Being a Mentor

Growing up, I saw all the prototypical mentors in the stories I read: there was Merlin, who was mysterious and grouchy, and who Arthur didn't always trust, or listen to.  There were hundreds of ones just like Uncle Jesse from The Dukes of Hazzard, Hannibal from The A-Team and Devon from Knight Rider, all being less impulsive, more experienced and more insightful than the heroes.  There was Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid, who was grouchy and mysterious and made Daniel LaRusso do all kinds of work, apparently for no reason, but was really training him to be amazing at karate.  There was Ben "Obiwan" Kenobi, who manipulated and drew Luke Skywalker into a conflict with the Empire, in an attempt to help undo the mess Kenobi had himself helped make, yet not being honest with Luke about it.  There were Splinter and Yoda, (and Chiun from Remo Williams: The Destroyer) who were similar to Mr. Miyagi again.  The X-Men had Professor Charles Xavier, who was the voice of reason and wisdom.  On the live action TV show Shazam!, Billy Batson had a mentor named Mentor to mentor him, and also got weekly cryptic advice from Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Apollo and Mercury.  In Lord of the Rings there was Gandalf, who was also a bit manipulative, failed to tell everything he knew, and had that habit of taking off when he might be most needed.  After I grew up there was Dumbledore in Harry Potter and even Haymitch in The Hunger Games.  Flawed mentors, for flawed heroes who needed someone.  Most of them had beards.

   So I wanted a mentor.  I wanted someone with secret knowledge.  Someone who'd be able to live my life much better than I, for whom my struggles wouldn't be so impossible to deal with.  I wanted someone who, instead of fleeing from my questions, gave me not only answers, but better questions.  I went and tried asking questions from the old guys at bible conferences, and to a man, they never gave me anything that made me think.  They either repeated stuff I'd heard a thousand times, but which didn't seem quite on topic, or they said something pretty obscure and random, which also didn't seem on topic.  None of them seemed to have really lived.  Not enough to be able to give me much of anything, in terms of what problems I had.  They'd all "stuck with the Meeting" culture, and it had given them wives, "Christian" jobs, weekly schedules, national Brethren recognition and so on.  That just wasn't working for me, though.   All they seemed able to do was tell me not to doing anything differently than they had.  Not a single thing even a tiny bit different.  They seemed to actually believe that their attitudes and methods were going to work out well in the 80s and 90s.  I tried them. They didn't. I really wanted a mentor even more, though.

   Of course there was Luke.  But he mostly was just undoing Plymouth Brethren assumptions.  Trying anything else.  Devil's Advocate-ing.  It wasn't that he knew how I should be me.  It was that he knew how to be not-what-we-were-expected-to-be.  And that was terribly useful to me.  Helped unhitch me from that wagon.  But what about something else?  Dare I say something "positive"? What about making a life that worked for me, straight paths for my feet, following Jesus rather than my church?  Luke also developed a rather unfortunate hobby of collecting empty bottles.  And ultimately he didn't have a clue about how I should best be me, of course.  No one did.  They just told me not to do anything different from how they'd do it.  That's how life is. And if you look very closely at all, you pretty much always find that people's advice simply boils down to "do what I did/don't do stuff I wouldn't do."  The whole "If I were you..." part is where it falls down.  Because that's too much of a leap. What would it be like for them to be me?  For one thing, they'd want what I wanted and have no better clue than I did about making it work out.

   And the thing is, mentors are for the very young.  For people just starting out in the world.  People who find life isn't exactly what they'd been told to expect. People whose first attempts don't work out well.  Once you start to really live an adult life, though, to a large degree you  really just have to do it yourself.  Unless you've made a major trainwreck of things and seem unlikely to be able to pick yourself up and carry on, you should probably just get through it and not let anyone else "drive."  You have to hope you've been given some kind of solid foundation from which to spring off, or that you've learned exactly what stuff you don't want to do anymore.  You know, given where it all got (or didn't get) your parents and friends, your past self and so on. 
  To make stories work, normally fictional mentors die at the most dramatic and convenient moment.  Because you don't want them around when it's time for someone to be a hero.  Can't be a hero while clinging to one's mentor.

   Years ago, I took kung fu.  The head of the school would come in, and there'd almost be a sharp intake of breath.  All the silly teenage guys who'd been joking around about girls and drinking and so on, immediately got quieter and a little more serious, and were respectful and tried to not do anything he'd not like.  One time we went to his house.  In his own house, he was just a doting middle-aged father of an infant daughter, with a young wife who wanted him to carry heavy things around for her, and who didn't have all that much money.  Just a quiet, painfully shy, rather bumbling, slow thinking, tall, stooped, grey-haired Italian guy.  At the kung fu school, though, he was the best at everything.  No one was as good.  He could block or divert anything.  Without you really seeing him move a muscle or tense up at all or anything.  Casual fluidity.  Didn't need speed, even.  It was all so easy for him.  Everyone deferred to him.  No one would have let him carry anything himself.  No one went through a door in front of him.  They waited for him to speak before speaking.  His awkward, quiet shyness came across as mysterious wisdom and a hesitance to speak rashly.  It was incredible.

  I've been a teacher for some time now.  In my classroom, I am in my own tiny place of power.  What happens in my classroom revolves around words and stories, ideologies and writing and things like that.  Stuff I know about.  I make sure of it.  And it's not hard for me to seem mentor-like in there.   They don't call me "sifu" or "sensei" or "master" or even "sir" (well, except this one girl who probably calls her dad "sir") but I am good at almost anything that might happen in there.  And it's all easy for me, that stuff in my room.  Outside of there, I'm just me, of course.  But in there...

   And there's distance.  That's important.  If some kid wants to be my friend, add me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, jam with me on music, hang out, go out for coffee, I keep a boundary up and I don't do any of that at all.  Not while they're in high school.  And when a student flirts, that boundary is definitely going to be up again.  I do not flirt back or even really acknowledge what she's (or occasionally, he's) doing.  That would be ridiculous.  I am "other."  Mentors are asexual.  That's very important.  And mystique and distance are good.  When kids see us teachers at Macdonald's or Wal-Mart, they feel confused or gleeful, and report it to everyone like they saw Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster there, like they saw us and we were just usual.  How odd for them, that must have been.

   As a teacher, I can know things and guide and dictate, and give instructions and so on.  I have the control, for that hour, in that room.  I decide what I think other people should do.  I decide what would be best for them, what would help them learn.  Because that's all I'm doing in there.  Not a single other thing. Their interaction with me is wholly and only about them learning stuff.  Growing in their skills.  Maturing.  In a very real way, it's not about me at all.

   And sometimes, outside of my job as a high school teacher, younger people confide in me, and want advice and so on.  This world is full of people with really dark stuff that's happened, or is happening still, and who find churches, Guidance departments and such places aren't chock full of people who can genuinely handle dark stuff.  I can handle dark stuff.  More than most people.  More than most pastors and guidance counsellors, certainly.

   But you can't be a friend and a mentor.  Not really.  Being a friend is equal, and personal and close.  Being a mentor is the opposite.  Being a mentor allows for control.  It's you helping them.  It doesn't really go both ways.  You keep much of yourself in reserve.  You control what flows out, and it flows out because you think it will help make points, not just to answer their idle curiosity.   And your interaction is about them getting stronger, getting their lives in order, moving on from past crap, freeing themselves from some tangle-y things and starting out on various new ventures.

   But when that last, good stuff starts to really happen, a change happens: they move on.  In school, kids graduate.  That's good.  That's the point.  They move on from the school and your class, and whatever good you might have been helping bring about, is done now.  It's memories.  You don't get to help more.  You're no longer what you were to them.  You receded into their past and become a memory.
    And then some of them have been out of school, you find, for years.  Some of them you meet later.  And it's probably time for people in their 20s to stop calling you "Mr." even if that's weird for them at first.  Suddenly the guy who had to hand things in when you said, or format papers like you'd asked, has been studying psychology for two years and needs to correct something you just said, or put a more informed spin on something you tend to say in the classroom.  Or the girl you gave a lecture to about her writing is telling you something about essays at university that you don't know about and you have to listen and thank her.  It's pretty cool, actually.  Humbling, of course, but always cool.
   Of course there's also the end of things where, they graduate, they send you a Facebook friend request, the acceptance of which shows you daily in your newsfeed that they seem to be drunk and partially clothed all the time at school, and (worse yet) using the most appalling grammar, spelling and punctuation.  And you shouldn't say a thing about any of that. It's not your place anymore.

   And in terms of Christian stuff, when you are talking to a teenager or young adult who's "troubled," there should also be a boundary there, too.  If you're going to be some kind of mentor, anyway.  Sometimes ex-students need some advice.  And church people.  (I'm not terribly impressed by churches' handling this kind of thing.  I tend to 'catch their missed balls' far too often to be terribly impressed.  And I think what I consider "dark" and what chirpy church folk consider dark just might be two very different things.) 
   As a mentor figure, you can decide pretty quickly that maybe you really do know better about something a troubled person is quite conflicted about than they do, and you may decide you can advise troubled people what to do, tell them that you don't think what they're doing will work, and all of that.  You can be pretty opinionated.  Pretty Dr. Phil.  "And how's that workin' out for ya?"  You can refuse to answer questions.  You can reserve judgment. You can give what you feel are better questions.  You can be as reticent, grouchy and enigmatic as Yoda, without really meaning to.  You don't need to explain yourself very often, either.
   You can be watching troubled people's actual repeated, patterned actions, and reading into them far more than their words and intentions.  You can easily have more years of experience and far more objectivity and outside perspective on what is clearly a pretty confusingly claustrophobic thing for that person.  And you can get pretty protective and fond.  And quite proud.  You can really cheer for people like that.  Those paternal instincts are pretty deep.

   But there is a time when that person doesn't need a mentor any more.  The better job you do, the sooner you may be able to make this time arrive.  He or she doesn't need a mentor any more. He or she doesn't need you, in fact.  And you feel that.  In fact, he or she absolutely needs to stop needing someone in precisely the way they may have needed you for a time.  
   Then it's time to let people like this go, in terms of asking too much about the specifics of how they are living, throwing in your own two cents, and asking if they're fixing stuff that they'd screwed up and were once confiding in you about, and things like that.  Now you have no place prying.  You have no soap box to pontificate from.  You're done.  No more second-guessing their intents and insights and plans.  No more "giving them something to think about."  No more Yoda.  No more Gandalf or Mr. Miyagi.  No more Devil's Advocate.  No more.  You are a memory.  You need to become past tense.

   Sometimes, you may later end up friends.  And that's pretty cool.  But most often, they get their life problems sorted out and you're quite simply part of the past.  You don't get to come along on the next leg of the journey any more than you get to go to college with the graduating kids.

   I have often been very insulted and hurt when I felt I had, for a couple of years, poured heart and soul into someone who was having a hard time in his or her life, doing long phone calls and email stuff, wracking my brain over the pickles he or she frequently found him or herself in; agonizing over every defeat and setback, and rejoicing when I saw growth I could finally accept as the Real Deal, and maybe even a Game Changer.  Sometimes I've been completely shattered when that person and I had a falling out, or they simply moved on to a new phase of life, and kind of awkwardly broke off what had been a very close, regular interaction, to go live that.  Treated me like an embarrassing thing from a past bad time.  Not inviting me to things one might have expected to be invited to.  Like weddings. 
   I have been a bad mentor and have not known how to handle all that.  Not wanted to stop mattering.  Not wanted to become obsolete.  Not wanted to be left standing there alone.  But that stuff happens anyway.  And it's good.  Except for the being left standing there alone, all the time.

   Chicks grow up to fly the nest.  That's what they're supposed to do.  If you've splinted broken wings or fed them with an eyedropper, and some have died anyway and others have flown away and you have never see them again, you need to be wise enough to not be shattered by this.

   May I learn to deal with that.  To be wise about being, perhaps, a temporary source of temporary wisdom.  A trellis for ivy to creep up.  Training wheels on a bike.  Wax on, wax off.  Trust your feelings.  I sense much fear in you.  Many that live deserve death and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? All that.