I'm D.O.A. I can live with it. But can my kid?

I’m a reasonably smart girl. I scored well on the SATs, or at least I scored well when I hadn’t gone to a party the night before and consumed a lot of Jungle Juice Punch made with grain alcohol and served out of a garbage can. I graduated from college. I’ve held jobs.

I understand that certain…..behaviors…may have led to some brain cell disintegration. Still, I should be able to help my daughter with her second grade math. That’s right. Not algebra or calculus. Second grade math. The teacher calls it Sunshine Math! to make it sound more palatable.

But I. Can’t. Do. It. Some of it is easy. You know, like, Pearl has two buttons on her sweater and Ann has six buttons. How many buttons does Liz have if altogether there are 10 buttons? Obviously the answer is, Who gives a shit about the fucking buttons?

Then there’s this:
WTF? Doesn’t this require a protractor? Or an engineering degree? If I could do this, I could have built my own house, I think.

The Diva has been gamely trying to answer this particular question, mainly by drawing random lines through the shapes then looking at me hopefully. Notice the affidavit the Diva is forced to essentially sign in the top right hand corner underneath the space where she writes her name: It reads, (This shows my own thinking.)

Frankly, her own thinking is that she’d rather be playing Club Penguin on the computer or eating marshmallow-pretzel sandwiches. Super-frankly, so would I.

Usually Hot Firefighter Husband helps her with math, and I help her decide what to wear. But Husband is working, so this ominous task is falling to me, and I’m a little resentful of someone, I’m not sure who, because I’m having so much trouble.

The Diva is in an advanced class this year. She was tested to see if she is “gifted,” and therefore qualified to remain in the advanced class. When I called to get the test results, the school shrink told me she was dead-on average, which made me seriously doubt the validity of her shrink degree. What kind of psychologist tells a parent her kid is dead-on average?

Because the shrink hurt my feelings, we shelled out a couple of hundred dollars to have her independently tested. The new test shows that she is “moderately” to “significantly” above dead-on average, and therefore qualifies to remain in the advanced class. But I should point out that on the way to the testing, the Diva was babbling on about our Mardi Gras trip, and she said, “If I counted up all my beads, Mom, I bet I’d have, like 10,000 of them. And if we all put all our beads together, we’d probably have, like 900!” So there’s that.

Now I’m doubting whether to keep her in the advanced class because I don’t know if I can handle it. I’m a little afraid the Diva will start making me sign affidavits when I help her with homework that read (This shows my own thinking!) and the teacher will see it and say to herself, “Poor child. So gifted, and with such a dead-on average mama.”