Week 21

Who knows what happened to Week 20.... Just try to keep up with me here....

It’s barely 6pm and I am dragging ass. I have shoveled snow to the point where I am very rich and very sore. I am able to pay for Sailor’s French lessons this month in cash, but I can’t lift my right arm. I am practically begging Mac to finish his homework so we can go to bed.

One morning last week I woke up and I was 40 years old. I don’t know how it happened, really. I was just going along, minding my own business being 39 and BAM! 40! One of my favorite birthday cards hit the nail on the head: “Inside every 40-year-old there’s a 39-year-old wondering what the hell just happened!”

So I am 40. I have been 40 for 4 days. Nothing has changed except that thanks to my family and friends I was celebrated for 5 days straight with manicures, coffees, cakes, massages, dinners, lunches, shopping, parties, brunches, pottery painting…. It was blissful, to be certain. But there was no stopping the regular flow of my days of making lunches, bathing children, folding laundry (oh, wait, I did take a mini-break from that telling my mother not to send any laundry up until Monday), helping with homework. We really let a lot slide and we went to bed so late every night I think we will need at least a week of early bedtimes to catch up.

And today it’s all over. Back to the grind. No one wanted to get up for school this morning but when we did finally it was only 7:20 and not late enough to warrant staying home. Mac had 4.5 days of absence on his report card last week, which was circled but not notated, so until someone tells me my child stays home too often I am not going to worry about it. Last Friday it snowed for 24 hours straight and I shoveled three times. And hauled Mac to school, which took almost 30 minutes. But no one was marked tardy and I had a PTA meeting in the overheated cafeteria, during which I spent a great deal of time in the hallway fielding phone calls from parents assuming our art studio was closed. Which it was not.

We had surprise snow last night and while I thought maybe they would close the schools today, I remembered that our city’s public schools were the only ones open in a foot of snow last Friday and so we trudged thru slush – it got warm out and a fog rolled in – all the way to school and back. Alec looses a mitten on the way, despite the mitten clips I recently insisted the kids use. I am too weary and my feet are too wet to go back and look for it. We'll find it in the next thaw, I am sure.

After school Mac brings home his backpack containing the first hot lunch menu we’ve seen since mid-November. And last week’s spelling test with an appalling 60%. I ask him how he feels. He does not like the bad grade. I ask him what he will do this week. He says he will study harder and let me drill him on the words on the way to school. And right now we sit at the kitchen table and he grumbles about his assignment to write each spelling word three times. I HATE his homework! And I HATE the relationship his homework is causing us.

“I wish I could just graduate now,” he says.

And Sailor still does not want to attend preschool at all. Last week he went to the annual pajama party preschool day, which he loved. But in anticipation of it Mac tells him all about what he can bring: “Your teddy bear, your favorite blanket, your slippers.”
“I am not bringing any of that,” Sailor tells his big brother, “And I am not bringing me!” Sailor’s teachers tell me Sailor is being manipulative. I think he is just tired and it’s a long afternoon for a child who still really needs to be sleeping after lunch. A few friends tell me to just give in and pull him out. I agree that this is not worth it. He is 4 and has a whole ‘nother year of preschool ahead of him. And then as I am anguishing over this matter he spends all last Thursday morning begging to go to the pajama party at preschool. Sigh.

It’s Friday. We start the day with a phone call to the mother of a 2nd grade boy who has been, according to Mac, trying to kill Mac at lunch recess this week. I know the mom and feel comfortable telling her what I have heard from my son. She assures me she will call her son at school right away and that she is not surprised because the same thing happened last year to her son when he was a first grader. That’s no excuse, she realizes, but she is sympathetic, as am I. What a horrifying phone call to receive, but also what horrifying news for me to hear that my baby is being harassed at recess.

Sailor has a fever and a tummy ache and I leave him home with my dad while I walk Mac to school.