Of the thousands of Texas State seniors receiving diplomas last week, I don’t think a one was more emotional than my son Lawrence Emmerich.
His emotions made me realize, in a profound way, just how great a mountain he had climbed and what a relief it was for him to finally reach the summit.
Lawrence was the sweetest little red headed boy you could ever imagine. We should have hired an agent and gotten him into commercials or something. He was that cute.
He loved his mom and dad and we loved him. He was a rascal, always getting into mischief, but not in a malicious way at all. He was adorable.
I’ll never forget, till my dying day, the day we were canoeing on the Black Creek and got caught in a fierce thunderstorm. I left the group to secure the canoes when the brunt of the storm hit. All I could do was hunker down under some trees on the bank and wait it out for 20 minutes.
When the storm subsided and walked back to the group, huddled under a bridge. Lawrence, about five or six at the time, saw me approaching at a distance and came running toward me as fast as his little legs could carry him. He leapt into my arms and hugged me with all his might, crying. “I thought you were dead,” he said. “I love you so much Pappa.”
As he hugged me, I realized that there would probably not be another moment in my entire life that I would be loved so deeply and intensely.
Lawrence’s older brother John taught himself to read at age three, so I was shocked to realize that Lawrence, then in the second grade, was significantly behind in his reading skills. I also noticed that he would flip words. Dog was god. Bed was deb and so on. That’s when I learned about dyslexia.
That summer I created my own phonics course and we spent every morning learning consonant and vowel sounds, followed by reading a chapter of the Hardy Boys. It was grueling, but it worked.
During that process, I realized that Lawrence had extreme difficulty sitting still and concentrating. That’s when I learned about ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Soon he was formally diagnosed. He was given medication, which I worried about, since the medication is often abused as a recreational and/or “pass the exam” drug.
My opinion aside, Lawrence hated that pill. Lord, I recall wrestling him to the ground and trying to force him to swallow it. The pill made normal people wired, but it calmed Lawrence down. That’s how you know the diagnosis is accurate.
Lawrence was in the crop of children that grew up with the first emergence of smartphones. I remember calling the cell phone company, outraged. “Do you realize all these children can access any porn in the world on these devices,” I screamed. Child lock software hadn’t even been invented.
But I did realize one thing. Lawrence wouldn’t read a book but he would text on his phone. I made sure the phone had a spell checker. For all the horrible aspects of teens and smartphones, I found at least one benefit. Texting on a smartphone helped ADHD kids learn to read.
It was a rough puberty, I kid you not. Lawrence was wild, legendarily wild. Ginny and I fought bitterly over child rearing strategy. She was all love and forgiveness. I just wanted to kick his smart ass.
Lawrence pretty much won the medication battle. It’s almost impossible to force someone as strong-willed as Lawrence to swallow a pill. He struggled mightily in school. I think it was eight schools in all before he finally got a high school degree.
I urged him not to go to college. “Nobody hates school more than you do,” I told him. But now being diagnosed with ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder), that made him determined to prove me wrong.
He was dead set to move to Austin and I was happy to let him go. He needed to be on his own and grow up.
Despite his rough teenage years, I felt confident Lawrence would succeed. He was smart, energetic and cared what other people thought. Those attributes, I figured, would eventually work together in a positive way.
I found a medical paper that analysed brain scans of ADHD teens compared to normal teens. The ADHD teens had smaller prefrontal cortexes. That’s the part of the brainmaking involved in decision making. But the good news was after four years, the ADHD brains caught up. So I just subtracted four years from his chronological years to compute his presumed maturity level. It worked like a charm.
He worked for a few years, established residency (which saved me a boatload of money) and then started going to Austin Community College. His last two years were at Texas State, a huge booming university built on a beautiful hill in San Marcos, between Austin and San Antonio, surrounded by a crystal clear river.
Later that night after graduation, we sat in the lobby of the hotel and Lawrence opened up to me about his childhood in a way he had never done before. He was so apologetic about the grief he had put me through. He talked about feeling so insecure as a child, working so hard but failing while other children just seemed to glide through effortlessly. Predictably, this led to his acting out as a way to compensate and cover up for his disabilities.
I was simply amazed at how this child of mine had matured into a kind, reflective adult who could look back on his life with such wisdom and insight.
It seemed like a miracle. There was this adorable child of mine whom I loved so dearly, who was then transformed into my teenage adversary, suddenly transformed again into a humble, reflective, mature adult.
I also realized that without Ginny, I could well have burned a bridge with Lawrence that could never have been replaced, depriving me of the joy I was now feeling and, with God’s grace, much more such joy in the future.
It is hard to be a parent. Each child is unique and they don’t come with instructions. In this day and age of overwhelming and instant communication of everything, the challenges have never been greater. Maybe that’s one reason world birth rates are dropping like a rock. It’s so hard these days.
Turn to God. Ask him for his guidance. Pray. Seek the fruits of the spirit: love, peace, joy, patience, self control, goodness, kindness, gentleness.
When my boys were young, I sat them down and read Proverbs word for word, many times. Maybe, somehow, it stuck.
The Bible doesn’t say much about child rearing. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” is not about beating your children. The shepherd uses the rod for guidance, not abuse. Paul tells us in Colossians 3:18 “Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.”
Texas State tradition is to jump in the San Marcos River after the graduation ceremony.
