by Lisa Termin

Created on: August 22, 2009

The gnawing, aching feeling I got just before the beginning of every school year was almost unbarable. Back to school blues always hit me right around the first of August and worsened throughout the entire school year. I would gladly take my sons anywhere but school... that was the one place I did so grudgingly and with a sinking spirit. There would be far less chair and sheet tents in the backyard or all-night movie marathons or home-made science projects. And far fewer nature walks and leaf gathering, pondering the beauty and science of it all. Homework would soon take its place. I constantly wrestled with a way to be alright with sending them back to school - back to a rigid, lifeless, constricting atmosphere where, if you were not a cookie cutter student, you felt the pain of rejection day after day.

I wanted more for both of my non-cookie cutter sons. I wanted them to be in a place where they were celebrated and appreciated for the creative and imaginative little souls they were. I wanted their atmosphere to be one that fed their sense of being alive and loving it. It crushed me to send them to school year after year, knowing that they would return home, little by little, with mauled and mis-shapen spirits.

Inside I knew that, by the end of their public school careers, that zest for adventure and life and learning they inherited at birth would be squashed down to barely a spark, if any. What a price to pay for a piece of paper. Thirteen years of not measuring up to what only a few had decided should be a 'standard' and their awesome reward would be a scrolled up diploma - a parchment that would be repeatedly heralded over the years as their magic pass to a world 'standard' level of success.

Peer pressure and teacher pressure and government test pressure... how would I, in good conscious, be able to send them off with a smile and peace knowing what damaging deception lay ahead? They were little whole-hearted, smiling faces and free spirits sporting backpacks and lunchboxes filled with promises of a better future, lined with discriminatory messages of self-worth drowned in uniform conformity. I had to send them because I had no other choice.

How does one beat back to school blues? I have not completely figured that one out yet but my suggestion would be to center school around those who attend, not those who have already lost their sense of a spirit-filled life.

Learn more about this author, Lisa Termin.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.