Category Archives: back to school

Bingo dammit!

imgres“B-37,” one of the moms in my son Eli’s third grade class called out.

“Bingo!” Yelled Samantha. I enjoyed watching the victorious young lady’s glee as she celebrated her triumph.

“N-11,” the mom loudly announced over the myriad pronouncements of joy and despair by the remaining players.

“Perhaps she doesn’t know how to play this game,” I thought to myself.

“G-7,” she continued calling.

“Bingo!” Yelled Taylor. There were more “ahs” and “darns” from the ensemble.

“O-63,” she went on.

She must be on auto-pilot, I worried. Maybe being the Valentine Bingo caller was too taxing an enterprise for her. I decided to leave my post at the bagel and cream cheese station to see if I might be of assistance to her.

Quietly I whispered, “Someone’s already won.”

“N-11,” she proclaimed as if she hadn’t even heard me.

“There’s already a winner,” I spoke out with conviction.

She looked at me askance. “Everyone has to win,” she stated matter-of-factly. “We can’t stop until every child gets Bingo and wins a prize.”

At first, I thought she was joking. I mean I’m well aware of eternal T-Ball ties and even-Steven itty-bitty basketball games. But even in 3rd grade Bingo we aren’t allowed to have winners and losers?

I returned to my bagel station dejected and disillusioned. This is what’s wrong with the world today. We insist on perpetuating a ridiculous myth of equality when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

In Bingo, someone wins. This also implies the converse. Someone, (usually several someones), lose. It’s a game! That’s the whole point. One person gets the lucky numbers first. That’s why it’s fun. It’s not skill. It’s not personal will or sheer determination that dictate the outcome here. It’s a silly game of luck. Why are we shielding our youth from this reality?

No Junior, you will not always win. Life is about losing some times. It’s about learning resiliency, bouncing back, accepting defeat and fighting to win the next time around.

Instead we are raising lazy, pathetic people who expect prizes for failure and unlimited chances to win. That’s not how life works. Why are we doing this?

Later that night when we were sitting around the table I asked Eli, a fiercely competitive child, if he noticed anything unusual about Bingo. “It was really fun,” he concluded. “But what do you mean by unusual?”

“Well, who won?” I inquired.

“Nobody,” he answered plainly.

“But I kept hearing kids yell ‘Bingo’,” I asserted. amazed that he had missed something so obvious.

“But we were playing ‘Black-Out’ Bingo, mom” he clarified, “You know, where you have to fill in the whole card before you win?”

“Ah ha,” I smiled. “So nobody really won? That’s interesting.”

“Why mom?” he questioned, “Tell me why you’re asking.”

“Just curious,” I replied, unsure if I should reveal the truth or not. Maybe it’s better this way, with him believing in the illusive golden ring that remains always a bit out of reach.
“But everyone got a prize,” I just couldn’t leave it alone.

“Yeah mom,” he laughed to himself, “Everyone always gets a prize. That’s just how they do it these days. But don’t worry, I know that nobody really won. They just don’t want to hurt the kids’ feelings. I think it may have to do with law suits or something.”

I shook my head and giggled. “Yeah,” I said, “You’re probably right.”

So while most kids walked away feeling like winners, my competitive junkie filled in the blanks a little differently. I guess competition really is in the eye of the beholder.

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Lockdown

imgres-6My 12 year old son, Levi, has anxiety issues. This isn’t a secret. So to those of you who might suggest that I’m exposing some kind of family skeleton, I want you to know that I always check with my family first before airing our dirty laundry in public. As long as they’re okay with it, I figure it’s fair game for public consumption.

That being said, the other day at school his math teacher sent him to his homeroom classroom to make copies for her during class. He happily complied and set off to do so. Apparently, only seconds after leaving the classroom, word got out about a ponytailed, pistol carrying stranger at a school a few blocks away. Our school went into immediate lockdown. I’m not talking “drill.” I’m talking serious, “we’re in a different kind of world after Newtown” lock down. So while Levi haplessly skipped across campus, everyone else bolted their doors, pinned up paper to cover the windows and huddled in bathrooms, closets and corners.

Levi thought it was more than strange when the door to his classroom was locked. Even more odd were the darkened windows that left no view to the inside of the room. He looked around and noted that no one else was anywhere within sight. Hmmm? He remained calm and clear-headed though and knocked softly on the door. Luckily, his teacher slyly squinted through a side gap in the papered window. Then, like an episode of “The Munsters,” the classroom door opened a crack and a hand emerged, grabbed my son, and dragged him into the room. It wasn’t until after he was safe that he felt the anxiety of the situation catching up to him. But to his amazing credit, he held it together and was able to talk himself down and maintain control of his emotions.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me. But I find the irony of this inane confluence of events staggeringly comical. I mean how is it possible that my kid, the one with severe anxiety issues, ends up on the wrong side of a lock-down, only days after the most gut-wrenching massacre in our nation’s history? I guess it’s okay to find humor in the irony since no one was hurt and nothing bad really transpired. I can’t even contemplate the real devastation that could have occurred had a copy-cat ventured onto ours or a nearby campus. Maybe the humor is simply survivor’s guilt or some kind of defense mechanism to protect myself from the overwhelming pain etched into our souls by last week’s horrific destruction.

Sometimes it’s just too painful to contemplate the very real risks we endure every day as we try to live our lives, watch over our families, and protect our precious children. And so to all who suffered a loss in Connecticut, our hearts ache over your pain. The nation grieves along with you and sends love, strength and healing to you.

May you all be blessed with a sense of peace and may God bring comfort to those in mourning who must now learn to accept the unfairness of life as they struggle to live without the earthly presence of someone so deeply cherished.

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Ancient battles

I’m not a poet. I wouldn’t know how to technically craft a poem to save my life. I like to write funny. Funny is safe. Funny is easy. But sometimes nothing feels funny. Every moment hurts. Bitterly.

 

 

 

Ancient Battles

When they are small it’s so easy to

kiss away boo-boos,

Wipe soggy tears,

And dab ointment on cuts and bruises.

A mother’s salve.

Healing.

 

But time changes all that.

And pains become immeasurable.

My words cannot erase the hurt

of treacherous laughter

and taunting betrayal.

 

My heart aches inside me.

I want so to help.

Instead I remain outside his fortress,

Unable to soothe.

Ill-equipped to protect him from the child warriors

who rage at the walls of his porcelain ego.

 

We are both wearied from battle.

“Don’t give up,” I manage to eke out the words

like a fallen soldier,

desperate to embolden the barely breathing comrade by my side.

“You will win in the end.”

 

He tries to believe me.

The corner of his mouth curls just enough

to tell me he’s not ignoring me.

And then silence.

We drive on through the night

alone –

together.

His fresh wounds bleeding.

My scabs ripped open to

once again remember the agony of childhood.

 

Don’t mean to depress anyone. But this is where I’ve been living this past week. So many good, kind parents have no idea that their children are viciously tormenting others. Please, talk to your kids about bullying. Teach them that cruelty wounds deeply and childhood scars can last lifetimes. Even if you’re certain it’s “not your kid,” think again. Because it just may be.

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Coyote smorgasbord

Have you ever done something so completely idiotic that you even surprise yourself by your total lack of judgement? Well, welcome to yesterday morning.

As is often the case, I walked my 8 year old son, Eli, to the bus stop about two blocks from our house. I also chose to take our two dogs, Maggie and S’more along with us. Not surprisingly, I’ve never managed to leash train the two canines, so a “walk” with them is more like an amateur wake boarding competition.

We were the first to arrive at the bus stop. But we were quickly joined by several of the usual grade school suspects. I was the only parent. Suddenly, I looked up and spotted a vicious predatory mountain lion aggressively racing towards us. Well OK, it wasn’t exactly vicious, and it wasn’t actually a mountain lion. It was a…coyote, a mean looking, mangy coyote. But mangy means hungry, doesn’t it? And on second glance, it wasn’t really racing towards us, it might have been minding its own business. But it was like 20 feet away from us and didn’t seem at all put off by me, my dogs or the little folk beside me.

I grabbed both leashes tightly as my dogs yelped and pulled towards the wild beast. Clearly they weren’t afraid. But I was. It felt like a situation on the verge of going horribly wrong. I struggled to hold the dogs back and avoid a wildlife confrontation. The coyote passed us without incident and turned the corner a few houses down. “Eli,” I said, my voice still shaking, “I have to get the dogs home so they’ll be safe. I can hardly hold them back.”

Then I corralled my two pups and headed off in the opposite direction. As I approached our house, I breathed a sigh of relief realizing we were out of harms way. But then it hit me. I had just left a cadre of elementary school children unarmed and unprotected with a rabid coyote on the prowl. What the heck is wrong with me? Sure the dogs were safe. But Eli might have been served up as Wile E’s second breakfast.
I dropped the dogs at home and turned tail to head back to the bus stop. But a few yards down the block I caught sight of the yellow school bus leaving the neighborhood.
“Phew,” I relaxed knowing that the children were safe and on route to school. Unless of course one had been eaten prior to the bus’s arrival. I heard my therapist’s voice in my head insisting I employ logic when “worry brain” starts to take over. “Nonsense,” I reasoned, “I’ve never heard of a single case where a lone coyote chowed down on a school child.”

Just in case, I drove by the bus stop on my way to work. There weren’t any entrails or blood stained concrete. I was relatively certain that no child had met with an untimely fate. But I will confess that I felt a whole lot better at 3:30 when Eli bounded off the bus surrounded by his entire posse of bus stop buddies.

Well, you know what they say, parenting is one third knowledge, one third judgement and one third luck. So in those instances when you come up a little short in the judgement arena, just pray that you’ve got a surplus of luck to fall back on.
p.s. To those of you feeling the urge to report me to child protective services and write chastising letters to the magazine: no children were actually endangered in the writing of this article. Our local coyotes are as timid as mice and as vicious as common house plants.

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Classroom Socialism

“It’s totally unfair!” my nearly twelve year old son, Levi, railed. “Mrs. Y teaches advanced math and sixth grade science. She gives out these tickets for good behavior that can be redeemed for the most amazing prizes; like dinner and a movie or board games, stuff everybody really wants. But some people have her for both classes. I only have her for science since I’m not in advanced math. So it’s totally unfair. Don’t you think so?”

“Well, not really,” I tentatively began, “What’s unfair about it?”

“Mom,” he rolls his eyes at the sheer inanity of my question, “ The people who only have her for one class can’t earn as many tickets. That’s what’s unfair.”

“But it doesn’t hurt you or take away from your chance to earn tickets that some other people earn more, does it?” I ask, knowing I’m treading on thin ice. “I mean, it may take you longer to earn the prize you want. But that’s how life works. Some people are better at some things than others. Some people earn more money or drive nicer cars or live in fancier houses. Everything isn’t equal. Plus if you really wanted to, you could work harder and be in the advanced math class. But you don’t seem to want to spend the time or effort to do that.”

“Well mom,” my son reasoned, “I am trying to be happy with myself at the level I’m at and not put undo pressure on myself.” I suddenly flashed back to a book a colleague of mine wrote several years ago entitled, “What to Do When Your Kid Is Smarter Than You.” I’ll have to reread that.

“That’s fair, Levi,” I conceded. “But life is what you make it. Nobody owes you equality. If you want to earn more tickets, think of a creative way to do that. Maybe you can stay later or earn extra credit somehow. But moping about unfairness is like buying into a socialist doctrine that we, personally, do not believe in.” I gingerly stepped off my soapbox and waited to see how my remarks had landed.

“Would you like to at least hear my solution?” He asked with a hint of arrogance that made me feel embarrassed for my philosophical outburst.

“Of course,” I nodded.

“Well,” he began, “I raised my hand and told Mrs. Y that I thought her system was unfair for the reasons I mentioned. She thought about it, agreed with me, and decided to amend the system. Now everyone can only earn tickets in one class.” He offered a self satisfied smile that landed like a gentle lob into my court.

I was, I’ll admit, speechless. Finally, I gathered my wits and responded. “Well, Levi, what you may lack in mathematical acumen, you more than make up for in ingenuity and boldness. I gotta hand it to you. You spoke up for yourself and were able to affect change. That’s awesome. I’m proud of you.”

“Really?” he asked doubting my authenticity.
“Really,” I answered. “Life will always set up obstacles for you to overcome. You used your intelligence, determination and creativity to do that. It’s like my dad used to say to me, ‘You can do anything if you put your mind to it.’” Then I thought about all the kids who had ostensibly been demoted to single classroom point earners.

“But just to be safe,” I added, “Let me show you how to throw a right hook in case any of those double point people come looking for you.”

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Guilt

I’m tired of traveling! No more guilt trips.

First week of school over. Both boys are happy. Have diverted several potential disasters with head on, logical intervention. Who is this family?

Don’t get me wrong, life is beyond hectic. Having kids in different schools is like trying to manage a herd of wild goats. They both have different early dismissal dates, which means you can kiss your life goodbye. They have different parent handbooks filled with different rules and regs. Totally different curricula. Yet, and I’m really not sure how this always seems to happen, they both have the same “Meet the teacher” and “Back to school” nights. Clearly I missed the parenting workshop on developing super-human talents like being in two places simultaneously.

That’s really what is escalating my current stress level. I cannot be everywhere. To drive my eldest, Levi, to school, I have to forgo walking my youngest, Eli, to the bus stop. If I pick up Levi at his regular dismissal time, I can’t stand happily across from the mailboxes sporting my best welcome home smile as Eli steps off the bus and runs into my arms. And although no one would ever believe this, I like being there to send each off into the world every morning and then enfolding them into the maternal cocoon every afternoon. I feel guilty whichever kid I’m with, because while I try to see it as a healthy way of spending quality one-on-one time with each boy, all I can focus on is what I’m missing by not being with the other.

Does every mom of two or more feel this constant stream of unmitigated guilt? I often wish I was Catholic so I could confess my shame and then somehow be cleansed of it. We don’t have anything like confessional in Judaism. Instead, we’re more like the guilt proprietors; and we do everything in house. We create the guilt, manufacture it, dispense it. We even have entire family structures devoted to marketing and promoting guilt. I for one am high up in the guilt echelon. I’m kind of like a guilt mob boss. I control all the guilt within my family, my neighborhood, and my extended territory. It’s a tough job. But I guess somebody has to do it.

Or do they? Wonder what my life would look like if I shed the weighty guilt cloak for even a day, an afternoon, what about an hour? Would the world collapse? Would havoc reign throughout the universe? Would the entire family lose their way? Rationally I know that life would go on if I ceased being a slave to the guilt monster. It’s that irrational side of me that seems stuck in this unhealthy tangle.

I’ve always given lip service to the old adage that “guilt is a useless emotion.” I guess I don’t really believe that though. The truth is that guilt fills me up in some way that I’m unwilling to let go of. Guilt must make me feel important, like I matter so much that I’m capable of enhancing, degrading or destroying other people’s lives. That’s really beyond absurd. I can no more be responsible for someone else’s life than I can for a Tsunami half way around the world. But then again there is that butterfly effect. No. I am not going there. I am not responsible for the rest of the world’s happiness, unhappiness or anyone’s personal decisions about how he chooses to live his life.

Ah, freedom. KInd of weird. Feel like I’m naked.

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Bus #108

What would happen if you took the school bus home ?
The police would make you bring it back ! (Well, we all need a little levity these days.)

As a parent, one tries to prepare her kids for everything. Especially if you have one of those kids for whom spur of the moment adjustments can be earth-shatteringly upsetting. Take the first day of third grade for example. New school. New teacher. New kids. New campus. But the biggest anxiety; taking a bright yellow school bus for the first time ever.

Who knows why certain things are scarier than others. But for my 8 year old son, Eli, his fears seemed to circle around taking that bus. There was the question of which one to get on, which one to take home, who will he sit with, what if he misses it? There were countless worries and fears floating around his new school mode of transport.

So what did I do? I was determined to prepare him accordingly which I knew would allay all of his fears. I checked the written parent packet and it was bus #108 that would daily carry my boy to and from his new school. We drilled the number into his head. We played silly games to test his memory. “Should you get on bus #115?” we’d ask, trying to light-heartedly trick him. “What about #37?” “Let’s say there’s a pink school bus and the number is #138 and the driver, whom you’ve never seen, says, ‘come on the bus, little boy. I have candy.’”

We did a couple of dry runs to school from the bus stop and taught him where to meet the bus after school so he’d have no concerns whatsoever. We even practiced walking to and from the bus stop, even timed it so we’d know what time to depart each morning. I was pretty proud of myself. But as all good mythologists know, it’s always pride that comes before the fall.

First day of school and we wait for nearly a half hour at the bus stop. The bus never arrives. We drive Eli to school and he ends up being tardy on his first day, which freaks him out and raises his anxiety level exponentially. After calming him, straightening out the tardy situation, and getting him situated in class, the day went surprisingly well. That is, of course, until it was time to come home.

They shuttled the bus-riding kids out to the parking lot and guided Eli right to bus #105. That’s when all hell broke loose. “I can not get on bus #105!” he insisted. “I’m supposed to be on bus #108.” Bus number 108, however, had broken down earlier in the day (which was why it didn’t come in the morning) and was in the shop torn up and awaiting repair. Bus #105 was taking its place. Of course that didn’t sway my son who had been practicing this drill for over two weeks. I can only imagine his focused little mind as he walked out to the bus. “Bus #108, bus #108, bus #108,” he likely repeated like a mantra as he headed out of school that first day. It eventually took two drivers, the teacher, the vice principal and finally the kind and compassionate principal himself to convince Eli that it was okay to take bus 105 to get home.

“Why was he so upset?” my 11 year old son, Levi, asked. “Because,” I answered, “He did everything right, just the way we practiced. Only sometimes, life changes the rules on us in the middle of the game. And it just isn’t fair.”
So here’s to a new school year filled with busses that will break down, schedules that will be changed, and routines that will be altered. But hopefully, amidst all the chaos life throws in his path, my youngest will learn to sway in the wind like a sturdy Elm and not snap at every formidable gale.

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Devoted mom or sinister stalker? You be the judge.

“If you become a crocus in a hidden garden,”
said his mother, “I will be a gardener. And I will find you.”

I call my 8 year old son, Eli, “my little bunny.” Today I tossed out the endearing appellation and he looked at me askew and said, “Why do you call me that?”

I told him it was from one of my favorite children’s books, “The Runaway Bunny,” that I used to read to him when he was a toddler. He had no recollection of the book. “Oh, it was such a sweet book,” I recounted. “It was about this little bunny who wanted to run away from his mother.” Hmmm…in this instant it didn’t seem all that sweet to me. “And no matter how he imagines himself running away, his mother always finds a way to hunt him down and drag him back to their sheltered little bunny hole.” OK, I didn’t actually say that last part. But it’s the truth. Suddenly I am not sure what was wrong with me that I not only read that book to my little boy countless times, but that I dubbed it my favorite and actually took to calling him “my little bunny.” OMG, I’m a monster.

I went back and reread the book. My greatest fears were confirmed. Talk about helicopter moms. Everything was starting to make sense; Eli’s intrepid approach to social situations, his continued vows to not attend  overnight camp, his insistence that he will never (ever) leave home. It was all my fault. The poor boy thinks that if he even ventures a few miles away from the homestead, I will come after him like some kind of vicious Cassowary and forcibly “guide” him back to where he “belongs” and where I’ll be best able to keep my Machiavellian claws dug deep into his stifled spirit.

Oh, how horrific. “If you become a sailboat and sail away from me,”says the fictitious rabbit, “I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go.” This mother will stop at nothing to get her wayward youngster back. The saddest part of the whole story is that by the end, the poor hare, whose only goal was to get away from his domineering matriarch, gives up entirely, and resigns himself to an Oedipal life with mama rabbit, eating carrots and believing himself incapable of ever venturing into the world on his own.

Eli starts at a new school next week. I think I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He’s excited to meet his teachers and a whole new cadre of potential friends in the neighborhood. I’m petrified.

Letting them “run away,” even if it’s just to a new school, is harder than you’d think. Maybe I’m being too hard on Mama Rabbit.

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Vote for…mom?

I ran for Vice President of the Student Council at my son’s middle school this week. I lost. But that’s not the point of my story.

Well, technically, it wasn’t me that ran. I just felt like it when at 4:00 on Tuesday I picked up my 11 year old son, Levi, and he informed me that he was running and that the election was in two days and the forms and posters were due before school the following morning.

My plan for the afternoon had not included a mad dash to Walgreens for poster supplies and a creative campaign brainstorming session. I had mapped things out a bit differently since I had to scoop up the boys, drive them out to my husband, Mark’s, office in Glendale, eat something on the run and get to rehearsal by 6. But, as usual my schedule was foiled by two small urchins who rarely pay any mind to my neatly ordered, pre-established agendas.

We spent the drive to the West side discussing my son’s political platform and how he wanted to market himself. After all, I kept insisting, this was his campaign, not mine. Yet somehow, when the time came to create the posters, it was me who found herself cutting, pasting and painting, while Levi and his younger brother, Eli, did their homework and dashed playfully from room to room in Mark’s office. In my defense, I did finally note that this was unfair and tasked Levi with peeling the adhesive backs off the sign letters so I would feel less like an indentured servant and more like a collaborator.

The posters came out fairly well. And I don’t honestly think our defeat was due to my lack of artistic talent. But here’s the thing, I was and am still deeply conflicted about my choice to do the bulk of the work on these posters myself. A multitude of internal voices were clamoring about this issue in my head as I worked. The  more sane and practical voice kept insisting that this was Levi’s campaign, and that I had no right or obligation to be taking on the responsibility of art director. But there was also the helicopter mom voice that repeatedly reminded me about Levi’s fine motor control challenges. If left to his own devices, he might create unintelligible posters that would not only assure an election defeat, but might also cause him to be a target of teasing and ridicule.

Other voices declared Levi’s graphic talents on the computer and wondered why I didn’t encourage him to create something electronically. Still others suggested I get myself fed and to work on time and simply allow his dad to handle the poster debacle. Of course that triggered a memory of the time Mark sent Levi to school for dress-up day, costumed in a bed sheet and kitchen mop wig, which wasn’t a disaster I cared to repeat.

In the short run, it was just easier to do this myself. So that’s what I did. I’m pretty sure that by most traditional parenting guidelines, I did the wrong thing. Most of the time I live by the doctrine that kids need to succeed or fail based on their own actions and behaviors. This just seemed…well…like an exception.

What would you have done?

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Back to school roller derby

Who will be the next School Supply Roller Derby Queen?

Lace up your skates, moms. It’s time to hit the aisles and go for the gold. If you’re fast and tough, you might actually secure that Justice League lunch box and water bottle your kid’s been pining for all year. Show no mercy. It’s back to school time.

God help me I hate school supply shopping. I hate everything associated with school supply shopping. I hate hordes of people fighting over number 2 pencils, I hate trying to find wide-ruled notebook paper amidst piles and piles of college lined loose leaf. I hate having to buy 4 large glue sticks when they always come 3 to a pack. I hate that despite the fact that every school in the world insists on kids bringing ziploc baggies and disinfectant wipes, they never put that stuff with the school supplies and you have to traipse through the entire store with a million other people to get to the cleaning supply and home storage areas before they run out of the items you need to complete your list.

Argh!!!! It’s awful. It was better this year because I took each boy separately. Trying to navigate two supply lists while maneuvering a shopping cart and corralling two young tykes was nearly impossible last year. At least I wised up a bit.

But the whole process is so utterly angst producing. I’m not even sure why. I love shopping, for almost everything. But this is…just…not fun. I spent over $300 for both boys. That sounds like a lot to me. I mean, that doesn’t even include text books or any real type of learning material.

I saw this one woman, who looked equally distraught, and she said that at her school you can pay extra money and they’ll do your school supply shopping for you. Unfortunately, she had flaked and missed the deadline this year. “Rest assured,” she bemoaned, “that wont happen again.” For a moment I wished our school did that.

But then, in some weird masochistic side of my brain, I heard a voice saying, “but you’d miss such a meaningful mom-son experience if you didn’t go school supply shopping each year.” The fact is, given the choice to abdicate all school related shopping excursions, I probably wouldn’t take it. Because even if I tell myself that instead of the crowded Target aisles, we could go to the water park or the movies or somewhere equally fun and carefree, something else would come up and we’d miss that time together and then it would feel just like every other missed moment I feel guilty and forlorn over.

So, I’ll keep body-checking 12 year-olds to get the last package of yellow highlighters and pushing distracted moms’ carts out of the way to retrieve that one Yoda pencil box that my son simply cannot live without. I will do this year after year after year. Because I’m a mom. And that’s just what we do.

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