“I hope you’re not going to do something like this,” warns my son on his way to attend a surprise 18th birthday party courageously arranged by his friend’s mother. That tone squelches any desire I had to do something similar.
“Never thought of it,” I shrug with a nonchalance I don’t feel.
Today, after his French exam, my son’s high schooldays are over. Soon he will be university-bound.
The maternal health nurse did say to cherish the years that would pass “in a flash”. With three children under five, nothing happened in a flash except the perpetual dishevelment that tested my sense of order.
In the way of many firstborns, my son is polite, obedient and diligent, an example to his siblings and a test case for his parents. After not enrolling him in kindergarten, we course-corrected with the others. When he disliked an activity, everyone got pulled out. And, when he outgrew his school, the kids moved en masse.
These days, having children entails a part-time job handling emails, calls and meetings. My son’s school years stand out for the fact that we have managed to navigate them with just two phone calls.
The first inhabits family lore. When he was three his childcare teacher called to report a concern about a picture.
Instead of the obligatory rainbow, he had drawn a wonky stick figure first intact and then decapitated. Resting beside the head was a trident replete with three wobbly drops of red blood.
“Have you noticed any disturbing behaviour at home?” asked the teacher, excited to have unearthed a baby criminal among her charges.
Imagine explaining that our son was an early reader who devoured the Indian comic books of my childhood and had merely been trying to depict the myth of how Lord Ganesh got his elephant head.
“Watch what he reads,” she harrumphed.
That warning was futile. At 13 I was relishing every racy Sidney Sheldon title I could find (at my Indian convent run by Catholic nuns).
The second phone call was from his high school principal to convey that my son had passed his first rigorous “job interview” and had been unanimously voted school captain. I allowed myself to feel enormously proud.
Between these bookends, his school years have been steady and uneventful, for which I am grateful.
Modern parents can go overboard ensuring that their children benefit from “the best” education, connections, career advice and so on. Any eagerness I had to take that role in my son’s life has been matched by his determination to excel on his own. I mostly discover his accomplishments and plans on a “need to know” basis, which I have grown to respect.
I joke that my parents are the rare Indians who never advised me to become a doctor (or anything else for that matter). But it’s not that they didn’t care. The bar in our house was high but not spoken of. Excellence was expected, never demanded. Failure only happened to those who tried. Without consulting books or counsellors, my parents decoupled love from achievement. They have been a good act to follow.
But if my maternal duties seem confined to driving, feeding and nagging, my son’s teachers deserve enormous credit for shaping a small boy into a fine young man. He is the product of three government schools in a time when these schools are flayed by the public and subject to parental flight, despite the average cost of 13 years of private school education in a major Australian city exceeding $300,000.
Australian teachers are poorly paid and woefully respected, the public narrative among the worst I have seen in the countries where I studied.
The sentiment is captured in one dismaying paragraph from a survey:
Teachers described such things as constant emails from parents, students’ disregard for expectations of behaviour and basic courtesy, and a sense of individual entitlement that compounds with the competition that’s inherent in our education systems.
In this troubling environment, my son’s teachers have been deeply invested in their students. Nowhere has this been more evident than in these final weeks of school when they have gone out of their way to hold extra lessons, provide moral support and stand outside exams with spare supplies and healthy snacks.
A veteran teacher gave my son an envelope of advice on how to be a decent person – it should be required reading for all adults. Another penned a note to every student – I have saved it for a time when its significance will be even more profound. One teacher taught him how not to get bored at university, another reflected on his missteps. These teachers are my co-parents, no less. What’s more, their advice is more palatable than mine.
Conversations with my cancer patients often turn to our children because they are a focus of distraction and commonality. All month they have generously asked after my son.
One patient shared that her eldest child is a fine student, sitting the same exams and hoping to study the same university course as mine. But with a terminally ill parent, this grieving child is running a dozen errands between exams while trying to keep her equilibrium.
Over the years I have used every opportunity to remind my children about the role of serendipity in the most promising of lives, and the need to always be humble.
On his final day of exams, I wish for my son success and satisfaction in life. My joy would be tripled if the child of my patient were similarly rewarded.
Ranjana Srivastava is an Australian oncologist, award-winning author and Fulbright scholar. Her latest book is called A Better Death
