VITAMIN ZZZ
MIDSUMMER NIGHTS
DISRUPTING PRAYERS
Growing up, I was frequently suspended from school for one of two reasons: either fighting a classmate, or sleeping in class. I didn't fit in with the other kids, so any time I had felt insulted by what another kid said to me, it was going to be a fight. When punished for that, I didn't protest the punishment, that I understood through and through. What I didn't get was why they would punish a kid for something relatively small, like sleeping in class. For a long time, I didn't give much thought to my sleeping in class, and really I thought it would be a relief to my teachers, one less issue for them to have to deal with. It would be one less time they wouldn't have to worry about me swinging at another student. Sometimes when other students were acting unruly, it would go unchecked, so it came as a surprise to me when I got punished for being a distraction, when I thought I was minding my own business. In many cases, I had finished my classwork before it happened, so I just decided to lay down. I didn't realize that what I was doing was viewed as rebellious behavior. When I was sent home for sleeping, I felt puzzled considering that it was something I didn't choose to do, I couldn't help myself. No matter what adjustments were made to my sleeping schedule, somehow I would find myself asleep. My family certainly showed that they loved me, I didn't have a tough home life. Most of the time, I appeared to be a happy child, so that didn't contribute to my sleeping. Also, my mother suspected that the depression my father inherited from his father, and grandfather before him, might be soon passed down to me, and that threat was looming overhead like a storm cloud. When entering middle school with that storm cloud over my head, I was still a very good student, but the same two troubles in the classroom persisted. There were many core contrasts between going to the Detroit public elementary school and the private Catholic middle school, one of the differences being that you only had a certain number of fights that you could be involved in before you were kicked out. Each year that a student attended that school, the number went down until it was nonexistent and a fight would mean immediate expulsion. As the number of times I got into physical fights with classmates decreased, my sadness became more visible because I was being picked on with no way to retaliate. My prayers for them to stop would go unanswered, and I became a person who began to question his faith. continued
SUMMER 2018
53
