370-379: Education. A Mother's Reckoning, by Susan Klebold

Where would you shelve a book by the mother of one of the most notorious school shooters in American history? Is it a book about parenting? Is it about mental illness? Is it a true crime story? Nope, turns out it's a book about a high school, one whose greatest claim to fame is the number of people injured and killed in one horrible incident, and it can be found right between books about why to homeschool (yes, fear of violence is a factor) and about how to get into college.

There are so many reasons NOT to read this book. From before the first page, you know how it's going to come out. Even if you are interested in memoirs of grief or of mental illness, you know this is the worst one you will ever read-- a memoir of a grief that also bears guilt and of illness that wreaked havoc. In almost any category, Klebold and her story are outliers.

It's not an easy book to read-- or listen to, in my case. But, if my original motivation was partly morbid curiosity or some sense of the twisted satisfaction that comes from knowing that someone else's life is worse than yours, I quickly realized that there was much more I could learn from Klebold's experiences.

It's always been very difficult to be a parent and very difficult to be a child because relationships are difficult. But somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, psychology and religion agreed that there are formulas that will guarantee you success with your children, that if you did the right things they would "come out," as if they were cakes, and that if you yourself did not seem to be a successful human, it was because your parents hadn't followed these formulas. The interesting thing was that, although everyone agreed a formula existed, no one could agree on what the formula was. Poor Klebold followed one formula-- family night, organized sports, parental involvement, good schools, nice neighborhood-- and it worked for every other kid at Columbine who didn't shoot up the place.

The story of Columbine is the story of 90's kids raised by this formula, and of their paranoid parents and teachers. It's the story of intruder or lock-down drills (a weird practice that continues to this day), of disaffected, attitudinal white suburban boys (is there any other kind?) being packed off to psychiatrists and counselors by the thousands, of MySpaces and basement places being searched and stalked because what kind of parent doesn't know there are pipe bombs and NeoNazis in their house?!!? In reading this book, I remember why I did some of the weirder things I did, and why my friends still thought I was slacking. It almost makes me long for the Cold War, when we kids hid under our desks to protect ourselves from the Atom Bomb. At least we were hiding from a theoretical enemy, not a theoretical heavily armed friend!

In response to all that paranoia, Klebold's insistence that she was an engaged parent, that she did talk to her kids, that she knew their friends, that she took every reasonable precaution, reinforces what a lot of us discovered: teenagers are very, very good at dissembling, and we, no matter what we would like to think, are crap lie detectors. She cites a study, which I can't track down now, wherein parents, policemen, and customs officials were called in to discern whether 4-year-olds were lying about having done something they had been told not to do. The parents got it about 50% of the time... the trained professionals, less. The policemen and customs officials did worse than blind chance in discerning the truthfulness of four-year-olds.

It's not easy to tell when someone is being truthful. Pretending that you are okay and hoping someone will notice that you're actually not is a fool's game, but it's one teenagers play all the time. Unfortunately, in Klebold's case, the results were deadly, because for Dylan, linking himself to his psychopathic friend Eric and walking into a school with a gun was the best way for him to be sure that he would be successful in ending his own life.

This is where Klebold ends up-- as a member of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. She believes that if she had understood that her son was suicidal-- if she had read his journals and gotten even further up in his face when he seemed discouraged and grilled him about his relationship with Eric-- she might have been able to save his life and the lives of his victims. But I don't know. Part of what makes mental health issues so difficult is that those who are struggling with them so often can't accept that help is what's needed or don't believe that help is really going to be helpful.

A Mother's Reckoning didn't really seem like a book about a high school. But maybe it is a book about being a high schooler.