With the school year steaming on the horizon, the coming work reminds me again of the honeybees inhabiting a corner of my yard. The bees continue their labor and, despite feeling paternalistic and important to the colony, I feel the bees' annoyance with my presence. I consistently want to help my hive, but they toil without my direction, without my input.
High school teachers know that oftentimes teenagers brush off parental assistance in similar fashion. It doesn't take much thought to link the hive to the coming semester.
Two summers ago, the bees swirled in a figure-eight pattern above the hive and darted south. I stood in the backyard watching them, standing square in the middle of their highway feeling them whiz by my head on their journey to forage pollen and nectar. One of my wife's chickens pecked at my right calf and I absently scooted it away with my foot.
Men are easily mesmerized by work completed in a seemingly effortless way. We stare at sprinklers like idiots and spit into campfires like 12-year-olds for that very reason.
Bees are like that. They fill their six-week life span working for the colony in ways that seem frenetically effortless. They start as little larvae within those beautiful hexagonal cells until nurse bees seal them up in waxen catacombs. Later, the young bees chew their way out to start their life's work. All the while, they move in a tireless rhythm.
My naiveté pushed me into the bee highway. It pushed me into handling them without respect until, in a hold-my-beer-and-watch-this moment, I showed off for a friend. Dressed in shorts and T-shirt, I lifted the top cover to expose the hive's bustling community. Four bees shot out, stinging my arm in a neat little line. We ran into the house as the guard bees flew in a taunting circle outside the kitchen window. Other than our panting, the only sound was the sarcastic chuckling of our wives.
I finally left the bees alone. Other than occasionally feeding them sugar water, I didn't disturb their progress. I had my doubts about their success and wondered if I'd get any honey out of the hive at all. I thought I should move the frames around or maybe move the hive to more sunlight. A few ants marched toward the colony one day and I rigged some buckets of water to protect it. Like the parent of a high schooler, I wondered about the final product. Shouldn't I do more?
It's not that parents shouldn't be involved or offer guidance or be a constant within a high schooler's life. However, when parents map every move, a child gains no satisfaction in figuring it out and, worse, no experience to draw from as an adult. In a world beset by a generation of anxiety, high school teachers know that helicopter parents, in an effort to ease their own anxiety, often cause more anxiety within their children. This anxiety is because the freedom to fail or succeed by soon-to-be independent hands has been completely squashed.
I made plans to use the long Labor Day weekend to harvest the honey, if there was any. Dressed in my white beekeeping jumpsuit, I looked like an angelic mechanic and my wife chuckled as she asked, "Changing the car oil?" I didn't laugh.
"Kids, come look at Dad. He's selling ice cream today."
I zipped on the veil.
"Never mind. He's joined the space program."
I turned and heard her camera clicking as I walked out the door.
Sweating, I opened the hive and pulled the frames one by one, gently smoking the bees off them and placing each frame in a tub. They felt heavy. A few of the combs were irregular, oddly shaped. They weren't perfect, but they had some heft, they had substance.
About 40 pounds of pure honey glistened in the collection tub. My kids thought we should call our endeavor Hillcrest Honey Company after our neighborhood, but a quick Internet search found that name taken. A couple days later, I visited the sweet lady who called herself Hillcrest Honey and she showed me her company headquarters in an immaculate basement complete with Hillcrest Honey banner and rows upon rows of jars. She had four hives: John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Kindly, she gave me honey to take home and I dabbed it with my finger. It had the sweetness of an angel's tear. Obviously, she's a really good beekeeper. Like a parent, I mentally compared my hive to hers. It made me wonder if mine was good enough.
Settling on the name Midtown Honey, my kids helped me devise a logo featuring our house. My wife wanted the logo to be me in my floor-length beekeeping suit, and I told her she wasn't funny. Midtown Honey produced 40 neatly stacked jars of honey. The honey was amber-colored, darker than I had imagined, but the taste was incredible. We gave the jars away as Christmas presents and stashed a few to get us through the year. The whole process brought me back to teenagers.
Raising a teenager involves a lot of guidance and the constancy of love. It also involves taking a step back and letting the process unfold. We should always protect them from danger, but never doubt their ability to succeed. Yes, they will be irregular sometimes and will surprisingly deliver some stings, but that's part of the maturation process. Eventually, teenagers find their pace, their purpose, their own highways. While the process is infuriating sometimes, it's still the best way to develop heft, to develop substance.
It's still the best way to taste the sweetness of life.
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Steve Straessle, whose column appears every other Saturday, is the principal of Little Rock Catholic High School for Boys. You can reach him at sstraessle@lrchs.org.
Editorial on 07/28/2018