I’ve been feeling very uneasy about my bald comment (on the About Melanie page) that I hated boarding school. Not because it’s untrue, but because it’s heavy-handed and unsubtle. Yes, I did hate it. Being there – at any of the schools - and dreading being back there dominated and oppressed my childhood. Why?

I wasn’t bullied, I wasn’t any more homesick than anyone else at the beginning of term, I didn’t struggle with schoolwork , I wasn’t overtly rebellious (though often in some sort of trouble) and I had friends.

I couldn’t identify what it was that lay so heavily on my soul and, certainly as a child and adolescent, I couldn’t articulate it well enough to explain or make a case against going back. The nearest I got to it was ‘existential angst’ – and even my adolsecent self  knew how abstract and pretentious that sounded, and how easily it would have been dismissed!

It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I began to see that school just doesn’t suit some children. One of my girls was fine at school. She didn’t love it  but she did well and thrived. The other one didn’t. In supporting her, I had to back off and remember that her experience was not the same as mine had been, although the theme was similar: lack of autonomy, being told what to do, being misinterpreted and misunderstood .

In my own case, at boarding school, it was also never having any unstructured time on my own and never getting out from under the oppressive atmosphere  during term-time.

What I’m saying here is that people are not only unhappy because of the bleedin’ly  obvious things. And neither are children.

Filed under: Life Coaching, Uncategorized by Melanie