Suzanne Smith

Pressure

It’s evening, and I’m watching a documentary about the pressure our culture puts on kids to achieve, while in his bed, my eight-year-old son waits for me to check in at the promised time: 9:30. I’ve got five minutes.

Central to the documentary are a mother and adult daughter, who live in my town, and their pressure-cooker story, how the mother both overprotected her daughter and overexpected her to succeed throughout public school. Instead of landing in an exclusive college, the daughter landed in depression and addiction and a hospital for a time. She’s healed now, in culinary school to be a pastry chef.

My son, with genetic, sensory, and visual conditions, feels pressure not to excel but to do, to do anything at all, to zip his jacket and squeeze his toothpaste and fill his cup. Buttons are his nemesis. My anxiety comes at school, he says, when I have to walk alone in the hall. Things he does not do: walk alone in the hall, sports, clubs, play dates, birthday parties, say hi to neighbors out with their dogs, ride a bike, swim, swing.

Teachers load him with supports and accommodations, while he worries about his glasses fogging up because of his mask, and what if he has to use the bathroom during a fire drill, and Mommy please be first in the pickup line. His vision therapist predicts school will get harder before it gets easier, and he says Mommy I wish you could teach me at home. His neurologist lays out adulthood scenarios: full independence; visits from a home health aide; group home; living with one of his brothers or with my husband and me. The last, I find both troubling and delightful. His geneticist explains that extreme variability in expression makes prognosis impossible, as my husband and I bristle that we can’t find a bike that fits the new jumbo training wheels.

Parents in the documentary are talking about how we should pull back from demanding our kids go to college. We should recognize that not every student will get into a top school. One is saying, “It’s so unbelievably stressful.”

My son is smart. He reads on grade level. Mental math is a breeze. He’s clever, uncommonly articulate about thoughts and feelings, devoted to our gardens, obsessed with weather. He writes elaborate stories and builds complex domino tracks and wants to be a baker and vegetable farmer and landscaper. My son wants to get married. He wants kids.

Will he? / He will: fly the coop. Will he? / He will: craft a baking-landscaping-parenting life. Prognosis impossible, but nobody needs to ride a bike to be a dad.

It’s 9:29, and I’m watching this documentary and I’m not in the fuzzy future, the collegiate dream, I’m in the right-here-right-now, with a beautiful boy who can’t wait to plant sugar snap peas and bake a funfetti cake and is anxiously waiting for another bedtime kiss.

Suzanne Farrell Smith is the author of The Memory Sessions, a memoir about her search for lost childhood memory; and The Writing Shop, a guidebook for writing teachers. “Pressure” is part of her forthcoming essay collection, Small Off Things. She is widely published, has been named Notable in Best American, and won a Pushcart for her essay “If You Find a Mouse on a Glue Trap,” published in Brevity. She teaches writing at Westport Writers’ Workshop, mentors emerging authors, reads for Longridge Review, and is founding editor of Waterwheel Review. Suzanne lives by a creek in the Connecticut woods with her husband, three sons, and two cats. Her favorite sweet treat is her mother’s coffee mousse pie. After her mother’s death, her husband learned to make the pie, which he does annually on Mother’s Day. He’s very sweet.