Critique this avuncular advice (long)

In My Humble Opinion
1

Full disclosure: this is for a story I’m working on. I’m not putting it in Cafe Society because it’s not the artistic effect of the passage in question I want feedback on: it’s the advice itself.

First, the situation. I’m working on a two-character scene involving characters I’ll call Sammie and Lee. Lee is the story’s protagonist: he’s a 14-year-old boy, an only child being raised by a single mother whose husband died when Lee was about 8. Lee is a good kid, responsible beyond his years and quite bright, particularly at recognizing patterns and when it comes to mechanics; show him how to rebuild a carburator once, and he’ll sop it off almost immediately and master the process lickety-split. Nevertheless, he has two major (and related) problems. One, he has a great deal of difficulty and is all but illiterate, probably due to a learning disability. I write probably because of his second problem: his mother, Liz. She has pigeon-holed her son as retarded, discounting his mechanical aptitude, she has for years told her son that math and reading are too hard for him, that failing a grade in school is acceptable because Ds and Fs are all he is capable of–that he is, for lack of a better word, slow. Accepting his mother’s opinion of him, Lee lacks self-confidence and frequently describes himself as stupid.

Enter Sammie, a friend of Lee’s father’s who takes a job at his school, teaching wood shop–a class Liz did not want him to take, because she fears he will somehow hurt himself, because he is, after all, “slow.” Seeing the plight his old friend’s son is in, Sammie tries to be a positive influence; but his job is only temporary, for one semester, after which he must leave the city in which Lee lives. Thus his prime aim is to help Lee become emotionally autonomous; he believes he shouldn’t let the kid think of him as a father, because, come June, he’s gone.

Now the point of the post. At one point in the story, Sammie and Lee are driving across the state, late at night. Lee asks Sammie whether he should try to sign up for the auto shop class the next year; rather than explicitly tell him what to do, Sammie tries to guide him down a logical path so Lee will see his is more than capable of handling the class. This conversation leads to a discussion about Liz, and Lee asks Sammie what he thinks he should do about both issues.

All of which leads here:

[QUOTE=Finally we get to damn point! Geez, Skaldimus, learn to SUMMARIZE!
]
Lee nodded. Then, taking a deep breath, he said, “What you think I should do?”

“I think you can decide about the class for yourself,” Sammie replied. “But don’t make your choice from fear, or anger, or even from hope. Make it from – I don’t know – prudence, I guess. I mean you should figure out what you need and what you know, and then choose the course of action most likely to get you where you need to be.”

“And what about – what about the other thing?”

Sammie took a deep breath of his own. Then he said, “You should let your mother go.”

“You-- you mean stop loving Mama? But – but --”

“No! Of course not. You can’t do that. I wouldn’t tell you to if you could. But you have to let her go. The thing is – your mother’s words are like blinders. You have to take them off. You have to learn to see the world – to see yourself – through your own eyes. Not your mother’s, not mine, not even your father’s. That’s what men do. That’s what you have to do. You have to become a man at fourteen.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

“I do know. You can.”
[/QUOTE]

What do you think of Sammie’s advice, and why? Should he be more blunt? Should he be more oblique? Should he keep his nose out of things entirely?

Thanks in advance.

2

Has Sammie discussed with Lee his disagreement on Lee’s mother’s opinions prior to this? Has Sammie explicitly given Lee evidence to dispute his mother’s opinions and observations? Has Lee given any indication that he is emotionally ready or willing to divorce himself from his mother’s opinions?

If you can’t answer “yes” to all of those, I think that Sammie would be better off spending his time pissing up a rope than getting Lee to take off his mother’s blinders - it would be more effective, and less messy in the long term. I can see his desire to help, but the fact is that he simply isn’t going to be there when the emotional independence gets tough - he can’t give Lee support or logic when he needs it, and so the idea of Lee trying to escape his mother’s view is very likely to backfire. She’ll see her “slow” son doing things that will end up (in her view) hurting him, and will act as most mothers would: to protect him. He’ll end up, at best, right back where he started - because 14-year-old kids don’t get to abandon their parents’ views on things; at least, not without some outside (hopefully adult) support.

If all the circumstances are in place, he has all the ammunition he needs, and he’s got his own emotional support system strong enough to replace his mother and withstand her understandable upset at being displaced, he’s got a chance. Without all those things, he’s fucked - and Sammie would be doing him a favor not to set him up for failure.

3

Yes. The scene I’m planning here is the critical scene of the story; Sammie’s been working to build Lee’s belief in himself all through the story, and Lee has been growing to see himself as more than the supposedly-retarded kid his mother tells him he is. This conversation isn’t the first time Sammie has said, “Lee, you’re an extremely bright kid who can do anything, and you have to stop listening to people when they call you a retard.” It’s the first time he’s said, "You have to stop listening to your **mother ** when she calls you a retard.’

I understand the theory there, but I have a problem with it anyway. It’s not so much that Lee has no one else in his life who believes in him; it’s that no one has yet had the nerve to tell him that the millstone around his neck used to breast-feed him. “Setting him up for failure” is what Liz thinks people are doing when they encourage Lee to try to learn to rebuild carburators over the summer; she thinks he should just sweep up hair in a barber shop.

4

Given both those things - that Lee is coming to understand that his mother’s view is not correct, and that he has an emotional support system outside her that will help him through the transitional period - I think Sammie’s advice is pretty damned good. I, personally, would be more blunt; if I am going to give offense, might as well do it in a singularly effective way. That may or may not fit the characterization, though, so I think it’s an artistic call more than a practical one.