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First year of high school
Hoping to keep my son (let’s pretend his name is Rasmus) amongst friends in the local area I went against my better instincts and enrolled him in the local government high school when the time came. Had my husband (Rasmus’ father) still been alive I think he would have made a better decision, but he was dead, we were grieving, and I wanted as little upheaval in Rasmus’ life as possible. This is one of my greatest regrets in life. The first year seemed to be fine. Though his grades were average, Rasmus had plenty of friends and the school was close by. I remember on his first day of school a very tall, somewhat overweight, Aboriginal girl looking at him with moonlit eyes. Later Rasmus told me she walked home from school with him every day – even though it was not on her way.
Blood-brothers
In the second year of high school everything started to go wrong. Rasmus’ grades dropped, he started wagging, some of his teachers told me they thought he was very bright but that he didn’t apply himself. He had a new best friend, another boy who, like him, had lost a parent and was part Scandinavian, part Brit – let’s pretend his name was Erik. Erik and Rasmus became like brothers for a few years. I liked Erik very much, and obviously I sympathised with him deeply. He had a low level rage about him that channeled itself in rebelliousness. I always had the feeling he would be the most normal boy in the world if he could just get a hug from his mum, but she was dead, and so the low level rage smouldered. One day he was pulled into the principal’s office and apparently he slammed the door in her face. She wasn’t injured, but she was a very short feminist and so she interpreted this as an act of violence. Erik was an overgrown child, he was well built for his age, he didn’t know his own strength yet (because it was so newly acquired), but the short feminist didn’t care about that. Personally, I never experienced any behaviour problems with Erik, but he knew I was on his side. I’m sure he could sense not only my goodwill but also my affection. He got none of that from the principal. She kicked him out of the school and Erik was never able to go to a normal school again. He spent the next few years in a school for boys with behavioural issues because no other school would take him. Erik’s dad moved to the other side of Sydney around this time and so this tight friendship gradually loosened and Rasmus lost his greatest ally at school.
Assaulted in class
A few months after Erik was forced out I got a call from the vice principal. A teacher had witnessed my son being bashed across the head by another student in class and was legally bound to report it, so she did. The student was Aboriginal and claimed Rasmus had been racist to him. The vice principal suspended the child nonetheless, probably because he was legally obliged to. The call I got suggested that although the assault was somewhat serious Rasmus in some way deserved it, because he'd been racist. I found myself apologising to the vice principal and letting him know I would be having a stern talk with Rasmus. But Rasmus swore he hadn’t been racist, that it was a made up lie. He also told me the assault had made his ears ring. I was upset and confused – why did this kid assault him then? Eventually, months later, Rasmus admitted he had referred to the boy as a “she”. I should have picked it up sooner, but it took me almost half a year to realise this Aboriginal boy was in fact the same Aboriginal girl I had seen on Rasmus’ first day of high school.
Violence will be tolerated (if the bully has the right characteristics)
The assaults continued for months. I called the school but they said as there was no proof they couldn’t do anything. I managed to get the vice principal to assure me this bully would not be put in any of the same classes as Rasmus the following year (which was not far away at the time). Even so, the new year came and they were still sharing classes together. The wagging intensified. One day Rasmus told me he his head had been knocked into a brick wall and I was able to feel a large bump on the side of his head. I called the vice principal and told them this had happened in front of other students and Rasmus now had a tangible injury, but I couldn’t name the witnesses because Rasmus wasn’t a “snitch” (to use his own term). The vice principal suggested Rasmus was lying. Rasmus told me the situation was a “PC checkmate” because the bully was both trans and Aboriginal. I didn’t want to believe him. Feeling a little desperate, I called the police but they refused to do anything, they explained it was a school matter, and that, in any case, the courts wouldn’t lock up this kid so there was no point in them getting involved. The policeman on the phone suggested to me that it would be better not to escalate the situation.
Boomers complain and get results
One night I lay in bed and just as I was drifting off I heard “Rasmus” being shouted repeatedly on the street. I got up and went to look out through the blinds, but Rasmus attempted to prevent me. He told me it was the bully from school and he didn’t want the bully knowing what I looked like. This began to happen repeatedly at all kinds of strange hours. My neighbours started to ask me about it, and I explained this was not a friend but an enemy. I explained I had already called the police and they’d been so useless I wasn’t going to try again. The name shouting finally culminated in a bizarre episode where expensive sweets, nail polish and ribbons were strewn across the driveway. Right in the middle of the chaos was a heart shaped box, and then I understood. This girl (let’s pretend her name was Lowanna) had a crush on Rasmus, but Rasmus wasn’t interested. Puberty had started early for her but Rasmus was still a kid, he had no interest in females yet. Lowanna was very dark, chubby and extremely tall. I had watched her the year earlier walking home with Rasmus (I peeped through the blinds) and had noticed how gawky and underconfident she was. At some point she had decided she was a boy and started binding her chest. Rasmus knew her too well though. He refused to accept her as a boy. I suspect she secretly loved, as much as she hated, Rasmus for that. A few months later she went back to being a girl. The driveway incident was dramatic enough that two of my elderly neighbours called the police. Apparently the cops went around to her home and gave her a good talking to. She left Rasmus alone after that.
Dolores Umbridge
With all of this going on Rasmus’ attendance at school had nose-dived. The school called me in for a crisis meeting. Everything was going rather well until the “head of well-being” came into the room. She told me that it was illegal for Rasmus to take so many days off school and that I was risking a criminal conviction by allowing it. I explained I was not allowing it. I had to go to work myself, I couldn’t physically force a kid my own height to go to school. I told her that I tried to encourage him and I had tried punishing him too. She spoke down to me, as if I were a houso, or a junkie. I could see the other school staff were uncomfortable, they could see she was ruining everything but they didn’t step in (one of them called me later and apologised, he also told me he was leaving the school soon). A cold horror came over me as this deeply stupid woman patronised and belittled me. If school staff could talk to me like this, how were they talking to Rasmus? There was nothing more to be said – I had to get Rasmus out of this school right now.
The psychiatric detour
For months Rasmus’ grandmother had been encouraging me to enroll him in a school that was not particularly close. I had looked into enrolling him in an expensive Rudolf Steiner school that I could only just afford (no other private school would take him as his grades and attendance were so poor and he wasn’t Christian) but they said they wouldn’t accept him unless I could guarantee he had no mental health problems. The thing is, I wasn’t sure that was the case. He’d been seeing a psychologist every fortnight for nearly a year but the psychologist thought Rasmus wasn’t showing any signs of improvement and recommended he be assessed psychiatrically. He referred Rasmus to Rivendell, the top specialists in the state for teenagers with serious mental health problems. The psychiatrists there assessed him over a period of months. The head psychiatrist informed me of his assessment the week I pulled Rasmus out of Nightmare High – he said Rasmus didn’t have anything wrong with him, no disorders, nothing at all. “He just doesn’t like school” was his conclusion.
A halcyon year at a new school
The only school I could get Rasmus into at short notice was the one Rasmus’ grandmother liked the look of. It was a charitable school designed for teenagers who were at risk of dropping out of education. I had initially been doubtful – it was quite far away and I suspected it might have some pretty troubled kids going there. They welcomed Rasmus with open arms and for the first year everything seemed, finally, to be on the up. His grades improved, and he was more confident. The other kids were mixed, some of them were surprisingly wealthy (the school was in an affluent area) and some of them were very poor. Rasmus became particularly fond of a boy who’d been expelled from a private school for punching another boy in the face – but this boy ended up leaving after a while because, in his words, the school was too “woke”. Rasmus was happy there though and so more than a year went by. I suspected he had a girlfriend – I saw a picture of her and she was a real beauty. Any doubts I had about the school had completely dissipated. And then the great Sydney lockdown happened.
The Sydney lockdown
At the start we were told it was just for 2 weeks. Sydney had been living mostly normally while cases soared overseas, so it didn’t seem like a big ask to me initially. Rasmus was hostile to the whole thing from the get-go. Like a good conformist I said all the things the government would like me to say to him. I spoke of the need to think about the community at large, and how it wouldn’t be for long. Then day by day the thing dragged out to 15 weeks. It was like Chinese water torture. They kept promising it would be over soon, only to extend it again and tighten the restrictions just that little bit more every few weeks. Schools were shut down, you couldn’t travel beyond a 5 km radius, or enter a shop of any kind without wearing a mask and “checking in” on a government app, so the authorities could monitor your movements (supposedly to enable contact tracing). Rasmus refused to check in anywhere and wouldn’t wear a mask. He sat in his room, unable to see his friends (they all lived more than 5 km away), with a slow rage building up, day by day, week by week, month by month. He played video games to the point of boredom and watched a lot of content by Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate (who wasn’t famous yet – I made my disapproval clear, but I think that just made Tate seem more alluring). When the lockdown was finally over and he was able to go back to school again he told me it was “no more mister nice guy” for him. He told me he’d been trying to please others for too long. That he wasn’t going to take any shit any more. He seemed so jaded, so cynical, so angry. I figured it was a phase.
Collateral damage
When he got back to school the girl I’d seen in the picture was covered in cuts. Not only her arms and legs, but her chest too. She told him she was on antidepressants now. Within months she’d gained a huge amount of weight and starting seeing older guys she’d met through social media (so Rasmus told me). One of his male friends had been vaccine injured, “my heart hurts”, he told Rasmus, and he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. I’d been feverishly reading medical reports about the covid vaccine for months and had told Rasmus he probably ought not to get it – that I didn’t think it was terribly safe for teenage boys and young men, based on the data I had seen. Even so, the government encouraged it. Rasmus didn’t take it, because he wasn’t taking shit from anyone now.
Too much tolerance
This turned out not to be a phase. His teachers and I kept expecting him to snap out of it at some point, if we were all just patient enough. His grades fell off a cliff. He lost interest in online gaming and computers in general (previously he had been rather keen on these things) and became voraciously social. At this point he was turning into a man and I was beginning to lose the close connection we previously had. I could see school was no longer a positive force in his life and encouraged him to drop out and get a trade. He refused. I sort of hoped the school would kick him out, but they liked him too much and didn’t have the bottle. They let him go right through all the way to the end, even though he barely ever attended. His final marks were very poor, not least because he suffered a severe allergic reaction to penicillin (for which he was hospitalised for nearly a week) during the exam period.
Distrust of the institutions
Rasmus is an adult now, at least in theory. He moved out more than a year ago (though I help him pay his rent – it’s very expensive in Sydney) and he has had a whole lot of adventures since then but my knowledge of them is sketchy so I won’t tell any more tales. I love him deeply but I don’t agree with his life choices (and he knows this). Over the years I have spoken to various people about how he is, and how cynical he is about the government and how society is in general. They always say “he’s right to be”, but this is from people who, like me, bought into the system at an early age. It’s one thing to become cynical in your 30s or 40s, after you have managed to find your way in life, but entirely another to become this jaded in your teens. When I was in my teens I was intensely idealistic and optimistic.
Side-effects of state ineptitude (inter alia)
I was listening to an audiobook recently called Stasiland, in which there is a story about a German woman who had been, through no fault of her own, betrayed by GDR institutions in various ways as a teenager. She tells the author she now has chronic issues with authority. She cannot even bear to be on time for anything. She can’t commit to a relationship or a job. It reminded me of Rasmus. He is hopeless with time keeping. He says he will attend a thing and he doesn’t, he promises he will next time but he won’t, then when you expect you won’t hear from him at all he suddenly turns up. He will not tolerate having any constraints placed on him by anyone. This story from Stasiland is the closest I have come to understanding why he might be like this. As with this GDR woman, government institutions f-cked him over. Of course, he is not alone in feeling that the state did him more harm than good. I have friends who had teenage daughters during the lockdown, one attempted suicide, the other became a deeply depressed recluse for years. If I’m honest these young women are not particularly well adjusted to society either. In a throwaway line the other week I made a remark about how I wasn’t sure I had been a good mother to him. Rasmus became unusually serious for a moment and told me I had been “a great mother, it’s just that I needed a father and you couldn’t be that too”. His father was very wild at his age, and Rasmus is so much like his father in some ways it is astonishing, so I try not to worry. But I do wonder how many other young men have had experiences like this growing up. I suspect they are not entirely unique, though most of their stories are untold, and I wonder ... where does a society built on experiences like these go from here?
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