BE ME

Years and years later.  Years after I’d struggled through university.  Years after I’d struggled through a handful of awkward jobs in some very awkward countries.  Years after I’d squatted in a bunch of fairly horrible holes in horrible buildings and years after I’d dated what might be the worst mistake in romantic history.  Years after all of this, I sat in a parent-and-teacher meeting opposite a family, both the parents and the son, where it suddenly dawned on that I was the teacher.

 

Did you see that one coming?  I hadn’t either but that’s not the point.

​

Parent-and-Teacher Meeting

Mum and dad were laying into the son because of a bunch of reasons, some of which I had no knowledge of, some of which I was being made aware of right now.  Boy, were they laying into him as well, though it was a strange place to do it.  A strange time to do it.  Should you wait until you’re inside a school building, a teacher and parent meeting, to inform your son that you regret ever having him?  That you should never have had a second?  That you should have followed your instincts and gone for the dog instead?  Still, this was the time and the place they’d chosen and a part of me could understand their decision.  I mean, we’ve seen it before.

 

I’d seen it before.  Parents who were fully aware of their child being a bit of a screw-up but always that hope of something better.  Maybe some time in the future, maybe some place else.  Maybe, if against all the odds, the kid was at least doing alright in school.  That would be something.  Or not alright but okay enough.  Average.  Not a complete screw-up, like they was at home and like he was everywhere else.  Maybe then all wouldn’t be completely lost.  Always that glimmer of hope but then they walked into my meeting and realised that all of that had been in vain.  The kid had been lost here just as much as he’d been lost everywhere.  He’d been lazy here, unreasonable, defensive, a waste of oxygen; just as much as he had been everywhere else.  There was no hope.

 

That’s when frustration took over.  They didn’t choose the time and the place.  The time and place chose them and so they both laid into him right here, right now.  This was it.  This was the time and this was the place.  This was the last straw that broke the camel’s back and weeks, months, perhaps even years of pent-up anger was coming out.

 

‘When will you learn,’ one of them said.  ‘When are you going to learn?  When is this, this, this nightmare.  When will it end?’

 

The other one - I don’t know which one - said something like not knowing what to do with him anymore.  Something about being at a loss and how they’re tried stuff.  No, wait, they’d tried everything.  After that brief moment and admissions of helplessness, he or she returned to parental mode, asking him when he’d start acting his own age.  I thought that was full parent mode because there’s something confusing about that, isn’t there?  Wasn’t he doing just that?  Acting his age?  Sure, I know there are also fourteen-year-olds that lead a slightly different lifestyle.  A lifestyle that’s perhaps healthier, more altruistic, more active, more academic and more awash with ideals and dreams.  Were they acting their age though?

 

Was I going to tell them?  As much as I wanted to stick up for the kid and point out that he might be acting his age, there were no redeeming qualities there.  He was still acting like a spoilt, entitled, lazy and useless entity; even if he was acting his age.  Someone who, if he decided not to walk into my classroom one morning, I might forget to tick on the register as absent.  Not on purpose, just because.  There was nothing there to stick up for and besides, part of me was kind of enjoying the little scene here.  There’s something quite enjoyable about watching parents lose their shit with their children.  It’s the unbridled anger mixed with utter disappointment that makes it a bit more theatrical and emotional than it would otherwise be, you know, when just two people take chunks out of each other.  It’s difficult not to love your children, which is the problem, and only people you love can wind you up to that degree.  Random people having an argument won’t let it get that bitter.  They either walk away or do something extremely violent.  You can’t easily walk away from the people you love and even though some people in relationships do resort to violence, I am naive enough to think the norm was right in front of me.  Two parents who couldn’t help but love the kid but who could equally not help being livid beyond even their imagination and understanding.

 

‘This is just so embarrassing,’ one of them continued.  ‘You think Mr Weeda doesn’t have better things to do with his time?’

 

He doesn’t actually, I thought.

 

‘And to make us come out here and be confronted with this.  This!  All of it.  Not just English but Maths, Physics and Geography.  Geography for Christ’s sake.  When all you have to do is just turn up.  You have to just go to school.’

 

That’s right, you tell him, I thought.

 

‘You don’t have to be smart, you don’t have to learn, you probably don’t even have to do much homework.  You just have to sit on a chair and pay attention.  And you can’t even do that.’

 

Exactly!  He can’t.

 

‘I am so, so, so disappointed.  How do you expect to get anywhere in life?  What do you want to do?  Live in our house all your life? Do nothing?  Play video games?’

 

He probably does, the cheeky bastard!

 

‘You think that’s how Mr Weeda got here?’

 

Well…

 

I mean, we don’t have to go there, do we?

 

‘You think that’s how Mr Weeda got to sit in that chair?  How he got his job?’

 

Okay, tangent happening.  Now I don’t mind but let’s see if we can get back on track again.  You were sorting out the kid, remember?  Focus.

 

‘You think he just coasted through life like that?  Never did any homework, never went to class?  And just ended up here?  Miraculously like that?’

 

…

 

‘Well?!’

 

My mouth went to make a sound.  Did my mouth realise it was part of the teacher’s body, not the kid’s body?  It didn’t feel that way.  I looked at the kid.  Yup, he was still there.  He was still sat there, being him.  I was still sat here, being me.  What were his parents looking at though?  Were both parents now looking at me?  What happened to their enjoyable rage monologue?  Why were they looking at me?  Why were they using me in this scenario?  What did they want from me?

 

I didn’t know how I got here.  I didn’t know how I got to sit in that chair and not be the one to get chastised.  The truth is that it is more likely to have been a miracle than through hard work because the truth is that I once, too, sat in that chair.  I did once coast through life.  I did once never do homework - no, wait, I never ever did any homework.  I didn’t show up at school most of the time.  That’s not how I got here, obviously,  but I don’t know how I did.  I mean, I don’t know - I didn’t know - how else I got here.  Could it have been a miracle?  Divine intervention.

 

Okay, they were looking at me.

 

My mouth, ever helpful, told them what it was thinking.  It said, ‘I don’t know.’

 

Luckily, I made it stop.  That’s maturity for you.  If I had still been fourteen years old, my mouth would have continued.  It would said something like, ‘You’ll be alright.  Look at me.  I have absolutely no idea how I got here and look at me now.   Sitting here.’  It would have said that I was the exception to the rule.  ‘You can be the exception to the rule too buddy.’  The rule is to work hard, go to school, pay attention.  ‘You and I are exceptions.’

 

‘What Mr Weeda is saying,’ one of the parents said.  ‘Is that he was once probably a lot like you.’

 

There was an encouraging, friendly nod in my direction from parent number two.  Encouraging and friendly but threatening at the same time.  It asked me to play along.  We’ve got your number  but just play along.  But if you don’t, we will come into your bedroom at night and murder you in your sleep.

 

‘At some point, and I think that moment is right now, Mr Weeda also realised his behaviour wasn’t getting him anywhere.’

 

The Aha-Moment

I nodded along but wondered about that moment and whether it had ever taken place.  If it had, would I be able to remember it?  Would I be able to search my brain and my brain would pinpoint it.  Perhaps not with an exact time and date but as a specific moment.  You know, the moment Lady Di was killed in Paris or the moment that tsunami hit Southeast Asia.  That where-were-you-moment.  It has to have to been there, right?  You can’t go from a sulky, lazy, useless teenager with no future to a 24-year-old teacher who is respected and mature and looked at for promotion.

​

This boy’s parents were hoping again.  The moment that it all changed.  The epiphany.  Of if not one big epiphany, then a series of minor ones.  A bunch of smaller aha-I-see moments.  The right person to walk up to you at graduation, a book you read that spoke to you, a friend who was led astray to his grave detriment, a sketchy bar job, a book you started writing that no one read, the university entrance exam that - against every single odd- you managed to pass.  

 

I just couldn’t remember the moment.  My brain wasn’t cooperating.  Why wasn’t it?  Why did it feel as if I’d gone from not taking my studies seriously - ever - to living in someone else’s houses - on several occasions - to a sketchy bar job and a whole host of other sketchy jobs after? Why did it feel as if suddenly I’d ended up here?  In this chair, facing this family, looking to me for some sort of sane and sage advice about what to do with their fuck-up son.  Their screw-up son who was going to be screwing up for the foreseeable and end up, what?  Squatting, selling his body to white men in bathroom stalls, shooting up under a bridge somewhere and basically ruining his life if he continued like this?  It’s difficult to put into words how I got from that place, and especially that deplorable future, to this place.  And that’s why it is all for the best that I never became a writer.

 

We Are All The Same

I think It is probably not that difficult to put it into words.  It’s just difficult for me.  There are a number of things you realise when you start university, which is what happened to me after my drawing and poetry phase at secondary school.  After my attempts at creating short stories and after striking out with every single girl at secondary school.  At university, you realise that safety nets will eventually disappear.  You can mess about like you did at secondary school but here you’ll just get asked to leave.  You realise the world is bigger than you thought it was.  You realise that what you thought were the cleverest people in the world were probably only marginally intelligent.  The clever kids in your school, in your school - you realise that contrary to what you thought then, intelligence is definitely not finite.  There are smarter people and they will meet smarter people who will encounter even smarter people than them and so on.  You realise that in that sequence of intelligent people, your spot is fixed somewhere.  You realise that it’s the same for talent.  You realise you will meet your match in everything eventually.  They might walk past you as you’re reading this.  At university, the understanding will take shape in your head that you are not the exception to the rule.  You are the rule and the exceptions are somewhere else.  They are someone else.  

 

And maybe it’s not university.  Maybe it’s just part of becoming an adult.  About half a year before I went to uni, I had my medical check-up for the Dutch military draft.  They don’t do them anymore because the Netherlands have stopped military conscription but back in the day they got all the new 18-year-olds in one massive building for one day.  They checked the boys’ hearing, their sight, their general intelligence and for reasons unknown even to this day, where they had a foreskin or not.  Afterwards, they sent all the boys home and a letter would eventually arrive telling them their station.  The eerie thing about that day, and that which stood out for me the most, is that everyone went for his check-up a day after their 18th birthday.  This meant that everyone in the room was born on exactly the same day as me.  All of us.  A room full of boys. December 22nd, 1974.  Maybe it’s growing up that makes you understand you’re not an exception.

 

For me it was university though.  50,000 reasonably intelligent young adults in one small-ish space.  What I wasn’t good at I was bad at.  What I thought I was good at, I could point at at least one hundred people near me who were better at it than I was.  Writing was, like me, no exception.

 

It’s not like I ever thought I was much of a good writer anyway.  Not when I was a child and not after I’d turned that corner into adulthood.  It’s just that when I was a child, people would kindly and patiently indulge me.  Tell me I was good.  I mean, we do that with our children, don’t we?  I remember going to my daughter’s first choir performance.  She was four or five years old and we were either proud or filled with trepidation.  Probably a little bit of both.  I really can’t remember which.  Though whichever one it was, that performance was so earth-shatteringly shit that it made the animals in the forest commit suicide.  And the forest was 30 miles away.  Still, there we all were, all of us parents of some kind of kid on that stage.  We were all smiling from ear to ear even though only five of the assembled children were actually singing.  Even though one was picking his nose and another one was trying desperately not to wee herself.  The point I am trying to make is that when we were children, and we were trying things out, we were encouraged to try them out.  We made jewellery that was ugly and could not be worn, we played the french horn that sent the dog back into therapy, we played tennis that cost our parents a racquet and a fortune in lessons and we baked bread that even someone coming out of a hunger strike would turn their nose up to.  We were decidedly awful at everything unless, and until, we were not decidedly awful.  However, until that moment, you’d never have known we were awful at things.  Adulthood changes that.  Uni changes that.

 

Averegeness Confirmed

The first time, and subsequently the last time, I handed in some of my poetry to an English professor, I instantly wished I hadn’t.  At first, I first got that disdainful look that the highly esteemed, learned and researched reserve for undergraduates.  Undergraduates, people at the check-out, waiters and waitresses and their loved ones each time their loved ones say something that’s not articulate or intellectual.  It’s that look of disgust where they reflect on their own two decades of intensive study, research, teaching and publishing.  The look of disgust when they’re arrested by that sudden pang of underachievement.  In spite of these two decades dedicated to the noble art of higher education, they’re still having to listen and pander to undergraduates.  They still have to buy their own groceries, order their own green teas and almond milk lattes and listen to the persons they once used to love talk absolute rubbish again.  I almost forgave him the look as well. Six months ago, I’d just as much asked a friend or my nan.  It was like asking Einstein to have a look at this new prototype ring hole punch I was creating.  You know, after I’d asked the guy helpful bloke at Staples and my nan.

 

Did I know I’d made a mistake?  Not to the full extent of my mistake.  Not until I received it back a few weeks later.  Not until I’d seen the comments.  I would have gone back to secondary school, would have taken every rejection, drawn a million pictures for a million more rejections and I would have accepted a rejection on national television.  This is the boy who writes poetry hoping that girls will go out with him.  Take a good look at him!  Do not accept any poetry.  He draws pictures of dodgy saxophone players too.  If you’ve seen this boy… Do not approach this boy…

 

I should have known as well.  I should have known that no good would come of this.  The British are easily offended.  You can’t teach them about music, you can’t make fun of their Royal family, you can’t tell them football isn’t coming home, you can’t abuse their pets and you can’t criticise their literature.  They take these things seriously, so what was I expecting?  A printed banner behind an aeroplane stating how amazing I was?  A special broadcast on university radio announcing a new talent had emerged?  From the Netherlands?  Or was I perhaps expecting a short note dripping in repulsed sarcasm? Should I just have expected that?

 

The notes needn’t have been dipped and soaked in sarcasm though.  His contempt was palpable as he handed me back my work, almost in as pristine a condition as he had been when I had given it to him.  There, in the top right corner, were the succinctly and carefully worded notes that looked as if they had looked more in place with a letter F next to them. 

 

‘There are merely some of my wishes for a better world,’ he said about his comments in the margin, and as he made to leave.  ‘A more just society, a wish for those who are not at peace to find peace and for a world to keep innovating.  To strive for progress.

 

Then he turned back again and, for probably the first time ever, looked me straight in the face.

 

‘And for the untalented and incapable to generally leave me alone and not bother me.  I have read your work.  I have made an attempt.  There is nothing there.  There is no emotion, no content.  It’s a minor collection of words.’

 

I don’t know my facial expression at this point.  I don’t know if I was crestfallen or cross, defeated or disappointed, but for some reason or another, he must have felt the need to continue.  After that hammer blow, he had to strike another one.

 

‘I don’t know if it’s your level of English,’ he said.  ‘Possibly, it could be.  I don’t know if it.  Other non-English speakers have gone before you and they have delivered work that, one might argue, was not to the standard one might have wanted.  But they had meaning.  They had purpose somehow and what they wrote moved others.  It spoke to people in spite of its obvious limitations.’

 

Then he looked at my feet.  You grow up old enough and you’ll understand this is your cue to start using them.  When you’re young, like I was, you think there’s something on your shoe that someone has just noticed.

 

Thing is, whether he was right or wrong and whether he was being rude about it or helpful, within the context of where I found myself, it made sense.  I was surrounded by better writers.  I was surrounded by people who not only wrote better than I did, it was quite possible they were also developing these skills faster than I was.  Now I was told they probably wrote with more purpose, more authority and more emotion than I did.  No one questioned their reasons to write.  They were moved to it.  They were compelled to write.  There were forces at work that made them pick up a pen, a notepad, a laptop.  Forces they could not explain.

 

About My Writing

In the early days, I could now see that my writing was compelling.  Some might argue it was haunting - too haunting perhaps, led me to counselling sessions even.  As a very young writer, I had found inspiration in the formidable, gruelling, traumatic and confusing tasks set by merely growing up.  My struggles and early childhood demons had moved me and what I wrote had moved others, though the direction in which we had all moved had perhaps been slightly different.  People had taken inspiration from what I wrote but over time I’d started writing for something other than the simple passion of picking up a pen and putting down to paper what transpired in my head.  I don’t know what it was but eventually, the same mundane nothingness, the same arbitrary misinterpretation of what I thought was inspiration had led me here.

 

From that place, in the short space of a few years, I had moved to this place.  Writing for the sake of writing.  Seeking approval from a professor of English I did not know, who did not know me.  For what?  Because he’d understand what scores of teenage girls hadn’t understood?  That I was talented?  I had written for affirmation.

 

I met my limitations right here, as perhaps I should have.  I’d walked into the brick wall that is young adulthood without a safety net.  I realised that when compared to the rest of the world, it is difficult to be the exception to the rule.  In the course of time, I would learn that when compared to the rest of the world, we’re all average.  The only ones who are not average are the ones who have stopped comparing and instead became the difference they wanted to be.  That plain and that simple.

 

Still, that’s a lot of hours of soul-searching that had to take place right there.  I wouldn’t have been able to write that back in the day because back in the day, I would have been busy writing trying to impress you, some professor, some girl, some girls.  Trying to be better.  I wouldn’t have known any of the above.  I would not have been able to think the thoughts and  I wouldn’t have been able to put the thoughts into words.

 

How I got from squatting to teaching, I can put that into words now.