HSC, Mark three

The Higherr School Certificate is fast approaching. After two sons have been through the trials and tribulations, I thought I had a plan to deal with the oncoming stress of son number three. Previous pandemonic outbursts of the older two examination candidates were just a distant memory and I was convinced that with my increasing maturity and the passage of time, I could handle anything son number three would throw at me. Alas, I was wrong. I now realise that each child behaves differently and that rather than diminish, the level of conflict has risen to fever pitch.
You see, Z is idiosyncratic. He does weird things and now as the pressure is on, he has become more demanding. For example, today he told his brothers and I not to walk on the kitchen floor as it disturbs him while he is studying below. Woebetide anyone who fails to take the hint. He will scream from the room down below using expletives about how we don't care about his ongoing stress. So we have begun wrapping rags around our feet to minimise our foot fall lest he turn on yet another tirade.

He seems to take particular pleasure in torturing me. I am the brunt of his invective which knows no bounds. I am told by my appeasing partner that we have to understand that the young thing under extraordinary stress that his regular wanderings around the house wearing his hoodie tightly over his cranium, in a new version of learning. Apparently it is now the case that whole essays must be committed to memory and therefore in order to focus his attention he shuts out all extraneous sound or light, in his relentless pursuit of excellence.
We have tried telling him to relax, to go for a walk or have a massage, but he responds with a grunt explaining that there are only 216 hours left until the big day and that he cannot waste even 20 minutes on frivolity.

My wife has begun feeding him at his desk so that he is not wasting time joining us at the dinner table. She searches for delectable morsels far and wide, that will entice his jaded taste buds and turns on anybody who inadvertently eats what she has prepared for him.

To be sure, the house has become almost uninhabitable. Z moves from room to room like an invading marauder, usurping desks, floorspace and computers as he searches for new and untouched areas to spread his notes and textbooks. Soon tiring of one room, he will annexe another. Last week he moved out of the house altogether to his grandmother's and we were relieved. But now he has returned and the clock is ticking. I plan to move to his grandmother's in the vain hope that I can avoid any more confrontations with the wildebeest that has become my previously charming son.
My fondest hope is that by mid-November when all of this madness is over he will recover its previously adorable personality and we will be able to talk again without my blood pressure and pulse rate rising.

Please please, spare me any more final high school examinations. Set me free from the pain, the ignominy and the nagging fear that he may be right. The final examinations in 2010 are infinitely more complicated than they were in 1969 and I am a stupid loser, like he says.