Read Baby Steps for Free Online

the system or refused to try. I’d had my brain tested and retested, my IQ tested, my stress level tested by how tightly I gripped a pencil during a test. I’d taken handwriting tests and psychological tests and stared at shapes and geometrical patterns, and I’d spent countless hours with the school counselor. When they at last offically pronounced me extremely smart but extremely angry and hurt, they said I needed to be in a place where I could get the attention I was lacking. They said I was acting out from an emotional place, and they were not equipped to handle that. They said I was out. Thelast two weeks of middle school, I was not allowed to go back on school grounds.
    My mother did everything she could to give me the tools to deal with our family trauma and my own anger. I’d been in therapy since I was eight years old, even before the divorce, to help me deal with the verbal violence I witnessed regularly from my parents and the gradual disintegration of our family unit. I’d spent years attending an ashram in upstate New York with my mother—it was my summer camp—wearing saris and participating in rituals and attending self-help programs, first for kids and eventually, for teens. But the simple fact was that her efforts to “fix” me weren’t working, according to the system. I was failing every single class. I wasn’t making it. I was choosing not to make it. That was the final determination.
    I remember the moment when I asked my shrink if I could read the court-ordered analysis that the public school required in order to boot me out. He should never have let me read it, but I did. It contained everything, every gory detail of my past and my parents’ breakup, including details I didn’t even know or remember. It was a War of the Roses story, full of volatility and emotional violence, and it had my mother written all over it: unchecked expression spewed across the pages, my mother imposing her experience on me yet again, making it mine instead of allowing me to have my own. And the details—details that painted a picture far more difficult than I’d imagined. Details of private things that government officials and school officials had now read: exhaustive accounts of my parents’ fights, my embarrassing reactions to their fights and their therapy, and some things I barely believed could be true. I could feel the tension building inside of me as I read, until finally I threw the papers onto the floor, climbed up on the couch, and screamed at the top of my lungs:
    â€œYou liar! I hate you! I hate you all!”
    Then I collapsed on the floor and wept. It wasn’t my best moment. My heart had been broken into a million pieces. It was quite a display, I’m sure, but my emotions were true and I couldn’t argue with their final verdict: I didn’t fit in. I was too damaged. I was too “complicated.” They could not educate me. I needed more than they could give. A judge had ordered it: I was done.
    When I recovered and my mother came to take me home, we had a serious discussion. She didn’t judge me. She didn’t shame me. In fact, she understood completely, and she probably felt responsible. But I was still years from graduation, so I had two options. I could drop out, take my GED, and we could travel the world together. “The world would be your classroom,” she told me. “But I need to be honest with you. For the rest of your life, you’ll always know you didn’t finish high school, and people will judge you because of that. You’ll always be like an outsider looking in. You’ll always know you gave up.”
    Or, she told me, I could go to private school.
    The problem with private school was that, based on my academic record, the only schools likely to accept me were schools for juvenile delinquents. There were options. We browsed them and visited several. There was the posh $16,000-a-year