I have tremendous respect for those who do ass work. What bravery to hang one’s shingle out proclaiming “Practice restricted to diseases of the head, foot, throat, and ass.”
As we headed into the drugstore to fill Doog’s prescription, I wondered just how much this was going to set me back. The big pharmaceutical companies are reporting record profits while drug-poor seniors pop tops on Fancy Feast every night for supper. What do they do with all that money? They say it’s all about R&D, research and development, that is, which is not to be confused with R&B or B&D, both of which are infinitely more fun.
I also remembered early warnings from friends who said that preschool would set us up for all sorts of contagious ailments that would lay the kids out like tiny Old Navy–clad dominoes.
One mom told me that a mean strain of an intestinal bug was making the rounds, apparently spread by kids who didn’t wash their hands after making doody. She said it just like that, “making doody.” She’s forty-two and flies her own airplane. God help us all.
Because this bug could keep kids home for a week or more, I decided to spy on my daughter’s classmates to make sure they were washing their nasty little mitts with soap and warm water.
Sure, the staff asked me to vacate the premises after the first three weeks but I must tell you that my research revealed that you should probably never hold hands with little boys whose first initial is Tyler.
Back at the drugstore, the line was long. Everybody was sick, it seemed. It reminded me of the lines at the grocery store last year when all the docs ran out of flu shots, but, strangely, you could still get one at the Piggly Wiggly.
I still haven’t gotten past the whole grocery-store-as-health-care-center trend. I don’t want to have a glaucoma screening, blood pressure, or diabetes check at the supermarket. What’s next? Pap smears beside the succotash? Cardiac catheterizations sharing an aisle with the canned sausage?
After another half hour or so, we got the prescriptions filled and Sophie managed to make it to the letter M week without another ailment. But then…
Let’s just say it: There should be a reserved seat in hell—where Thomas the Tank Engine starring Peter Fonda in the worst children’s movie of all time plays on all sixteen screens at Satan’s Sin-a-plex—for parents who bring a kid with a 102-degree fever to school. (“What? She looks pale and clammy to you? Oh, she gets that from her father. Toodles!”)
Don’t they know they’ll be summoned back to school by the stern voice of the principal on the answering machine? (“Could you please pick up Tonya Sue? Her fever’s so high, the other kids are standing around her with marshmallows on sticks.”)
Meanwhile, every kid at school is incubating the latest butt-kickin’ virus and spreading it to the grown-ups at home.
The way I see it, thanks to some inconsiderate hussy who didn’t want to cancel her French pedicure, I have wicked pinkeye and sound as if I’m going to cough up a Passat. Wagon.
My daughter announced during Q week that her friend had missed three days of school because she had “the Romeo.”
It took some digging to discover that what she meant was pneumonia. Frankly, I liked Romeo much better and intend to use it if I ever feel my lungs rapidly filling with fluid. (“C’mon, Doc, don’t sugarcoat it; you and I both know I’ve got the Romeo.”)
It’s funny how when you try to correct kids, they can get downright belligerent considering that you basically control 100 percent of the Ring-Pop distribution in the household.
“It’s pneumonia, honey,” I said.
(Loudly) “No, Mommy, you must mean Ru-monia.” And, then, apparently in full preschool teacher mode, she added: “Now, watch my face and say it after me, rumoan-ee-ya.”
To which I just sighed deeply, suddenly very sad to have finished my wine, and dutifully recited “Rumonia.” Which can also be spelled Uncle.
Some parents have told me that, practically speaking, it’s actually a good thing to get these diseases out of the way now so the kids will be immune to them by the time they start Real School. That makes sense. I think I’ll just crash my car to make sure the airbags are working, too. Who are these M-is-for-mo-rons?
Of course alphabets and diseases aren’t the only things you learn at preschool. Last week, my daughter shocked me by asking for help settling a playground debate: did babies come out of your belly button or from Nordstrom’s?
Sex talk? At four? Oh, holy hell. I hadn’t planned this for at least eight more years.
Hadn’t I done the best I could do? Didn’t I yank Legally Blonde out of the VCR mere seconds after my daughter asked me softly, “Mommy, what’s a bastard?”
I launched a rambling ten-minute, age-appropriate discussion about how babies are a gift from heaven. So sue me. The exact details can come later, on the school bus or under the bleachers, where every kid learns them.
If the Romeo doesn’t get ’em, that is.
5
PRESCHOOL
Already?
Why We’d Rather Stay Home, Chew Gum, and Not Share a Little Longer
We didn’t send our three-year-old to preschool. Don’t get me wrong. Signing her up was on my to-do list, along with picking up the Clinique bonus gift with purchase, but I never got around to either of them.
My bad.
All of Sophie’s little friends, who had well-organized and clearly superior mommies, went to preschool, but I wasn’t all that impressed. Frankly, I figured my kid could color at home and I’m proud to tell you that, by staying home, she never missed a single episode of educational programming such as Dora the Explorer or Judge Mills Lane.
The funny thing was that every time I told somebody Sophie wasn’t in preschool, they would smile knowingly, and say, “Ohhh, you’re planning on home schooling her, aren’t you?”
At this point, I laughed so hard I busted a couple of ribs and paramedics were summoned.
Don’t get me wrong. Home schooling is fine for some folks. Maybe they’re concerned about school violence or declining morals. Maybe they believe their kid can learn better in a nurturing environment that stresses individual strengths and creative learning approaches. Or maybe they just hate having to miss the second half of Passions to shlep to the bus stop EVERY FRIKKIN’ DAY.
Home schooling? No way. I believe that education, like brain surgery and sausage making, is something best left to the professionals.
It’s not that I didn’t think about preschool when my daughter was turning three. I even visited a couple of them. One didn’t smell like poop and every little room had an aquarium with a hermit crab to torture. But then I heard about The Rules.
Parents had to provide the snacks and there was a looong list of “unacceptable foodstuffs” which basically included every single item in my pantry. Peanut butter was out because of possible peanut allergies. Grapes couldn’t be larger than your pinkie toenail. The whole thing made my head hurt.
Another preschool was just entirely too expensive at $6,000 a year. Plus, parents were responsible for laundering the art smocks every week. I’m thinking for that kind of money they should come to my house and hand wash my step-ins, am I right?
I had several friends who sent their kids to preschool with such rigid parking rules that if you parked incorrectly they actually called your grown-up self into the teacher’s office. My friend, Lisa, an ultra-competent mommy and big-shot corporate lawyer, was reduced to tears for a parking offense. I knew I’d never fit in. Somehow, the teacher would miraculously locate my old “permanent record” and would be only too eager to add a few negative comments. (“Forty years later, she remains a troublemaker who doesn’t apply herself. Sigh.”)
When Sophie turned four, the preschool pressure was too much and, frankly, I started looking at those nine hours a week when she’d be learning awful playground words like “bah-gina” (it’s taken me weeks to convince her that the medical term for “down there” is actually “woo-woo”) as a minivacation on the order of a trip to Bali, lounging in th
e sun, my every need attended to by a dutiful and buff cabana boy.
In our minds, it was already time to start thinking about Big School. It seemed like only yesterday that they had placed that tiny pink bundle into my arms and I was overwhelmed with awe and wonder. At least, I think I was. Hell, I was on so much Percocet, it may as well have been a squirrel monkey they placed in my arms but I’m pretty sure it was a baby.
Kindergarten? Already? My husband and I began to slowly and carefully freak out.
We’re a teacher’s worst nightmare. You don’t believe it? Consider that we spent several nights visiting kindergarten open houses and we carried clipboards.
So what? So this. We did this one year early.
Several teachers scrambled for their roll books and looked puzzled when we introduced ourselves.
“There must be some mistake,” they’d say. “We don’t seem to have your daughter’s name on our list.”
“Oh no,” we said. “No mistake. See, we are auditioning you. The princess is our only child and, frankly, we’re not getting any younger, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, so we want to make sure that she has the best elementary learning environment since we’ll be basically nodding off into our rice pudding at the home by the time she gets to junior high.”
“I see,” they said, not seeing at all.
“Hmmmm,” I said, “don’t you think these cubbies over here would be more attractive if you painted them in eggplant or sage so scuff marks wouldn’t show?”
“Uhhhhh—”
“Speak up! I can’t hear you!”
“Uhhhhhhh—”
“And this nest-building fighting fish over here,” I said, “he looks a little depressed to me. Have you considered letting him swim in a wide-mouthed vase filled with indigenous stones from North Carolina’s ruby mines? Here. I brought a bag just in case…”
“Yes, well, thank you…”
Sophie, rolling her eyes and doing an “Oh, Mommmm” that I hadn’t scheduled until puberty, scampered away to check out a Pooh program on the teacher’s laptop.
“Will all the children have a computer?” I asked.
“Certainly,” said one fresh-faced teacher who had developed a strange tic and was ma’aming me way too much. “We have three computers in each classroom for the children.”
“So that leaves you about nineteen short. Let’s work on that, shall we?”
“Well, it’s not that simple,” huffed an older teacher with eyeglasses on a chain. “There are budgetary considerations. We’re doing the best we can with limited resources and dwindling public support.”
“Oh, cry me a river,” I said. “You’ve got a whole year to fix this. That is”—and, here I paused for effect—“if we decide to come here.”
“Well, you know the plumbing’s awful in this school,” one teacher blurted out.
“Yes!” said another. “We haven’t had a decent flush here since 1998. And don’t get me started on the playground equipment. It’s so rusty we have our own tetanus ward.”
The whole experience was so traumatic, we decided to wait a year until we did, so to speak, have a dog in the fight.
Take it from me, hons. Selecting the right kindergarten is every bit as stressful as growing out your bangs. Foolishly, I timed these two life-altering events to take place in the same month.
When it finally came time to select a school, I was majorly stressed and it didn’t help that my bangs were in that maddening fall-in-your-face stage that looks so terrific on Helen Hunt but made me look like I was working undercover as a dying fern.
As the sign-up time began in earnest, we mommies began to wonder… Public? Private? Charter? Church? Technology, foreign language, or arts focus? Inquiry-based or traditional? Year-round or nine-months’ calendar? Magnet or neighborhood? Thin or hand-tossed?
We gathered in tight little circles on the freezing playground, scrutinizing test scores and ignoring our children’s screams for help on the monkey bars. Sure they sounded terrified and their faces were tear streaked, but, hey, we’re planning their futures here. A little help?
My sister, who doesn’t have any kids, said she didn’t get all the fuss as she heard me console yet another mommy-friend whose kid didn’t get in the private school where, she sniffled, “all the kids’ art looks just like Vincent van Gogh did it his own self.”
I heard it was a good school but knew we wouldn’t fit in. The teachers still wear Earth shoes and the parents have those annoying Kill Your Television bumper stickers on their perfectly aged Volvo station wagons. Losers.
“What’s the big deal?” my sister asked. “Don’t you just send your kids to the school closest to your house?”
I started with a review of inquiry-based learning and her eyes slammed shut and she began to snore loudly.
I couldn’t blame her. To someone who was neither dealing with kindergarten issues nor growing out her bangs, the whole thing must have seemed so shallow and self-absorbed.
I mean, planes were being flown into buildings; we were a nation at war, for heaven’s sake.
As it turned out, we chose public kindergarten at a magnet school so all that was left to worry about was my bangs. Oh, and that whole axis of evil thingy.
6
“PSSST—WANNA BUY SOME
Really Ugly Gift Wrap?”
Training Tykes to Be Telemarketers for Fun and Profit
Last week I spied a brightly colored chores chart on my friend Lola’s refrigerator, complete with thumb-sized magnetic cookies indicating that her four-year-old had made the bed, fed the goldfish, placed plastic juice bottles in the recyclables, and so forth.
Because our kids are the same age, I felt inspired to go home that very minute and create my own colorful laminated chores chart with headings including mow grass, replace rotted wood around dormers, take down storm windows and install screens, and so forth. I know what you’re thinking but we don’t have a goldfish.
This was going to be fabulous. Clearly the days of me running around like Edith Bunker fetching beers for Archie every time my daughter demanded more rainbow vanilla wafers were over.
The next morning, I told the princess that she would be starting her new chore life by making her bed.
“But you do that, don’t you?” she asked, clearly horrified.
“Sure, I always have, but you’re old enough to do it yourself,” I said. “It says so in all the parenting magazines. Besides, I’ve made this nifty chart and you get a dollar if you do all your chores all week.”
The princess rolled her eyes and went back to sleep. Maybe this had all been a bad dream. I imagined her dreaming of Norma Rae, standing atop her shut-down loom and demanding a wage increase or, at least, more
E.T. Teddy Grahams.
Who was I kidding? This was the same kid who required that I ask her to put her shoes on approximately seventy-three times. No, really. The other day it suddenly occurred to me that I had been slowly repeating “Please put your shoes on” in a monotone for the better part of an hour like it was some sort of demented mommy mantra. I sounded just like those airport recordings: “The white zone is for the loading and unloading of passengers only. No parking.”
Four-year-olds are selectively deaf, of course. They can hear the opening strains of Spongebob Squarepants if they’re twenty-six miles from the closest TV, their little ears pointing toward the sound, their nose high, a paw slightly raised. Yet they cannot hear you say, “It’s time to go. We’re going to be late,” if you’re kneeling with your hands on their shoulders and staring into their demonic little eyes.
I hear my boring self tell my daughter that when I was her age I was making my bed, feeding the oxen, and polishing my three-button shoes, but she doesn’t hear a word I say.
Although now and again, she does ask me what the white zone is.
Ironically, while you’ll have a terrible time getting kids to do chores around the house, it’s amazing to see how quickly they accept the notion of going door to door se
lling crap for their school.
With all this pressure to be a good salesman, schools are churning out tiny little future telemarketers and I’m sure that we’re all in agreement that that’s exactly what this nation needs right now, more telemarketers.
Oh, but if your kid sells $500 worth of popcorn, candy, candied popcorn, wrapping paper, greeting cards, magazines, coupon books, chances on a used Taurus, he’ll win a pink fur key chain shaped like a tooth that you know is worth precisely eighteen cents as well as the admiration and respect of the entire class.
They get the kids psyched up. You must win the key chain. And if you don’t, you’re stuck with a kid with Swiss cheese self-esteem. The kid’s in prekindergarten but if he doesn’t sell enough crap to win at least a little prize, he’s already branded as lazy, a loser, Not a Team Player.
The parents at a neighborhood school got so into the fund-raising that they all made dresses and hats out of the wrapping paper they would be sending the kids out to sell. Don’t any of y’all ever tell me I got too much time on my hands.
I’ve dreaded the moment that my daughter would be required to peddle junk door to door ever since I first found out I was, medically speaking, knocked up.
On the other hand, having bought enough of that junk from my newsroom co-workers back in my childless days, we were technically overdue. Now I’d be the annoying parent toting those damn boxes of foot-long chocolate bars their kids were supposed to be selling, the one who guilted friends, neighbors, relatives, and coworkers into buying one or six. Well. They are tasty.
Because we’ve already worked our ’hood for the Leukemia Society, Red Cross, and March of Dimes, my daughter and I are the poorly groomed version of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’ve seen our neighbors run when they see us coming, screaming to their children to get inside just like the mosquito-spraying truck was coming down the street or something.
We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier Page 6