Another school year down. The boys' school district finished last Friday. Today at noon my school dismissed, my first year of teaching as a Real Teacher in the books. I really do feel a little like Pinocchio: A Real Teacher, like someone waved a magic wand over my head. A month ago I felt like there was no end in sight, and yet here we are. What an adventure we’ve had.
This year I started a new job, took on an extended volunteer job within Scouting that could have been at least a part-time, 20-hour per week job, and added an extra teenager to our already busy life. Why not? What could go wrong?
Here’s why not, roared back my aging body. My immune system apparently took it as a dare. YOU WANNA SEE WHAT HAPPENS? LET’S GO, DUMB GIRL. Let’s crank up the chronic pain, a couple of funky autoimmune disorders, rekindle those migraines AND migraine associated vertigo, which will keep you barely functioning sometimes for weeks at a time. HOW BOUT DA?
So yeah. I maybe overdid it this year. But I regret nothing, let’s make that clear.
Ten months ago I noticed a brief line in a school district newsletter about foreign exchange students, and suggested to my family, hey, that might be cool, why don’t we look into it? A week later we met a darling Korean teenager at the airport at 1:30 in the morning, fresh off a flight from Seoul. He was goofy and excited and quiet, all at the same time. He spoke a formal, classroom style of English, but he spoke it pretty well. He didn’t understand American sarcasm, memes, or my dad’s terrible jokes. He didn’t really speak unless someone spoke to him, initially. But he listened quite a bit. He always seemed to be off to the side, listening, watching, quietly taking it all in. I soon learned that when he needed something he would come find me in the kitchen and kind of hover nearby, until I asked, “is everything ok? Do you need anything?” He would say “well, actually…” And then we would drive to Target to retrieve whatever thing he needed for school or soccer or personal care.
He could sleep anywhere, at any time, but especially in the car. At first I chalked it up to the time change and jet-lag, daily soccer practice workouts and a full day of school in his second language. If we drove somewhere longer than five minutes away, he'd be asleep like a baby. It became something of a joke. Oh look, he’s asleep again, on the way to a restaurant for dinner out. So cute.
I made a conscious effort to slow down my speech and avoided using slang and contractions. I asked specific questions every day when I picked him up after soccer practice, good questions that did not allow yes or no answers, to force him to talk to me. I told him about my day after he told me about his, until eventually he began to ask about my day, unprompted. I corrected his grammar or word choice, and explained why. (My inner English major loved that part.)
Sometimes I let the car fill up with an awkward silence, just to see what would happen. My theory stands, as I found with my own kids, that teenagers love to talk when riding in the car, when adults can listen but not make eye contact while driving. He didn’t have a lot of social skills at first, and he kept to himself in his room quite a bit those first few months. My own boys are introverts, they prefer their video games and laptops to group engagement, so it was fine. But we got into a rhythm as a family of five. I cooked a lot of rice in the fall, so he always had something comfortable available in the fridge. But honestly, he was the least picky eater in my house, he ate everything I put in front of him. We sat down to dinner together as a family this past year more than we have in several years, at least until spring came and everybody’s sports/activities/music/clubs schedule exploded again.
After the holidays and we went back to school in January, we hit a rough patch. My Mom attention-span got stretched a little thin. My bizarro, unexplainable, chronic pain (fibromyalgia) issues kicked in and I’m not gonna lie, it was likely stress related. I forgot things, or I got them wrong - the who what when why where part of our lives. My family isn’t used to me screwing that up so it was tough on everybody, especially me, so smug in my Supermom ego. Teenagers don’t forgive and forget easily. My kitchen became a constant scene of loud, dramatic, passive aggressive rhetorical questions: Why are there no forks? Who drank the last of the orange juice? Who ate my Poptarts? Why are there twelve pairs of shoes in the doorway? Who moved my backpack? I was supposed to take the first shower! (Hint, it wasn’t always the teenagers, sometimes it came from the adults.) Sometimes it felt like I was drowning in a sea of cranky, testosterone fueled drama, like an old episode of Real World: The Suburbs. We all got tired of each other at about the same time. I tried to tell myself maybe it was okay because all three boys were either alone in their rooms with the door shut, or arguing constantly, like bickering siblings.
This is normal, according to the exchange agency coordinator. Happens to many host families - the shine wears off. March and April screamed by, and suddenly it was almost time for end of year band concerts, dance club concerts, finals and graduation. Suddenly it became clear to all of us that our little experiment was about to end. The kids began to tolerate each other better, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. And our student friend became more and more sad, each day of May that went by, anticipating the end of this experience and life as a member of our family.
Back in August, on his first full weekend in Kansas, we went to a Royals baseball game, in part because my son's marching band was performing the National Anthem. Bookending his time here with live sports games, on his last evening in town before flying home to Korea we went to a SportingKC soccer game. We sat in the front row behind the corner kick flag, and had a blast. We took selfies with kitty noses and whiskers drawn in, and I commented “look how cute we are! I like that, it makes my face look less fat.” Actually, it's a feature, he replied. American sarcasm, achievement unlocked.
It was an amazing year. It wasn't perfect. Sometimes it was hard. I was often reminded why my husband and I had deliberately chosen to only have two kids. But seeing someone experience the life we take for granted was humbling, and I am grateful for it. I'm glad my children had a chance to see a different point of view. He played competitive soccer, read Hamlet (in his second language, can you imagine? The metaphors alone are barely understandable in English!) He went to prom, and patiently defended his beloved country to American teenagers who don’t understand the difference between North and South Korea.
Last August, I greeted an adorably awkward, foreign teenager at the airport, and brought him into my nest as one of my own.
Last Thursday morning I put a young man back on a plane to Seoul. And onward we go.
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