I started seeing Dr. Waxman on Long Island when I was in kindergarten. Jason was in second grade. We were fighting a lot. Maybe it wasn’t any more than brothers fight in plenty of other families. But my parents wanted help getting us to get along. So once a week we’d go to Dr. Waxman, and we’d talk about why we were fighting. My brother had already been going to Dr. Waxman for a while, for his own problems, having to do with shyness and hitting, I think.

When I was little, my father knew only one disciplinary strategy — yelling. He was a world-class yeller, still has a booming voice today. Not that he yelled all the time. Actually, he was playful and caring and attentive. Mostly, though, he was at work. My mother tried to keep me and my brother from killing each other while she cared for my little sister. When we wouldn’t listen to my mother, she would call my father on the phone and he would yell at us from Manhattan, where his hardware store was. The yelling usually worked — my father wasn’t a hitter, but we were scared of him anyway. Sometimes, all my mother had to do was tell us that she was calling my father, and we’d cut it out. Despite this, the yelling wasn’t enough to stop the fighting, so I went to Dr. Waxman with my brother.

Dr. Waxman was smooth, calm. Even his mustache was calm. I didn’t imagine the guy ever yelled about anything at all. He gave me and my brother a chance to say what was on our minds. I don’t remember what was on our minds. Probably just typical sibling crap: I was the younger brother who was oppressed and picked on; Jason was the older brother who was blamed for everything. Or something like that. Dr. Waxman also gave my parents advice and taught them about behavior modification charts and how to avoid yelling and other stuff. I guess it worked, or we outgrew the worst of the fighting, because after a while we stopped going. We. My brother was done. I wasn’t.

For the first half of elementary school, from kindergarten until third grade, I got into tons of fights. Maybe it was a reaction to the fighting with my brother at home. Maybe it was a preemptive defense mechanism, because I was shorter than the other boys my age. Maybe it was chemical. I don’t know exactly what I was so angry about, but I know that I was angry. Other kids got into fights, too, so I shouldn’t make too much of it.

Still, I remember getting into a fight in the lunchroom and slamming this kid’s face down into the lunch table. Another time, I got into a fight with a kid in the school library and the librarian couldn’t pull us apart, so she dragged us by our hair across the floor and out of the room. And way back in kindergarten, I got into a fight that ended when the other kid and I fell into and broke the class’s U Fly It airplane set. Don’t get the wrong idea. I wasn’t fighting every day. Not every single day. There were way worse kids than me. But I was fighting a lot. And fighting wasn’t my only problem.

I wasn’t doing well in school. I didn’t listen to the teacher. I daydreamed constantly. My classroom desk was a disaster, with papers crammed in every which way. If I were a kid today, they would probably put me on medication. I was sent to the principal’s office a lot in first and second grade. I got a lot of notes sent home. My mother had to meet with the principal a few times. My parents were doing their best. They were attentive and in touch with my teachers. At the end of first grade, I still couldn’t read. The teachers thought I was stupid.

Dr. Waxman gave me an IQ test. It turned out that I was very not-stupid. I don’t know what I talked about with Dr. Waxman every week. I was six, seven years old. How much of our childhoods do we understand, or even remember? It feels now like it all happened to somebody else. Maybe I talked about everyone who started fights with me, about the teachers who had it in for me. Maybe I had a minor persecution complex. Maybe I was angry at the unjustness of the universe. Sometimes, Dr. Waxman took me to the driving range during our sessions. (I guess my father stayed in the waiting room while I hit golf balls. Did he read a magazine?) The golfing was a device, a way to get me to talk.

Afterwards, every week, my father would take me to eat at a Roy Rogers that had a western theme and saddles in place of some of the seats. I’d pretend I was riding a horse while we ate cheeseburgers. I don’t know what I talked about with my father during those dinners and those car rides out to the Island and back. I’m sure we talked about something. It doesn’t matter what it was. What mattered was that it was just us. I looked forward to our time together.

I stopped going to Dr. Waxman by third grade. I’d quit hitting kids, more or less, had my temper mostly in check. And my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Tiger, had to bring in her teenage son’s old books for me from home because I had whipped through whatever we had in the classroom and was bored with third-grade reading. I read his historical novels about Pearl Harbor and the Pony Express. I don’t know what made the difference that year, whether it had anything to do with Dr. Waxman or time alone with my father or if I just grew up and my brain got itself under control, but the fighting years were over.

Now my son is starting first grade. He’s a good kid, a lot better than I was. There’s been no need to take him to a psychologist. And he’s reading already, has been for months, way earlier than I did. But being a parent isn’t easy. Now, only now, can I understand how hard it was for my mother and father to worry about me getting into fights, not listening to teachers, being so angry and unhappy in school, not being able to read. Kids don’t have any idea what parents go through. There’s so much that they just don’t see.

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Tags: family & parenting, reflections & recollections by Scott Stein // 1 Comment »