to figure out what to do because, you know, no manual and such.

“I like to look at it like this,” she said. “If this were an academic study, do you think at this point you would get additional funding?” The point being the experiment had reached a pretty obvious conclusion, and that’s that my attempts to solve the problem weren’t working. You might even say failing.

I laughed out loud and gave an emphatic, “No.” Or maybe I said, “Hell, no.”

The data is in and regular high school isn’t working. That was the point. We tried it and it didn’t work and now it was time to move on and begin a new experiment. Or change the parameters. Or whatever.

And that was a hard pill to swallow. So I guess I just put that pill in my mouth and swirled it around for awhile and eventually spit it out. I didn’t intend to spit it out but when we met with the school last week, the new part-time schedule seemed to have potential, and then she liked the idea of prom and I thought, OK, let’s just get a few more bucks for funding and try this again.

But the experiment has now been shut down officially for lack of potential. Reality slapped me in the face (it’s soooo mean!) and we’re back to square one. And I’m both relieved (I can stop dreading next week) and disappointed. Now I have to start all over, knowing only what doesn’t work, and that is trying to get Maddie up and to school. Any school. At any time. I have a headache just thinking about sorting through all the information and making the best choice. Or, rather, the best choice we can figure out in the moment. It’s more of a guess, really.

When she declared her intention never to return to high school,  I informed her, “You can’t just stay inside and use technology all day. If you don’t go to school, you will have to learn some other way and get up and go somewhere on a regular basis. You will have to volunteer or get a job or something.” Naturally, that all sounds wonderful to her right now. For one, the conversation got her out of going to bed at a reasonable hour on a Saturday night, which she was complaining about already this evening. And she can stop dreading Monday, her proposed return date to school. She’s off the hook while we do our research, and that’s go to be a relief for her.

My reaction is less enthusiastic although truthfully I don’t know why I had been expecting anything different. Why in the world would she suddenly start going to school? I guess I thought since she went sometimes, if I only asked her to go sometimes, maybe it would work. I don’t believe my hope was rooted in logic, though. It was just a whole bunch of wishful thinking.

So now we’re faced with yet another unknown. Maybe she’ll do online school. Or maybe she’ll take the high school proficiency exam and we’ll all just be done with it. I’m not ready for that yet. She is too bright to quit school. Or maybe that’s not even relevant. Maybe her make-up is antithetical to school at this point, and she’d be better suited to some kind of work. Beats me.

So we keep trying, at least for now. We’ll see if we can figure out a Plan B and maybe a Plan C and then at some point we’ll have to re-evaluate what in the world we’re doing. Not that I don’t do that on a regular basis already.

I’m tired just thinking about it.