Back to school and Homework
I have two beautiful children that I love more than the world. They keep me grounded, make sure my blood pressure spikes daily, and ensures that I contemplate different ways of escaping undetected. The bathroom is no longer a safe hideout. They just sit on the other side and talk as if I’m not trying to find a moment of peace. I love them, don’t get me wrong…but they’re eleven and nine.
The boy is in that pre-pubescent stage where everything is awful. Which gives me the honor of being on the top of the list. I don’t understand anything. Apparently, when I was eleven, life was easy and I couldn’t possibly grasp how things are for him. His sister is the most annoying person on the face of the earth and they have found a new way of irritating each other through music. It’s Justin Bieber meets Ariana Grande. I’m. In. Hell.
The girl is nine and she prides herself on being sweet yet has perfected exactly which buttons to push. Oh, I have a phone in my ear = MOMMY I NEED YOU! She’s literally my clone, which means when she starts her puberty period she will hate me as much as the boy.
When September loomed I was ready to start skipping down the aisles of OfficeMax (remember that Most Wonderful Time of the Year Staples commercial? That was me). It also meant waking up before nine am, making lunches, morning screamfests where people are falling on the floor flailing around, and the dreaded H word.
As parents we have our babies, love them, nurture them, watch them grow, and then they go to school. It’s like a small slice of heaven everyday. There’s no noise. No “I’m hungry.” “Can I have a snack?” “Mom…he’s annoying me.” It’s just … quiet. But that comes with a price: homework.
Homework is what teachers invented to pay us back for the peace we were granted. It’s evil and reminds me what an idiot I am. Why does math make me feel like I shouldn’t have graduated school? Seriously who cares what ‘x’ equals? Also, word problems? Really? I’m a writer…I should rock out word problems, right? NO! No. No. No. I don’t even understand what in the world they’re asking? I swear I took the SATs and passed. I graduated with honors, yet I can’t do freaking simple division? Don’t ask me about prime numbers because I don’t know what that means! I swear YouTube and Google are no longer about my characters but about how to find the meaning of some weird math meaning.
I digress… we take the good with the bad. I must now go back to looking at worksheet that makes me contemplate whether I actually have any brain cells.
