November 18, 2004

I'm an optimist, I told them. Change will come.

On my way out Wednesday, I saw the ROTC boy with his mother standings in the school foyer.  It seem she was driving down the street and spotted him when he should have been in class.  I watched as she made him empty his pockets and took his savings account card from him.  "You don't need that, "she said, furious.  "You're grounded.  Do you have any more money with you? "He had some change for the bus, he said.  "Give me that, too, because you have a ride home from school today." 

Of all her jobs, mom is most important!

Articles By: Tina Griego

 November 25, 2004

 It just happened to be Sherry Martinez’s day off.  Other wise she never would have been at that intersection at that time.

 She would have been behind the cash register at the discount market where she went to work after her job as a convenience store manager evaporated.  Downsizing. Restructuring.  Whatever you want to call it.  There went one of the best-paying jobs she’d ever had.

  She was driving down Federal Boulevard, trying to decide whether to go home or get groceries, thinking, as she looked out the window, “dang, look at all these kids ditching class.”

 Then she spotted him.

 “That looks like my kid,” she thought.  “Wait a minute, that is my kid.”  Her son.  Who should have been in class at North High School.  Crossing Speer Boulevard heading toward the gas station market on the corner.

 She  honked.  He kept walking.  She drove around the block, pulled into the market parking lot and got out of the car.  Then she lit a cigarette and waited.

 You have met Sherry Martinez before, readers, though you might not yet recognize her.  She’s the woman who brought her ditching son back to North High School, made him empty his pockets and then grounded him.  When I described that scene in last week’s column, I did not name either of them.  Nevertheless, he was furious.  So was she.  She told me so when she called.

 “Why did you put that in there?” she demanded.

 The main reason, I told her, was because “I wanted to show a parent being a parent.  I saw someone who cares enough about her kid to draw a line and say, ‘this is unacceptable.’  And I wanted people to see that.”

 Her anger dissolved.

 “I love my kids,” she said.  “I will always be there for them.  I will never turn my back on them.  But I do have rules and expectations, and I tell them,  ‘It’s simple.  You get up every day and go to school.’ I want my kids to get their education.  Not for me.  Because it’s one thing I can’t give them.”

 She was angry with her son, she said, because she was disappointed in him.  He is capable of so much, she told me.  She sees for him a future of choices she has never had.  She wants for him a life where the job comes with benefits and the house with a mortgage, where the furniture is not rent-to-own and the car always runs.

 He could not have understood when he walked out of that gas station door and smack into his mother’s glare that her disappointment was a complex thing.  It was not simply that of a mother in a son from whom she expected more, but of a woman watching a version of her past.

 “It was the greatest ditcher there ever was,” Sherry tells me when we meet for coffee.  She was just in middle school, an Eastsider with a troubled home life.  Her mother was 15 years old when she had her.  Her father left before she was born.

 “Why did you cut class?’  I asked her.

 “I didn’t want to be there,” she says.  “I didn’t like the teachers.  Same as any other kid.  I did go to school on cold days, but even if I was in school I was still ditching.  I would walk the halls and hide in the bathroom.”

 It wasn’t until her second semester of ninth grade at Kennedy High School, she started to get serious about studying.

 “I think it was that I started to see that there were other ways to life.  I don’t have to be on welfare like my mom.  I saw girls wearing brand-new this and brand new that, and I was wearing hand-me-downs.  I started taking account management classes at C.E.C. (Denver Public Schools Career Education Center).

  “I wanted to be an accountant, I wanted to start my own business.  I even had a job lined up from my aunt.  She’s the only one in my family to graduate from high school.  In the whole family!  I wanted to be like her.  She worked in a bank, and they were just waiting for me to graduate.  But, that day never came, and it passed me by.”

 She was 17 and living with her boyfriend, and she got pregnant.  When she told him, she says, he packed up her stuff, dropped her off at her mom’s house and left.  After her son was born, she stayed in school for six more months but then had trouble with childcare.

 “So I dropped out,” she says. “I was a semester away from graduation.”

 She has never had it easy.  She’s waited on tables, bartended, cashiered.  She was a fast-food restaurant manager for a while.  She is now married to a wonderful man, she says with a job at a screen-printing and design shop.  She’s taking tax preparation classes, her sights still set on her own business.

 “I’m trying to teach my kids that they can have futures as opposed to ‘There’s nothing out their for me.’  For some reason, my son has that in his head, that there’s nothing.  I don’t want my kids thinking they’re stupid.  I don’t want them thinking the only thing waiting for them is a life of low-paying jobs.”

 Sherry’s two daughters are honor roll students.  Her son was an A and B student in his first year at North, but he’s been drifting for some time now, and she’s not sure how to help him.  She is, like all parents, a work in progress.  She has said and done things of which she is not proud.  She has a quick temper and a sharp tongue.  Like every parent I know, including my husband and me, Sherry must occasionally remind herself that she is her children’s first teacher and all she says and does, all that can be observed by them, is also absorbed by them, and that is a fearsome responsibility.

 Sherry did not grow up in a house of hugs and kisses, and she wishes that such gestures came easily to her, that she could sweep up her children in her arms and tell them how much she loves them and how proud they have made her.

 “I don’t know how to be a mom,” she told one of her daughters not long ago.  “I’m still learning.”

 One of the raps North High School gets is that its parents are not involved in their kids’ school lives.  It’s true.  Not enough are.  Not at North.  Not at other high schools.

 But, there are moms and dads who are involved and who do care, and you have just met one of them.  And maybe when her son bows his head over the meal she is preparing for her family today, he will give thanks for that.

September 17, 2005

Looking back at this indent I was very upset after the first article was printed more so because it was true.  I felt that I was not a good parent not knowing where or what my kids were up to my son was upset that there was a reporter in his school doing a series on the students at his high school.  The day of the incident my son confronted the reporter prior to the incident and told the reporter in anger "Why did you focus on all the kids ditching?" "Why didn't you write about all the kids who go to class?"

Well, my son just happed to be ditching that day and got caught...So yes, as a parent, mom, I was truly upset...After the second article was printed and my son read it on Thanksgiving Day he realized I wasn't trying to be mean.  I only wanted him to succeed in life...I also had to re-evaluate where I stood as a parent so I was very happy when the opportunity arose where I could have an income and be home for my children.  The high school where my son attended was a bad environment for him as a student although he held a B average in the beginning the influences around him he and his grades went down hill quick.  My son with-drew and re-enrolled in the Second Chance Program at EGOP (Emily Griffith Opportunity School) he will be graduating in May of 2006 :) He also works for UPS, and has a part-time job on the weekends. He is planning to go to the Air-Bourn Infantry after graduation for 4 years.