Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood: The Good, the Bad, and the Scary (17 page)

A
few years ago, my dad sold the town house he’d been living in since I was a college student. When it came time to move from the place, he presented me with a big box containing all of my transcripts and report cards from kindergarten through senior year of college. Some of the papers I’d never even seen and some I had long ago tried to banish from my memory. As I thumbed through them all, I was struck with a single thought: my children sure as hell better be more impressive students than I was.

My grades weren’t
awful,
not bad even, but phrases like “lack
of focus” and “not living up to potential” were echoed year after year after year. Teachers criticized my inability to concentrate on the task at hand, claiming I was a daydreamer and a doodler. They said I lacked ambition. It was clear that I just “wasn’t giving it my all.” But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t
like
sitting in a classroom when the weather was a balmy seventy-five, and the grass was a far more comfortable location to learn. I didn’t
like
taking tests or worrying about grades or rehearsing for speeches on states I’d never been to. I resented being told that I held my pencil the wrong way or, later, that typing one-handed was incorrect. When I graduated, I swear, I heard the angels singing from the heavens. (Or perhaps it was my teachers. Either way.) Halle
freaking
lujah. I was done!

Or so I thought.

The feeling hit me as I was walking down the halls during Lily’s kindergarten orientation, like a ton of heavy textbooks. The little desks and lockers and chalkboards filled me with familiar dread. The building even smelled like the exact same mix of industrial cleaning supplies and musty old library books that I remember my own school having, twenty years before.

I was back. And there was
nothing
I could do about it.

Ben is in kindergarten this year and it serves as a constant reminder that I have yet to master even the most basic of skills. Penmanship, for instance. I’d argue that his handwriting is more legible than mine at this point. These days, I can barely read my own notes. I would have made a really good doctor, at least where handwriting is concerned. The other big lesson he’s studying? Sharing—a skill I’ve never quite mastered myself. If I could password-protect everything belonging to me, I would. My food, my computer, my bed—they’re all mine! Hell, I would draw a
permanent line down the middle of our king-size bed to prevent interlocking legs or wandering arms belonging to my sleeping husband. I frequently wake him with “That’s my side!” when he’s coming dangerously close to invading my personal space. I don’t share drinks with the kids because of that backwash thing, and I resent giving up the last bite of my dessert. What’s mine is mine and what’s theirs is theirs. Clearly, I wasn’t paying attention in school even at the age of five.

And then there’s the homework. As a student, it just seemed horribly unfair to have to continue the fractions and spelling when I was done with the day, when Barbie dolls and crayons called my name. I stomped my feet and fought with my parents and did everything I could do to get out of actually sitting down and attacking the bastard. It sucked to be me. As a parent, it sucks more.

Though Lily is only eight, her homework assignments perplex me. All those years of falling asleep in math class and having successfully convinced my principal to let me drop calculus for pottery have come back to haunt me. Even her English work is over my head. Sure, I know how to properly write a sentence, but dissect it? No clue. Predicates? Clauses? Compound sentences? I’m already drowning. Years and years of confusion and frustration at the kitchen table have flashed before my eyes. Screaming matches, hair pulling, and tears, from both of us. If this is lower elementary, how the hell am I going to survive the later grades? Turns out, I’m
not
smarter than a second grader.

As a parent, there’s so much more to school than just school. The PTA, for example. The Parent-Teacher Association should be a thing of good. A thing of purity. A thing of grace. Unfortunately, for me, it’s more like a thing that nightmares are made of,
far worse than forgetting about a test or walking down the halls naked.

I discovered, early on, that there is little room for casual volunteering at school. Once you start with, say, the gateway Halloween party or something, there is no going back—you’ve claimed that task for life. And it’s not the actual volunteering that’s bad. It’s
nice
to be involved in your child’s education. It’s wonderful to get to know the teachers and the syllabus and to be able to envision your child in each of his or her classes. Of course. It’s the other parents that kill me. Everything just has to be so . . . complicated. I was once on a party committee that took the group three hours to name. There were votes and discussions and pros and cons about a freaking
party
. Don’t even get me started on how long the invitations took to settle. Days. Seriously. Just give me a task and let me do it the way I want to.
That’s
the kind of volunteering I can handle.

If the PTA is overly complicated, it’s usually thanks in no small part to the PTA president. No matter what the school, the state, or the religious affiliation, the PTA president is usually the same. It must be part of the job requirement. Her hair, whatever color it may be, is usually pulled back into a tight ponytail. She carries around a clipboard, and sometimes a microphone, too. She is usually dressed in some sort of high-end athletic gear, her tight ass bouncing as she quickly bolts by. She knows everything about everyone and makes coffee on par with the best shop in town. She’s always in a hurry, off to extinguish (or ignite) some school fires concerning bake sales or teachers’ gifts. Sure, she might look all kind and innocent, but beware: she’s got motives. And those motives? To suck you into her world.

A big part of her world is the dreaded fund-raising. As a kid,
it’s mildly fun to go carting cookies from house to house, competing with your friends for top sales. But to a parent, fund-raising is a dirty little word. It brings out the worst in people, despite the fact that it’s all for a good cause. When I was a kid, fund-raisers were limited to yearly chocolate pawning and the annual car wash. These days, it’s everything from wrapping paper to calendars to soap, numerous times throughout the year. Parents camp out at grocery stores and movie theaters and peddle the goods at office lunches and conferences. It’s insanity. And who wants an overpriced roll of wrapping paper, anyway? How about something we actually
want
to buy? Alcohol, for instance. That would be the perfect school fund-raiser. Or how about a sickroom for children with lingering fevers to spend the day hanging out in instead of being at home? Or classes over winter break? Practical things that I, for one, would gladly pay for.

Even the things that once seemed the most simple for students are challenging this time around, like actually
getting
to school. For a kid, mornings might not be pleasant, but they certainly aren’t all that complicated. You pretty much roll out of bed, get dressed, and get driven to school, oblivious to the behind-the-scenes action that is surely taking place. For a mother, mornings of young, school-age children are a carefully orchestrated combination of timing, skill, and luck. It’s nothing short of an act of God to get three children to school by eight, looking halfway presentable.

They need to be awoken prematurely and dressed. Lunches need to be assembled. Forms need to be signed. Breakfast needs to be prepared. Teeth need to be brushed. Bags need to be packed. Shoes double laced. All before the children would even like to be awake. Or at least fully functioning. On a good day, I
get everyone out the door relatively unscathed. On the challenging days? I’m dripping with sweat and hyperventilating in the car pool lane. Really, it’s all almost enough to make me consider keeping the kids home day after day after day after day and just teaching them myself.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’d rather just complain.

I must have been paying attention the day they taught
that
lesson.

T
he summer of my seventh-grade year, many of the girls in my class got their periods. Of course, we didn’t call it a period back then; it was simply referred to as “it.” “Did you hear so-and-so got
it
on the playground?” or “She has
it,
that’s why she didn’t feel like going to the party” or “When you get
it,
did you know that you need to stay in bed with the lights out all day?” All we did was think about it, whisper about it, and plan for . . . it.

The girls who were on the early end of the development chart
were the lucky ones that summer. Suddenly they were experienced and so much more worldly than those of us who rushed to the bathroom, every day, to see whether we had a surprise waiting in our days-of-the-week underpants. I wasted countless hours just willing my period to arrive, waiting for the day when I would
finally
become a woman.

It came, without much pomp and circumstance, one October day of my eighth-grade year. And it was, without a doubt, the biggest disappointment of my short life. Where was the glamour? The feeling of being a grown-up? The excitement? There ought to have been a T-shirt blazoned with “I got my period and all I got was this lousy maxi pad.” What a bust. Along with bidding adieu to childhood, I also said good-bye to ever confidently wearing cream pants, feeling entirely comfortable in white sheets, and not breaking out like clockwork the third week of every month. If this was the dive into womanhood that I’d been waiting for, I wished I’d appreciated childhood more. And, although it all started with a period, it was only the beginning.

Obviously, I have no experience being a boy, but I can say from personal experience that being a girl isn’t easy. It’s confusing and emotional and turbulent and just plain hard. Surviving it myself was no small feat, and then I was lucky enough to have a daughter. I’m starting to realize that it may even be harder the second time around.

I have the same amount of love for all my children. It’s perfect and equal and if my heart were a diagram, it would be sliced up in three pieces, each individually beating for the three of them. But that love is very different when it comes to Lily versus the boys. With the boys, my love is easy and simple. They are mysterious little creatures to me—the way they run around smashing
their behinds together and can shoot a Nerf gun with perfect aim, yet are unable to direct their urine into a receptacle with more than enough room. Their needs are relatively easily met and there are few layers of emotional complexity. They are foreign and bizarre and I don’t see all that much of myself in them. I adore them in the purest of ways, without any other emotions junking it up.

My relationship with Lily is another story entirely. My deep love for her is combined with a mixture of awe, concern, regret, and hope. Identifying with her the way I do, I somehow have a more complicated love for her. She loves fiercely and yells loudly and feels everything so strongly. The intensity is sometimes entertaining, but more often terrifying. The scariest thing? I remember exactly how it feels.

I remember friendships being so volatile that I would scribble out girls’ names in my diary only to rewrite them on new, clean paper to paste over the scribbles. I remember cutting faces out of photographs and then needing to get reprints made once we resolved that particular battle and I again wanted their images adorning my walls. I remember being told that “hate” was way too strong a word to describe someone with whom I’d just had a sleepover the week before, but I also remember knowing that hatred was
exactly
what I was feeling. I’m always taken aback by the intensity of Lily’s friendships, but I shouldn’t be, because I lived them, too.