A Broken Boy

I was 9 years old when my parents sent me to boarding school in England. I would spend the next seven years there, far from home, struggling academically, enduring the teasing of other boys and counting the days until I could leave. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined where my life would eventually take me. I only knew how that young boy felt: frightened, lonely and, in many ways, broken.

Nearly 50 years later, I tried to put those feelings into words in a poem I called A Broken Boy, see the  comments section.

It’s hard to fathom that during those seven years, I spent far more time at boarding school than I did at home. With a few short-term breaks and a longer summer vacation, we had about 12 weeks each year with our family, leaving roughly 40 weeks at school. Fortunately, a few close friends occasionally took us home with them on weekends, giving us a welcome escape. When I say “we,” I’m including my twin brother, Nicholas, who shared those seven years with me.

In 1977, Nick and I finally returned home to Maryland and enrolled in high school. Our credits from boarding school would have allowed us to skip 11th grade and go directly into 12th, but our parents felt an extra year would give us time to adjust.

Academically, high school seemed easy compared with the English school system, and socially I wasn’t intimidated. In fact, our English accents created a certain fascination among our classmates. I made several close friends, some of whom remain friends to this day.

More importantly, the teasing stopped.

And every afternoon, I got to do something that had been impossible for most of the previous seven years: I went home.

Looking back, I don’t think I appreciated how important that simple routine was. Home gave me something I had been missing for much of my childhood: a sense of security and belonging. I could close the door on school at the end of the day and be myself again.

Slowly, things began to change. My grades improved. I continued working hard at school and at various part-time jobs. I made friends. Most importantly, my confidence began to return. Perhaps I wasn’t the academic failure I had come to believe I was.

In 1979, I started at the University of Maryland. I lived off campus for my first couple of years, but after my parents’ divorce was settled, my father moved back into our house and asked me to join him. I immediately said yes.

There’s an interesting symmetry to that decision that I only recognize looking back. The poem I would write years later described home as the place where I felt safe. Now, as a young man, I was choosing to go home again.

During my final year at Maryland, something happened that the 9 year old boy at boarding school would never have imagined: I made the Dean’s List.

I was glowing.

It was a resounding YES moment: I can do this.

Life moved on. Nick and I eventually started a landscaping business and spent more than two decades building it. We sold the company, and I was fortunate enough to retire at age 55 with financial security.

But that’s not how I measure what happened to the broken boy.

I found lasting friendships. I regained confidence in myself. I learned that struggling in one environment didn’t mean I was incapable of succeeding in another. Eventually, I found love and built a family of my own.

Perhaps most importantly, I came to understand something that nine year old boy already seemed to know when I wrote the poem years later: the importance of having a place where you can simply be yourself and know that you are loved.

If I could sit beside that frightened boy today, I’d tell him something I couldn’t possibly have known then.

We did it.

We made it through the hell. We became stronger. The bullies didn’t get the final say. There would be good friends, a successful career and financial security. There would be an amazing husband and a family I love.

And there would be home.