I’ll find you again. The back-to-school train passed over us, leaving each morning at our feet its share of transformations, passages, mixed anxieties and excitement.
Every morning, yes, children passed through the doors of our homes, leaving behind traces of what we no longer were.
At home, one was going to catch her first yellow school bus, get on without us, head off without us towards a class, offices, routines and a schoolyard, too, with all the cruelty that is sometimes there. , obviously. The other walked to another courtyard, to encounter an even more dizzying world: the multipurpose school.
I closed my eyes so as not to cry too much like all these mothers do who know that there are all these possibilities outside that could scratch the precious fragile still-so-pink-it-seems-to-us-but- no-let’s-see-they-are-big. I tried not to be that mother, even though I instantly became one, just a few minutes to myself, in the car, on my way to work.
In the clinic, I also collected the back-to-school stories, but also all the traumas that came to the surface in parents who accompanied their children to what, for them, carried painful memories. This image of our parenthood always born a little from our own open wounds struck me again. If adulthood allows us, we believe, to protect ourselves, how difficult it remains to accept pushing into the world these beings around whom we would like to draw large circles of protection, which they do not feel, grace, that which, in us, remains at the origin of the ruins.
There are so many things underlying all this pent-up emotion on street corners, at 8:10 a.m., all those mornings in early September, when parent-child couples are waiting for the first school buses of the year. It is not only about this excitement linked to the beginnings of the school adventure, no, nor the neurotic triumph experienced in the face of the lists that we conquered in time, nor even this excitement of seeing the future make its way under our eyes. No. For many parents, it is about containing traumatic reminiscences of what made up their own school experience.
I myself felt some remnants of my own sweaty hands running along the brown seams of the bus benches from the 1980s, which I remember by heart, as I do every time there is a question of trauma, with images in close-ups that never disappear. I clearly heard again the sound of my heart breaking in the face of the cruelty of the primary school playground, at that time when we said “rejection” to designate someone who was not part of the place, but who still had to evolve there.
These memories sometimes appear in spite of myself in my way of approaching the start of the school year with my children. Despite the time spent distilling shame, there always remains in me the trace of this possibility: that the world will break my child. The distrust that some parents express towards educational institutions often takes root in a previous time, for which we have little ear, obsessed as we are with our management of time centered on the present, the future, the plans intervention with operational targets and concrete means to put in place.
However, what we carry as the past very often invites itself into our interactions with the present, whether we grant it importance or not. Many parents carry with them the trace of a school career in which they were told to “ignore” hurtful remarks, or to “go see an adult” who often found themselves quite helpless in situations that persisted. Others fortunately built trust too, conversely, when adults they met during their school career knew how to hear what was suffering and act in a way that elevated them — raised in the sense of educating, but also in the sense of verticality, that which leads to straightening one’s spine to dare to be oneself and act in coherence with this.
I remember making this decision, deep down, one day in September at the start of my 2e secondary school, when arriving at a new school. I was now going to find the words to defend myself in turn, to no longer keep myself folded, coiled around my shame as if to cherish it. I remember the beginning of an uprising necessary for my history, the one which made me stand up straight, and which still serves me today, when I have to break through these few schoolyards that are sometimes these professional environments full of adults still a little caught up in the dynamics of multi-tasking. I also learned that there is a fine line between “getting up” and slipping into the bad guy’s camp, and that sometimes it’s a healthy form of guilt that saves us from becoming monsters. I’m talking about this guilt which allows us to see the other and the effect of our actions on them, and not this Judeo-Christian affect which swallows us up, makes us anxious and prevents us from deploying ourselves.
In a world that always tends to split everything into two opposing clans, reducing a myriad of colors into a bichromatic world, it seems to me that there is a little lack of space to tell all the layers that make us and our children complex people, rarely just nice, just mean, just intimidated or just intimidating. There is often a story, or a thousand, to discover as long as we open a space necessary for the deployment of a word that exceeds our linguistic categories which are so often reductive. Obviously, it is simpler and more operational to include in an intervention plan: “oppositional disorder”, “AD/HD”, “bully”, than to tell a story that goes back to the parents’ childhood. .
However, it is all this, and more, that is played out every day in schoolyards.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.