I love you so much I didn't make you cupcakes

If you didn’t know already, I went back to work about a month ago. It was completely random and unplanned – the company I worked for years ago called and offered me a position that I didn’t apply for. In fact, I don’t even own an updated resume and haven’t officially applied for a job since college. So with absolutely no warning or preparation for my family, I went back to work. Now that I’m a month into it, I can safely say I love my job and have nothing to complain about. It’s like I’m not even me anymore.

Then, yesterday, I was talking to one of my son’s teachers and she made a passing comment about how sad he seems. She asked, “Do you think he’s having a hard time with you going back to work?”

That question weighed me down for the rest of the day. Ten years ago, part of the reason I quit my job was because I didn’t feel I could do everything well and I’m a compulsive perfectionist. I felt guilty. Maybe I didn’t give my son enough time to adapt or prepare him. Maybe he’s miserable and it’s all my fault.

After school, I asked him if he was okay. He said, “Fine.” But later, I found this on my bed:

My ten year-old son's ability to communicate blows me away. Most grown-ups aren't emotionally astute enough to recognize "what really stresses me out is my expectations for myself."

So last night he and I talked. His sadness has nothing to do with me working at all. He’s upset about the dynamic in his math classroom. He’s frustrated because he feels he and one of his teachers can’t communicate and math has always been his best subject. Yes, he’s upset, but it has absolutely nothing to do with me. And as we talked, he came up with a plan for how to handle his problems.

He let me off the hook. It isn't my fault. Even when something goes wrong in my child's life, it isn't always my responsibility to fix it for him. Last night reminded me that working doesn't change my relationship with my child.

This morning I woke up, helped the kids get off to school, and then sat down to check my work email. But instead of opening Outlook, I opened Word and wrote this.

Dear C,

I love you so much that I didn’t bake you cupcakes. I taught you your alphabet and read to you and made up silly songs with you, but I didn’t worry about looking perfect in front of the other moms in your class on party days.

I love you so much that I didn’t hover in your classrooms while you were trying to learn. I’ll always fight for you to have a fair chance, but I’ll never fight for you to have special favors or privileges. You know how to work for those and gain them on your own merit.

I love you so much that I don’t buy you gifts other than for holidays and birthdays. I don’t bribe you for grades or to perform at sports or to do your best. I don’t offer rewards for good behavior and discipline. But I know from your attitude and perseverance that you know those things are their own reward.

I love you so much that I never did your homework for you. On the nights when it was difficult and you wanted to give up, we talked and cried through it and your grades always reflect your hard work.

I love you so much that I never did try to solve your problems for you. I will always be your biggest fan, your sounding board, and hopefully the person you can tell anything to. But I also have faith in you. Faith that you can handle life when it gets rough. And no matter where I am in this world, I’ll never be more than a phone call or FaceTime away for you.

I love you so much that I won’t live through you. I won’t pressure you to do or be anything for me. I’ll have my own interests, my own life, and I won’t make you fill a void in me. I love you so much that I want you to have the opportunity to be exactly who you want to be – for yourself.

Love,

Mom

This is definitely not a poem

I know very little about poetry. I like things that are juvenile – things that rhyme – and most poetry makes no sense to me. A poem is supposed to have a meter and a flow which all sound great in theory until I read one.

So I wrote a jumble of words. Is it poetry? Honestly, I don't know or care. It's definitely a mixed meter. When I write – no matter what it is – all I want is to feel something. I hope you feel something too, but I’m not selfless enough to write for an audience. I want to make myself laugh or cry or think because most of my waking moments are spent trying to dull or ignore those emotions.

I’m not supposed to laugh when my husband and I are arguing, or when my kids are upset, but I do. I’m not supposed to cry when my kids are singing with Miley Cyrus in the back of the minivan on the way to dance lessons, but I do. And thinking? Well, I either do too much of it or I shut down and do none at all. But at three in the morning, everyone is asleep and I can feel whatever I want.

So no, I don’t think this is poetry. It’s a jumble of words that mean something to me. Oh, and they rhyme sometimes because I like it.

Every time I think of you

I pop an elastic band around my wrist
– it’s painful, too –

to clear a thought or memory

of things you never did to me.

More a habit, never love,

now it’s not you I’m thinking of.

A mindless blank, an open space,

my thoughts of you they do replace.

They’re uncomfortable like misfit pants.

Better discomfort does remain.

I’ll always choose to pick my pain.

I’ll find a thought to swaddle me.

You’re not even a memory.

Porn, Predators, and Pinterest Projects - Oh, my

Ah, the horrors of the internet. We all fear what our children will be exposed to - porn, predators... My 5 year old’s newest obsession is You Tube. She pretends to be incompetent when we ask her to clean her room, but if we look the other direction, she takes her Barbie movies over to the computer and copies the words off them into the search engine to find related videos. And what she’s found is shocking. There is a whole segment of the adult population that spends their spare time recording themselves playing with dolls. Not blow-up dolls, which is what I would’ve expected her to find, but real, actual dolls. Then there are others who construct doll accessories.

Three days ago, (the first day of summer vacation) my daughter started begging to build a bed for her doll, Elsa. At first I thought she’d dreamed up the idea on her own and warned her that I'm not a preschool teacher and her expectations were a bit too high, but then she showed me the video of a guy named Chad Alan who constructs doll beds. Chad, if you’re reading this, I beg you to stop making doll beds and go drink and get laid like everyone else your age. You’ll have plenty of time when you’re frustrated and middle aged to do this shit. Trust me. You’re ruining my life.

But guilt makes people do funny things. This is the time of year I feel pressure to round out my children’s education and teach everything they can’t learn in school. So while most people are probably sleeping in and enjoying their first weekend with no homework to contend with, we’re building a bed for Elsa. See? I do things other than criticize our school system in my spare time occasionally. My 5 yr old and I are breaking down the problem of making the bed and working on it together. What supplies are used in the video? What do we have around the house that could be used instead? Does she want to spend her own money on supplies or use substitutions from our recycling bin?

Since I’m so thrilled with this experience, I thought I’d give you pointers on how to build one, so you, too, can share in my misery. Our bed is shamelessly plagiarized from Chad’s example, seen in the picture below.

But we don’t have beautiful Christmas icicles randomly lying around, or perfectly cut Styrofoam, or a professional, matching star, so we had to improvise. This bed cost us $0 and only a marginal amount of my sanity since there wasn’t much left to begin with.

Things we used:

Wooden BBQ skewers

Craft beads and sequins I’ve had in a box since high school

Blue craft paint/brushes

A cardboard shipping box from Nancy Meyer (I highly recommend skipping making this bed altogether and shopping at Nancy Meyer instead)

Clear plastic forks

A spare piece of scrapbook paper that sort-of matches

A clear plastic sunflower seed container (or any plastic food container you're ready to dispose of)

A glue gun

Clear school glue

My 11 year old daughter

Step 1: Cut the box into bed pieces & paint the pieces and 5 skewers. If you want to skewer your child before you finish this section, I recommend you abort the project because it only gets worse. Also, enjoy your child's enthusiasm now, because it'll quickly diminish.

Step 2: Cut part of the plastic container into something vaguely shaped like a snowflake and add sequins with clear school glue.

Step 3: Break the tongs off the plastic forks to make them look like icicles.

Step 4: Glue sequin and scrapbook paper decorations to the headboard and footboard.

Step 5: This is where the magic happens (and there are no pictures to prove it because I can't hot glue and take photographs at the same time). Hot glue the bed pieces together. Glue a skewer to each corner and add decorative beads to the ends. Cut the 5^th skewer into smaller pieces (regular scissors worked fine for this), add similar decorative beads, and stick them on the headboard. Then sick the plastic-fork icicles in between and hot glue them, too. Fold the rest of the scrapbook paper over the bed as a sheet. Then coerce an 11 year old to make a pillow out of random fabric so you don’t have to.

Presto! You have a bed for Elsa, hopefully a child who is more enthusiastic than mine, and no fingerprints, thanks to the hot glue. Today is only the 3rd day of summer. I'm not sure how much longer I can pretend to be an engaged parent. I wonder if Chad Alan wants to babysit.

"The Leader In Me" Doesn't Make Leaders

Transitioning to middle school is a nightmare. We all remember it. Horrible hair. Acne. Stinky, maturing bodies and being forced to shower after gym class.

A few nights ago, I went to a parent orientation for my oldest child, who is transitioning to middle school.  Hidden amongst other agenda items, such as getting the kids excited to use their cell phones during school, was the schedule. Three academic blocks per day, one leadership block, and two electives. That seems okay, right?

But wait a minute. Math. English/Literature. Science. Social studies. There are four main curriculum objectives and only three blocks. When I questioned the guidance counselor about this during the meeting, he explained that both Math and English/Literature each receive one block per day. However, Social Studies and Science share a block. The kids alternate between them.

I seem to be the only parent mortified by this. Leadership receives structured time during my child’s day. Every. Single. Day. But what is leadership? Leadership is  program called “The Leader In Me,” run by none other than FranklinCovey – a for-profit business. Businesses and civic groups in our area have gone together to purchase my child’s time to indoctrinate her with bad middle-management buzzwords.

The goal of this program is to instill children with self-worth and a social toolkit to work with. The problem is that self-worth isn’t found in knowing the definition of the word synergy. It isn’t found in tracking metrics of daily progress in which the child spends more time tracking progress than actually making any. Leadership is not a skill that is taught. Leadership is earned. It is earned by a person’s actions, in the way one approaches the world. In is earned with skill in a particular field, in the mastery of an idea, in an ability to communicate with others. And how does one learn to approach the world? How does one choose their particular field? How is one driven to master an idea and communicate it? Education.

My daughter is being screwed out of her science and social studies education by local businesses. She might be a geologist. She might be an art curator or a political science professor. She might hate all of it. I’m not saying she’s so smart that we need to design her special curriculum or that she’ll master every idea taught. I’m saying that, in a public school system, she’s being cheated out of the opportunity to even try by organizations that have nothing to do with education.

I vividly remember 7^th grade biology. We dissected a frog. I hated it to the point that I swore I’d never take another biology class that wasn’t required. And I didn’t. One of my criteria in choosing Chemical Engineering was that it didn’t require one biology class. So does 7^th grade science matter? Absolutely. Other people thrived on that experience. Many of them are friends of mine who are now physicians. But my daughter will only be exposed to half of the material I was exposed to, because instead she’ll be learning leadership.

What about social studies? So maybe the history of the world isn’t my favorite subject, but I believe my child absolutely needs to be exposed to it – now more than ever. The internet puts everything on the planet immediately within our grasp. Almost every large company is multinational. In order to understand other cultures, to conduct business with them, you must have a reference of their history. This is habit 5 – seek first to understand, then to be understood in action. Don’t teach my child the leadership slogan. Give her the education to actually practice it instead of preach it.

Who teaches leadership? I don’t believe there is a bachelor’s or master’s degree offered in the course, so who is qualified? Our school system has even changed their graduation requirements so leadership is required, unlike typing, a skill which would be highly beneficial in today’s society, even to those who don’t choose to pursue advanced degrees. This means even if I want to use that portion of my child’s day to educate her, I CAN’T. That isn’t required by the state, just my school system, courtesy of FranklinCovey. Parents would riot if their children were forced to flip fries for a portion of their day, sponsored by McDonald’s. Maybe when that becomes a graduation requirement, people will finally start to fight back.

I was so worried about this that I called the Ohio Department of Education to discuss curriculum standards. Those guys are worried – not just for me, but for the entire state. Since the funding for testing has been cut, there is no way to hold schools accountable for what they teach. In our pages and pages of laws and drivel, there is not one place that requires a certain amount of time or teacher contact hours for social studies or science. So sadly, there is no way to legally pursue a change for my school district. But why are laws and lawsuits required to convince schools to do their jobs? Shouldn’t their mission be to expose my child to the broadest range of topics possible, and provide enough depth for her to learn what her strengths and weaknesses are? Isn’t our goal to prepare her for competence in whatever her chosen field is, along with a social conscience to make her an engaged citizen?

If I had one wish, it would be for our school to conduct an anonymous survey and ask the children what they really think of "The Leader In Me." Most high school students use expletives to describe it, although they would never come forward to say that in a classroom because the pressure from the school system and our community is too high. My almost-7^th-grade daughter says it’s a complete waste of time. In her words, the kids who are doing well don’t need it because they already have those skills, and the ones who need it aren’t listening anyway.

I’m sure this will be an unpopular post. Almost everyone I know buys into “The Leader In Me” hook, line, and sinker. And I’m not saying the program doesn’t have some merit or things it can offer. To this point, my annoyance with it has been offset by the fact that I never felt it interfered with my daughter’s education. Yes, it’s agitating to fill out metrics and silly forms, but lots of us have to do that garbage at work either way so she might as well get used to it now, although if you really think about that statement, it is TRAGIC. Leadership as an elective? No problem. 

But leadership in the place of science and social studies? Think of that on a grand scale. What would happen to our country if that were a priority? Science innovation done mostly overseas. Other countries controlling American interests because we’re too culturally unaware of the world around us to know better. Wait. Maybe I’m the one who missed something. Maybe this school system IS preparing my kids for the world they live in.

I'm finally endorsed by medical science. It's about time.

I haven’t written in quite a while, partially because my life keeps pelting me with lemons and partially because I’m too medicated to think coherently most days. Six months ago, I herniated a disk in my back. The week I was allowed to return to the gym, my main mechanism for coping with life, I developed shingles on my face, and now I have something called postherpetic neuralgia, which is fancy way of saying a painful itch that may last forever. If you made it through this paragraph and are still reading, I’ll count you as a friend, because the truth is no one wants to hear a list of symptoms when they ask how I’m doing. Granted, you didn't ask. But I digress...

Pain is a funny thing. Everyone experiences it, yet we’re highly skeptical of it in others. We criticize people who we perceive as whining or drug seeking, yet medicate our own pain with ice cream or television or alcohol while simultaneously touting our high pain tolerance. And no, I’m not using this post to justify developing a drug habit, although it seems like a viable option. Most of the drugs I’m offered cause weight gain and while heroin isn’t covered by my insurance, its weight loss benefits would more than offset any inconvenience.

My friends and family tolerate my responses when they ask how I’m doing. Then, since they are not ill and are thereby experts in living, they gently offer tips so that I, too, can be well like them – relax, listen to calming music, do yoga, think positive, eliminate gluten, eliminate red meat, use sulfate-free shampoo, take supplements. Not one of my well-meaning family or friends suggested making it worse. Sometimes I wonder if they know me at all. Just the suggestion of positive thinking makes me break out in hives.

In a move that seems counter-intuitive, this week I decided to make myself more miserable on purpose. You see, relaxing and listening to calming music isn’t all that great. It’s boring, and since I’m bored, nothing distracts my mind from my extremely painful itch. When kids get immunizations, they’re generally offered candy afterward because pain is all about perception and kids are distracted by lollipops. I am too, but my jeans are already perilously tight from lack of exercise so I decided to try a different method. If I’m in more misery than my painful itch can supply, it by comparison will not bother me as much. So I cranked up Eminem's aptly-titled song Desperation and hit the gym, relaxation be damned. And it helped. Instead of sitting on the sofa relaxing (i.e. scratching), my gym time motivated me to do some research (i.e. text my brother, the anesthesiologist).

And to my surprise, I stumbled across a real medical theory that should be called making-it-worse-on-purpose (to make it easier to search on Google), but is referred to as the gate theory of chronic pain. This theory is simple: cause yourself so much pain that your nerves are incapable of producing enough of the pain chemical to keep up – essentially beat them at their own game. While the proposition sounds warped, I’ve actually considered burning my skin with an iron to stop the itching, so I’m open to suggestions, even from crazies on the internet. Yesterday I started frying my skin with capsaicin cream every few hours and the pain feels fantastic compared to that horrible itch. I feel so good that I’m awake at 4:00 am writing again for the first time in months. My husband winces when he kisses me and says I burn his lips, but he really should think positively – I can still make him tingle.

I already knew making things worse was cathartic. I do it every day. I complain about my husband, my kids, and my life and I make myself laugh so when it comes time to actually deal with my husband, my kids, and my life, I can smile. My warped approach is endorsed by medical science and clinical trials. Pain is all about perception. If you can make it worse and still live through it, in the end it’ll probably all be okay – well, after the hospital bills are paid off.