I listened to Lisa Lisa & the Cult Jam for this

“Sitting in my house, I can hear my son screaming and crying, which must mean the bus is here. I’ll interpret it as the harbinger of doom.”

As I typed that tweet, I questioned my mothering skills. I was sitting on my sofa with a cup of tea and my phone, listening to my son scream and tantrum outside, and my first instinct wasn’t to help him – it was to make fun of him. It made me feel like a crappy parent for about thirty seconds until he walked through the door and I learned the entire fuss was over a wet post-it note. That amount of drama should only accompany a botched kidnapping attempt – or at a minimum some type of bodily injury.

I wonder what my neighbors think. Am I supposed to panic and rush out the door every time my child wails? We discuss proportional responses at home, but he is theatrical. What makes him great on stage also makes him difficult to parent. He feels everything and expresses all of it and sometimes I feel guilty about trying to squelch that. There’s a fine line between teaching him to handle his emotions and criticizing his personality. Our emotions make us human. Too often, the process of growing up becomes not a lesson in learning to control our emotions, but a lesson in ignoring them.

When my son is upset, he shows it. He knows why. As an adult, I still have trouble showing emotion in front of people and sometimes it takes me hours, if not days, to reflect and figure out why I feel the way I do. I look away and concentrate on something mundane if I feel like I’m going to cry. I swallow my anger and grit my teeth because I never want to be perceived as “creating drama”. I busy myself with daily activities if I don’t want to think about something that bothers me. Essentially, every emotion I feel is expressed through quiet detachment.

But what is creating drama? And why does it have such a horrible reputation? Drama makes people feel. It makes us discuss and recognize our faults. Essentially, drama is conflicting emotion. So what is life if not drama? Isn't all great art, theater, and literature something that makes us feel? We all want to feel connected on a human level. I don’t want to win a competition of who can feel the least. I want to grow, learn, think, and make people – even myself – uncomfortable at times.

For all his faults, my son does make me feel emotion. Usually that emotion is anger if he’s screaming at the bus stop, but it’s something. It’s real. It's uncomfortable. It’s life. Luckily, I have a nice set of also-very-real industrial earplugs I can use to tune him out until he goes back to school next Tuesday. Perhaps I should offer the neighbors a set as an early holiday gift.

P.S. If you read this for Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam you are probably sorely disappointed. I'm not original enough to come up with a title and I kept thinking of their "Lost in Emotion" song, so I listened to it multiple times and then couldn't make the video link in. Frustration. This particular emotion I'm feeling now is frustration. Someone give me a cookie.

My daughter, the well-trained monkey

Standardized test questions:

1. What do you need to have a football game?
                (A) Matching uniforms

                (B) An electronic scoreboard

                (C) Players and a ball

                (D) Cheerleaders

               

2. Which of these do children need to learn?

(A)   A working knowledge of the school mission statement

(B)   Daily work habit data tracking

(C)   Books to explain the material they’re learning

(D)   Daily parent signatures in their school-funded FranklinCovey planner

Last night, I attended parent-teacher conferences at my child’s school. Thanks to Stephen Covey, our school no longer offers one-on-one interaction or feedback from my daughter's teacher; instead my daughter led me through our conference. In a cafeteria full of children, my child explained her leadership binder. We reviewed her goals and progress toward those goals. Her teacher bounced from family to family, trying to answer questions and address issues to the best of her ability in a crowded, noisy environment.

What did I learn during this conference? Nothing about my child’s grades that I didn’t already know from our daily discussions about her work. Nothing about my child’s teacher because she was too busy placating everyone to get to know me on any personal level. What I learned that my child spends a considerable amount of time charting progress against poorly-defined, irrelevant goals. I also discovered that she has learned the art of setting mediocre goals so, on paper, she always exceeds them without extra effort. She’s a well-trained corporate monkey

The kids have a school mission statement, a class mission statement, and a personal mission statement. They have homework and behavior data tracking, leadership roles and victories, and daily work habit reflections. They have everything except books.

Yep, you read that correctly. Our school system participates in The Leader in Me and is training my children in the art of corporate lingo, but won’t provide them with books they could use to learn. Instead, our school system only provides enough books for the classroom (not one per student) from sixth through twelfth grade.

Some (for our grade, some = ONE) of the books are available online. Perfect. We live in a high poverty area so, of course, each of these children can run home, pull out their new computer, and read their books over high speed internet. Is our school board really so out of touch with reality that they think that’s an option? Some of our population is so rural they don’t have access to high-speed internet and still have dial-up. That is not an exaggeration.

This means there is no book to study on test nights. No chapter that I, as a parent, can quiz my child over or review with her for content. Even the online book does not always work. Sometimes the website crashes. Other times it simply won’t load.

I’ve always been an advocate of public school. I don’t believe you fix a problem by running from it, but our schools are failing and our teachers know it. Our administration is so busy preaching politically-correct hogwash that they’ve completely ignored teaching our children to think. Mr. Superintendent, you are running a SCHOOL. You are selling out my children. You are not teaching them to become independent thinkers or supporting their intellectual pursuits; you are breeding sheep.

I'm lucky because my child gets the joke. After the conference last night, she made me a PowerPoint presentation in her free time. The irony of using PowerPoint to make a trained monkey slide did not escape her. When I clicked that slide, it made monkey hooting noises.

The biggest lie in leadership marketing is that everyone can be a leader. Leadership is not goal tracking or keeping checklists. Leadership is not using the word synergy correctly in a sentence – which my kids have been able to do since the second grade and it makes me want to vomit. Leadership is thinking for yourself and having the capability to analyze situations in ways that others cannot. It’s doing what is right REGARDLESS of what the people around you are doing. Leadership is standing up against a costly, ineffective school program and asking for BOOKS so my children can learn.

The chamber of commerce and school system have come together and paid so that each child can have a FranklinCovey planner. If I have to sign my child’s homework planner to make her accountable in sixth grade, I’ve already failed her. I have seven years left to help her before she leaves us for college. I have five years before she can leave my house in a car. Her homework at this age is not my responsibility, nor are her goals and progress towards them. Those are hers to own and do with as she wishes; my job is only to support her and provide the necessary tools for her to learn. However, she isn’t of the age where she can advocate for her own education, so I implore you, instead of a planner, would you please consider buying her science, math, and social studies books?

My future's so bright, I have to squint. I think I forgot my sunglasses.

“Finish your peas first. Then you can have a few chips.”

“Finish your homework. Then you can watch TV.”

“Finish remodeling the kitchen. Then we can have a party.”

According to some random conversation my parents heard on NPR, the ability to delay gratification at a young age is an early indicator of success. If a young child can grasp that 3 marshmallows in ten minutes is worth more than 1 now, he is umpteen times more likely to attend a decent university, select a desirable mate (or maybe none at all if he’s really smart), and live a happy, fulfilling life. 

I don’t buy it. Who the fuck did that research? In my experience, the best laid plans are guaranteed to fail miserably while the best things in life happen completely spontaneously. Compare candid photos of kids with with ones from a studio if you need proof.

On the left, an overpriced photo of my daughter screaming. On the right, a candid taken in her room with a $20 camera.

Don’t get me wrong. Saving a little for the future is a valuable endeavor. But what makes tomorrow infinitely more valuable than today? The future's so bright, I have to wear shades? I don't think so. Tomorrow isn’t a guarantee, and living as if it is denies our basic mortality. Perhaps that’s why everyone is so focused on it. It’s easier to plan for a future than to admit there may not be one.

A Facebook friend posted: “I've always instilled one thing in my children. Finish what you start. But what do you do when you find yourself at the same crossroad? Finish what you started? Or leave it with your integrity?”

Last week, I turned down a coaching job because both my 5 and 9 year olds started gymnastics classes and hated them. I let them quit, which also impacted my ability to coach. As we were leaving, someone asked me why I gave my kids the option. My answer? “Because I’m raising quitters.”

What the hell is so wrong with quitting? I was raised to be a quitter. My mom probably won’t appreciate that statement, but I mean it in the best possible way. How many people hang on to things that don’t bring them fulfillment? Horrible careers. Unhappy marriages. Toxic friendships. Commitment and committed have the same root word. Coincidence? I think not.

Why is it considered integrity to stick with a miserable decision? Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe circumstances changed. Maybe you changed. I’m not suggesting you pack it in the first time you encounter difficulty, but at some point, isn’t it actually better to move on? It takes bravery to admit that something doesn’t work and change it. There’s nothing I hate more than motivational phrases about perseverance. To what end to you persevere?

I quit all sorts of activities and my fair share of boyfriends and I don’t regret any of them – only the way I went about it when I hurt people. Sorry, Dan. I played the flute, the violin, and the piano. I danced for years. I was even a cheerleader for a while. (And I know that sounds like a joke, but it isn’t.)

Instagram doesn't offer a collage with enough spaces to illustrate everything I've quit.

Although I try to budget and prepare for the future, I place just as much importance on now. I don't live on credit or $20 dollars away from my house being reposessed, but I also don’t own guest towels. I use the nice ones every day. I lay out the silver for dinner when I want to, although not usually on cereal nights. The happiest people I know don't spend every minute squirreling away nuts for the future. I figure I won’t need nuts anyway – when the country goes to crap, a couple of bullets will be all I need to shoot my way to the organic aisle at Kroger.