Something’s been up with Jme lately. She has always had her ups and downs, but it seems as if she has been in a consistent downswing lately, and the level of interaction, the level of trust, and the level of communication between her and us feels like it is significantly lower lately. As Wifey and I have talked about causes, she thinks it correlates to the reemergence of MJ, who has never done anything but bring her down in one way or another. Today, he would never come around here, and she would never talk about him with us. But we’ve seen little signs here and there.
On Sunday, Wifey was asking Jme about her grade in Spanish and encouraging her to do some assignments that she hadn’t turned in the previous week. Jme was in one of those moods and throwing down some attitude. She responded to Wifey harshly by saying that she didn’t care, and that she was going to enroll in our state’s military academy. This was pretty much news to us.
She has talked about the military academy in the past. Once, before she had started counseling, she hatched a plan to run away when she turned sixteen. Her plan, as best we uncovered it, was to run away and join the military academy along with her cousin. Her sixteenth came and went and things were going really well at that time, so that’s all we heard about it.
This time around, we asked her a little about her plan. She told us there was an orientation meeting here in town on Wednesday. She wanted to go to the meeting with her cousin because it was their plan to go through this experience together. Wifey asked her if she wanted us to go. She said no, that it was only for youth, not for parents, and that this was the only such meeting. Of course, Wifey did some checking and quickly found that Jme was wrong on both counts. Parents are encouraged, and it’s one of a number of meetings coming up over the next few months.
She didn’t want to talk about it, but we also saw that she was suddenly feeling very anxious. Her anxiety was causing stomach aches and nausea. She said she was sick and certainly carried on as if she were. Wifey gave her some Pepto and some good mothering, but we also had a pretty good idea as to the root cause of her pains.
On Monday, I asked Jme about this meeting. She said she didn’t want to talk about it, and she was clearly in no mood, so I let it go. The next day, Tuesday, I asked her about it again. I told her that if she wanted to go she needed to tell us something about it or it simply wasn’t going to happen. She grudgingly came over to where I was, pulled up the website on my computer, and showed it to me. I told her she couldn’t go alone. Wifey had previous plans, so that meant she and I were going. She acquiesced, and we could tell that she felt better almost immediately. Where she didn’t eat a bite of her dinner and claimed to be too nauseous to eat, as soon as we talked and it was determined the we would indeed go to this thing, she bounced off from that conversation and started to look in every cabinet for something to snack on. She was relived to have a plan, to have something definite, and not have this big Conversation still looming in the undetermined future.
Today, she and I went to the orientation meeting. She has talked often about wanting to enlist in the military after high school. She has talked about college, and about trade schools, and about JROTC, but enlisting in the military is the only real consistent thing she has talked about. It holds some appeal for her. So when we walked in to the national guard armory, where the meeting was to be held, she was immediately wowed by the Humvee and other military equipment there (wonder why they had that parked inside so prominently?).
After a brief presentation, they showed a slick promotional film about the training, the camaraderie, and inspirational stories of kids who got their lives back on track after being in this program. It looked fun. It looked exciting. It looked like some kind of summer adventure camp. I think if I were a teen with only a tenuous connection to the life and people around me, I would absolutely want to go.
But a couple of things stood out to me during the presentation. First, basically the mission statement of the school states that it targets “at-risk” youth, and it goes on to define at-risk as either already dropped out of school, or in danger of not completing high school. Elsewhere in the presentation, an instructor claims that this is a “last ditch effort to get [these youths’] lives back on track.” Well we don’t think Jme quite qualifies as “at-risk,” nor is her life necessarily off track. And if it is, we haven’t nearly got to the last ditch effort yet.
At the end of the presentation, the recruiter basically said, Are you ready to sign up now? and gave the hard sell. Most of the students there were ready, and the recruiter nearly brow beat the one student who said he was not sure. The next step is an interview alone with the student and the recruiter. We’ve scheduled that for next Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. I’m not sure what is going to happen between now and then, but there must necessarily be a few serious discussions. The candidate is supposed to bring the completed application packet, which includes the parental permission slip, to the interview on Friday.
Jme’s best interest is our sole motivation. We want to do what is best for her, and what will give her the greatest chance of maximizing her potential in life. We have been very glad to see her do well in school. She maintains B’s and C’s, and she has been involved in after school activities and hangs out with a select few of her school mates outside of school. She has been showing all the signs of doing well there. We think she is absolutely on track to graduate next year and do whatever comes next.
One of the real selling points of her current school is that the vast majority of them, like 98% or something like that, are college bound. These are upper middle class kids whose parents value education and ensure that their kids do well. Those are the kinds of influence that we feel she should be around right now. The last thing we want to do is submerse her into a pool of “at-risk” kids with good drug connections. She’s had enough of that already.
And though she would have the opportunity to earn her GED there, we think she should earn her regular diploma. We have learned that military recruiters have a strong preference for regular diplomas over GEDs, and if she still wants to enlist, or do anything else, she should have a regular diploma.
We also recognize that Jme has not had enough of the parenting and mothering and functional family life that every child should have before tackling adult life. She’s never really had a mother, and her father was marginal at best. We think she could really benefit from being a part of an intact family and being loved by a mother for another couple of years.
These are our views. We want to know why she wants to make this kind of change and how she thinks it will benefit her. What does she think this program will do for her? Some of the conversations we will have over the next week will have to include her explaining this to us as best she can. I told her that I am keeping an open mind about this for now, but she is going to have to sell me on the idea, and that is just not the kind of thing she can do very well.
