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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.”
Okay, that post a few days ago about my life being ideal? I take it back. Idealism is for idealists. An idealist is defined as someone guided more by ideals than by practical considerations. So I am not a idealist.
For example, within hours of my optimistic assertion that despite the chaos, my life is pretty much perfect, I ruined the family dinner by pointing out to my son that his smiley face beach ball is not a person and was not thirsty, a fact which he apparently was not ready to hear. An idealist would have treasured this creative moment and simply strived to achieve the overriding goal, which was to get the Pterodactyl to eat some food so he would stop acting like he had taken some bad LSD. But I was more concerned with the potential mess involved in giving the smiley face beach ball its own cup of orange juice with a straw. A ball, as you know, rolls, and could easily knock over the the orange juice which was not going to be consumed because BEACH BALLS AREN’T PEOPLE.
In my defense, I was perfectly willing to give the beach ball pretend orange juice, and pretend dinner for that matter, but that was not an acceptable option.
I became frustrated, I admit it, and I regret it. In my frustration, I said, or perhaps slightly shouted, “IT’S JUST A BALL, SON! IT DOESN’T NEED ANYTHING TO DRINK!” And my little 5-year-old’s face dissolved into a sea of crumples and tears. He was so traumatized by my pronouncement that the Diva stopped eating and rushed over to comfort him, pressing his little head into her littler chest and whispering, “Shhhh, sssshhhh, it’s okay.” All three children stared at me as though I had ripped off a kitten’s ears right in front of them.
You know how this ends, right? I apologized, the Pterodactyl fed the beach ball some orange juice, and then he sat in my lap while I fed him bites of food like he was a “little tiny zero baby,” which he wishes he was so he could breastfeed. Then I watched “The Bachelor” and went to bed.
I woke up the next day with more visions of idealism, but then the Tyrant pooped in her pants at school. I arrived for pick-up to find her teacher grimly walking out of the bathroom holding a plastic bag with the fecal proof. The Tyrant ran into my arms and said, “I poopy! But now I clean! So all better!” The teacher’s look assured me that it was not all better, and that I obviously needed to enroll my 3-year-old in a remedial crapping class before bringing her back to the civilized paradigm of education we call preschool.
I really like this particular teacher and do not blame her for being put out. Changing a poopy diaper is gross enough; the idea of scraping poop off the bottom of a 3-year-old who is not your own child gives me the dry heaves, frankly, which is one of the many reasons I am not a preschool teacher. Another reason is that I do not like glitter.
Today is Day Three since the Idealism Post, and you should know I am currently sitting alone in a bar drinking wine while writing. It’s a reasonably nice bar, and dark enough so that I’m hopeful fellow patrons won’t notice I’m two workouts into a no-showering stretch and have been wearing the same set of sweats for two days.
The good news is that tomorrow is Friday, and if I can get the kids to school on time, I will have 5.5 hours alone in the house with the Hot Firefighter Husband. Uh-huh. We might do that. And then we’ll still have 5.25 hours left, and since we are in dire need of a backhoe to shovel out the Diva’s room, and there is mold growing in the shower, we’ll try to make ourselves useful for a while.
Does it all sound ideal to you?
Yesterday afternoon I was careening down the highway while talking on the cell phone, the kids were in the backseat watching SpongeBob Squarepants, and we were headed to Chik-fil-A for dinner.
When we arrived, I made the Tyrant put on underpants since I assumed she would be sliding in the play area, and the idea of her sliding with no underwear under her tattered tutu contained such an ick factor that I nearly locked the doors and drove away. But another little girl in the play area had soiled underwear, which quadrupled the ick factor, and so I just gave up and assumed the Tyrant was in the process of contracting the MRSA virus and would therefore need a good scrubbing as soon as we left.
I ordered the meals to go because we had to pick up the Diva at ballet. On the way home, the younger children dropped their meals on the floor of the Motorized Landfill. Fortunately, the food fell on discarded pieces of paper (read: trash) and so was spared contamination, as far as I know. So when we arrived home, I scooped it all up and served it to them at the table. The Pterodactyl wasn’t particularly hungry because he had wolfed down two hot dogs, cottage cheese and three pretzel-marshmallow sandwiches just an hour earlier, but I told him very sternly that he would not be able to have raw cookie dough for dessert unless he ate at least four chicken nuggets. He ate three and took two helpings of cookie dough. I didn’t notice because I was busy checking Facebook.
Yes, for about 2.5 hours, I was a poster child for everything wrong with America. It was a beautiful afternoon; in an ideal world, I would have been at the park playing freeze tag with my kids. or perhaps outside on the porch helping them make a reproduction of Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin using popsicle sticks and graham crackers. Maybe I could have put aprons on them and let them help me cook a nutritious dinner.
In an ideal world, my kids would eat whole wheat whatever for breakfast and beg me to make my famous squash casserole every night of the week. They would have chores. The Pterodactyl would not have taught the Tyrant that drawing on the walls in pencil is okay because you can erase it. Theoretically.
But it’s not an ideal world.
But it is! Right now, I have two kids in school, one is on a playdate (THANK YOU, MS. JAY, FOR TAKING THE TYRANT, AND I’M REALLY SORRY IF SHE AGAIN ACCUSES YOUR KID OF STEALING HER YIPSTICK.), I just dumped a bunch of stuff in the crock pot for dinner, the yard guys are here trimming the dead lawn, and American Idol starts tonight! Life is great!
I do secretly long to be the parent who doesn’t allow my children to watch television during the week, and who organizes family board game nights every Wednesday. I want to cook dinner every evening and engage my children in discussions about how Dick Cheney nearly ruined the country and why eating organic chicken is okay because those chickens are raised humanely and only have one bad day.
Instead we often have a smorgasbord for dinner: Easy Mac, hot dogs with one single squiggly yellow mustard line, plain noodles, fruit cups, canned corn and Dora the Explorer yogurt. Discussions usually center around how to use the words poop, gas, booty and pee in one sentence. At least we don’t watch television during dinner. Unless Daddy isn’t home. Then we do. But I actually really like that iCarly.
Hot Firefighter Husband has noticed that I have been doing research on how to relocate to a Caribbean island. He thinks this seems implausible. “How would we live?” he asked.
I assume that we would live in a quaint cottage on the beach, and the children would walk barefoot to their 1-room schoolhouse. We’d eat fresh fish and pineapple for dinner every night, and our entertainment would be the dolphins playing in the surf. In time, I’d forget about American Idol and the kids would forget about Fruit Roll Ups and Happy Meals.
That would be an ideal world. But then a hurricane would come and wash it all away and we wouldn’t have insurance and we’d be totally fucked. So we’ll stay here.
What I’ll do is take incremental steps toward the mythical tower of idealism. For example, today I went to the grocery and did not buy any Little Debbie chocolate chip muffins even though they were on sale. I’m cooking dinner. I might take the kids to the park.
And tonight, when we’re watching television, I will sit on the couch and watch it with them so that I can provide context and force frequent verbal interaction to make sure they aren’t allowing their brains to shrink.
Yes, that sounds just about right. In fact, it sounds ideal.
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The Family Cast The Diva: my 8-year-old drama queen. She has eaten noodles every single day for the past five years, loves her new iPod and hopes to be famous one day. She likes wedge heels and lipstick and Taylor Swift.
The Pterodactyl: he's five. He loves trains, volcanoes, tomatoes, and talking about my boobs. His younger sister's mere existence has ruined his life.
The Tyrant: she's a very bossy three. She curses, throws things, hates wearing underpants and refuses to brush her hair. She knows the words to most Lady Gaga songs.
Hot Firefighter Husband: he loves sports, politics, clean floors and me. He gets really annoyed by laundry, Ann Curry, tapas restaurants and me. He edited this.
Damn Gem: the dog. She eats paper which I end up pulling out of her butt.
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