Write Your Own Report Card
Give yourself a participation trophy, and make it a big one. You earned it.
Earlier this year I was going through some of my mother’s things, a stack of old cards, letters, and other papers that I hadn’t felt strong enough to go through in the months after she died. Among those papers I found an old report card of mine from fifth grade. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about it, or at least nothing that seemed to make it worthy of keeping instead of the many other report cards from my childhood. I set it aside with the old birthday cards and forgot about it.
I came across it again recently, and it was only then that I noticed the comment that must have moved my mom to keep this report card instead of others. In the section for Language Arts, my fifth grade teacher had remarked on my excellent language skills — par for the course in all of my report cards; I was a bookworm of a kid — and then stated this, on a separate line: Cathy’s imagination is absolutely first rate.
Of course my mother hung onto that. She was always the first and loudest to praise my imagination, but to see it validated in my academic record would have utterly delighted her; I’m surprised that she didn’t have it framed. That the comment might have had a critical edge to it — Cathy is always making up stories — would not have bothered her in the slightest. Of course she is making up stories, my mom would say. That’s what imaginations are for.
The woo-girl in me chooses to believe that my mom wanted me to rediscover that old report card exactly when I did. One of the hardest things about losing her has been realizing that I lost the one person in the world who would always give me top marks, straight A-pluses across the board, especially for the intangible things that report cards ordinarily don’t account for: imagination, curiosity, kindness, spirit. If I ever had a flicker of doubt about how I was doing in life, I knew that my mom would always insist that I was doing her proud in all the ways that mattered; I was her heart, she would tell me. I was smart and ambitious and accomplished, but more importantly, I was kind and curious and full of stories. I could do anything. Anything I would do would make her proud. Losing her meant that I lost that: I lost the secure warmth of her belief in the best parts of me.
But then the report card reappeared, and it did so in a moment when I was asking myself, after a year of wild learning, “how’d I do?” And — obviously — it gave me an answer. Two answers, really: one, I can write my own report cards — be the source of my own pride — now, and two, I have one hell of an imagination. I can summon my own belief in my own damn self, and have it ride in on a unicorn-shaped participation trophy.
So in the spirit of imagination and self-grading, here is my report card for myself, for end-of-term of the year 2024:
Language Arts: I always got good grades in anything to do with reading or writing, but I haven’t given myself top marks here because I performed well in these areas, but because I re-embraced my love for them and committed to it. I read for pleasure (over 50 books this year, most of them fiction or memoir)1 and I wrote for pleasure. I read and wrote things just for me, completely rejecting almost any impulse to do either of those things for any purpose beyond my own happiness and fulfillment.2 What was kind of amazing was that in doing so, I ended up reading and writing more this past year than I have in a very long time. And I wrote some good stuff. Maybe I will do something with it. A+, Catherine shows great potential in this subject.
Math: Math was never a strong subject for me, at least in grade school and high school; it’s the only subject for which I ever received a failing grade (10th grade math; in my defense this was also a year of pretty robust rebellion, and skipping most classes to go smoke and listen to The Cure probably didn’t help my grade), although that shifted somewhat when I fell in love with stats for a hot minute in college. And it’s not like math plays a particularly big role in my life now, but I’m still giving myself high marks because I turned a financially very lean year into a fine year full of discovery and adventure by mathing my own math in a way that served my real needs and also kept the lights on. Also I paid all my credit card bills in full on time and Experian says that gets you top credit score marks, so. A+, Catherine didn’t work hard and tackled the mathematical theorem that more = more.
Physical Education: I’m not a fitness girlie, but this was the year that I climbed a mountain (twice) and spelunked a cave and walked a whole bunch of miles, AND I napped a lot, which is good for my mental fitness, and those things are worth all the marks. A+, Catherine excels at napping and at sometimes walking in pretty places.
Art: We moved this year and it was brutal but it also took us somewhere beautiful, to a magical forest cabin of a home where I finally started putting up all the paintings and posters and photos that I love (so much wall space!) — a literal expansion of art in my world — but also where I watched more sunsets and listened to more music and invited people in and held story gatherings and all sorts of beautiful things that, I think, made my life more of a work of art. A+, Catherine’s appreciation of beauty improved dramatically this year.
Science: my academic field was political philosophy, but I studied it under the rubric of political science, a discipline for which I had to prove competency as a social scientist. This is something that I’ve always been proud of, and as an adult I’ve always been a little bit of a snob about analytical rigor and such, which made adjusting to the hippie-woo culture of southern California a bit of a rough ride at times. But this past year put my science side in more direct conversation with my emergent woo side than it’s ever been, and I have somehow kept the discourse not just civil, but generative. I am learning richly on both sides. A+, Catherine’s imagination is first rate.
Participation: there’s no capital-T Teacher here to remark on whether or not I was a joy to have in class (I was), but as the assigner of my own grades in 2024 I feel fully justified in giving myself all of the gold stars and a jumbo trophy for leaping into the Course of Life this year and participating with my whole heart, grief and fear and hope and love and all. I sat at the front, I stuck up my hand, I did extra credit, I wiped down the chalkboard, I played well with others. And for the first time in a very, very long time (in memory), I didn’t do any of it for the grades or the gold stars or the pats on the head. I did it for me.
And I’m so, so proud of me.
2025 is going to be another gold star participation trophy year, I just know it. I can’t wait.
Faves: Ambition Monster, Hello Beautiful, When Women Were Dragons, The Book of Love, Girls They Write Songs About, No One Is Talking About This, Educated, I Who Have Never Known Men.
There was writing that I was paid to do, so there was motivation beyond happiness, but I can say that, without exception, everything that I was paid to write (or write/speak) was something meaningful to me and brought me happiness.