Week 227: What happened
The lesson learned: A safe space is a necessary but not entirely sufficient condition to thrive.
It occurs to me that if I were a soulless corporate drone, I'd have monetized last week's newsletter, The Five Foot Bookshelf, into a list on Amazon, and gotten the corresponding cut, and released it right before Prime Days. You can take this as proof that though I often call out operations for marketing opportunities missed, I can do a fine job of missing opportunities myself.
You may find this week’s installment unpleasant, but remember it’s history now.
If you follow me on facebook, you may have seen at the beginning of the month, that Catie has transferred to Serra Catholic High School, which is a bit further over in the Mon Valley. This was a messy decision that while I support her in making it, I also find myself needing to hash through the problem to sort out my feelings, since she’s had to go through her feelings to get to this point.
If we have to start with a proximal event, it was in October. There were some ordinary level conflicts with band prior to that, but this was a tipping point. Catie was feeling stressed from a series of events: my father's strokes, Judie's succumbing to cancer, and a traffic accident that claimed the life of a student at another school that she knew, and but for a schedule change, might have injured her friends, the triplets. (The triplets are the daughters of Dana's friend Dena, and were the flower girls for our wedding. Catie's known them since forever, and were in the same class with them from nursery school to 2nd grade.) So in decompressing from that span of bad news, Catie said something in a conversation at dance to blow off some steam that one of her other friends interpreted the wrong way. She didn't even remember what she said, but it prompted one of her friends to call a help line.
Now allow me to explain what that means in PA. A phone call to the helpline is received, and in quick succession the student’s principal, vice principal, guidance counselor, and CYS are called. The police are relayed the information and immediately go to their home. This happens within 10 minutes, which explains why I was standing on my front porch in my underwear at 12:30am, explaining to the cops that she wasn't home tonight but at her dad's fast asleep, completely unaware. And to boot, because this has now involved parties in multiple counties, there's a second call to a second CYS. So yeah, this was a new stress, and until we got her into counseling, she couldn’t go to school. I figured out later that has become the slightly gentler form of swatting somebody.
Her absence then led to her being unavailable for a band competition and a football game, earning her the ire of the band, which only created more tension. There was a series of tensions among leadership this year, and this was only one of the points, but it was closest to us. By the end of the football season, she was not really with the band any more.
Shortly after this, her biggest defender on campus, the vice principal, suffered a heart attack. He recovered fully, as we’ll see, but it meant he was away recovering for most of November and December. November managed to at least end with a good memory, of taping the show. Since the vice principal was the one who approved me getting the team on the show, it was a bit of a letdown. In the book, I had been using the concept of the pressure, the person who you’re trying to win for, and our pressure was absent.
The new semester began with the new year, and the drama began again. I’m not going to go into this part of it, but if you put the high school in google news, you’ll see the headline, and you don’t need to go any further. Catie did have him for class, and thankfully she wasn’t a witness to anything to need to testify. If there had been anything more, this newsletter would probably been suspended as I wouldn’t have been able to keep my cool. But what finally tore it for her was the kids doing live-action shitposting defending him. At some point in there she had had enough of the other students, and she fixed on getting out of there.
She planned her escape well before she told me. When I first found out, I tried to temper her instinct. When I had problems in school, I learned to bear up under the indignity of being bullied, because I really didn’t have any other choice. Where I learned to be the immovable object, she has learned to be the irresistible force. I found out her level of commitment to the plan about a minute before she announced the plan to the entire team as we were preparing for the second match, and she never moved from that commitment.
I've felt like shit about this for the better part of 2024. I'm realizing that now that is a selfish thing on my part, because in some part my involvement at Seton was to help her and partly to establish a team that _I_ could be proud of, not that _she_ could be proud of starting. And now I’m seeing that every ounce of resolve she had in starting the team at Seton in recruiting teammates, talking an old coach out of retirement, and convincing the powers that be, she just used to take control of her situation with the same force. She left St. Louise feeling alone, and resolved to build a team to not be that way again. I wanted her to have a safe and positive space in quiz bowl, and she did get that, she never has had issues with anyone on the team. But that wasn’t enough on its own.
Yesterday, I got called at 3:30 to take her to her first band practice over at Serra, and I had to rush to pick her up from home, get gas and drop her off, one of the essential tests that needed to be done this summer. Unlike Seton, which has a van pickup a half-mile from my office, it's a 70-minute drive to Serra. This means, from a purely practical standpoint, I won't be able to help her start a team at Serra. I don’t think it’s going to matter, she’ll have the triplets back in her classroom, a band with no drama so far, and she smiled on school grounds for the first time in months. The door is closed, but it’s not locked.
As for Seton, Catie and I have discussed this all summer. She’s okay with me going back there. The members of the team were never a problem to her, and she knows I feel like I owe the team for the opportunity they gave us, and they’re the only people aside from the vice principal who she isn’t blocking as she leaves. There’s a point of pride there in what they did together that she’s not going to cast aside completely. They’re already prequalified for next year’s TV show, and I can’t see them putting us up against the South Side buzzsaw twice.
The irony in this is most everyone who really caused her stress is gone. The band is under new management, the hecklers, bullies, and semi-stalkers of last year have either graduated or transferred out. If she wanted to she probably could have stayed. And then I remind myself, if I had wanted to stay mentally invested in the hsqb forums, I probably could have stayed as well. Sometimes the distance is necessary for self-care.
Because they handled the crises of last year well, the principal is now the superintendent of the diocese, and the vice principal has been promoted as her replacement. As I congratulated them on their new positions, I was welcomed back if I wanted to. I do, because she wanted this team to succeed, and we’re still ahead of our four year plan. But it won’t be exactly the same.