The rapid decline of focus and care that families experience at the end of a school year is not always a sudden decline. For some people, it’s a steady one that takes months and months to reach complete burnout. For some it never happens at all.
But if you’re an overachiever like me, this decline requires only a few weeks before you’re gracefully accepting the Failing at School Award.
Husband and I do fairly well at the beginning of every school year, for at least the first couple of weeks. Everyone has matching shoes when they get to school. No one forgets their backpacks. Sweat pants, which are part of my boys’ daily wardrobes, don’t have holes in them yet.
And then my boys get really tired of being in school, and they become a bit more to manage. Husband and I don’t really have the time for “a bit more to manage.” And it starts weighing on us in increments: so many folders to sign, not enough pens that work, so much reading time spent with kids who take ten minutes to sound out four sentences.
We start giving up.
So by the time we get to the end of the year, our failures have accumulated in massive quantities. Recently I noticed it in the frequency with which our boys showed up at school the day of their field trips with no signed permission slips.
I won’t tell you how many times this happened, but, for context, we have three boys in school. The number of no permission slips was greater than the number of boys in school.
Don’t ask me how that happened; I’m still confused, too.
Half the time, I did not even see these permission slips. My sons’ teachers emailed me the day of their field trip or field day or movie day, asking me if I’d let them go or play or watch, and, if so, just send a note with the boy. If they only knew how hard it was to find a pen. I wrote my notes in crayon.
We missed all the teacher appreciation activities this year, not because we don’t appreciate our sons’ teachers but because it always happens the week of the second-born son’s birthday and I’m so busy planning a party that I can’t really juggle anything else. We know what the Age of Pinterest has done to parties, and even though I’m an underachiever when it comes to parties, I still try minimally hard.
So this year all the teachers got their thank you notes and treats a whole week late. Well. Good enough.
It seems like, at the end of every year, the kids are invited to a billion birthday parties. We receive about fifty percent of these invitations. We notice about thirty percent of the fifty percent we receive. We respond to about ten percent of the thirty percent we notice, and the boys make it out to about one percent of that ten percent.
Whatever grade you made in your statistics class, you can likely see that those are not great odds, but when you have a family with as many people in it as ours has, you have to make concessions everywhere. The five-year-old cannot go to twenty parties every year. The six-year-old cannot go to a party the same weekend his brother is playing a chess tournament. The nine-year-old cannot go to a party that starts in two hours because he “forgot” to show us the invitation four weeks ago.
One of my sons had a missing library book at the end of this school year, and I didn’t even realize it until I got this nifty little slip of paper that had the name of the book and a mug shot of my son. In large print, it said, “Book still missing from the library. Please return.” So we did, and the boy didn’t have to go to jail today for the crime of keeping Creepy Carrots here at home.
Since last September, I’ve been getting annoying calls from the school district cafeteria office, because on the same day, two of my boys decided to charge their lunch, even though they had a perfectly good lunch packed and ready for them. Another day, the third boy decided the cafeteria pizza looked better than his PB&J, so he joined his brothers with a lunch charge. And because schools don’t make it easy to pay for school lunches anymore, unless you have an online code that we lost way back on the second day of school, they’ve been calling three times a day (one for each boy) since the fifth week of school. I have three hundred forty-three messages from the cafeteria office on my phone. If you call me and my mailbox is full, that’s why.
They even called on Christmas. That’s dedication.
The boys’ wardrobe has gone seriously downhill, because, honestly, we’ve stopped caring. On the first day of school, my kids were dressed like the cool, clean boys they are. Now they wear sweat shorts with soccer socks pulled up to their knees, along with the dirtiest-looking shirt they could find in their closet. The oldest, this morning, stepped out of the house with both his knees flapping through his sweat pants and his ankles showing because he grew three inches over the course of this school year. It’s not important. They can look like orphans if they want. School’s almost out, and they’ll probably just stay in their pajamas all summer. Or, better yet, their underwear. It’ll save me a few loads of laundry every week.
Related to this wardrobe decline is the deteriorating state of their shoes. These poor shoes are only hanging by a thread (I know how you feel, shoes). The problem is, my boys are required to wear tennis shoes for their physical education class. And here at the end of the year, I don’t want to buy new tennis shoes, because summers in Texas cannot be borne in anything but flip flops. So if we buy them new tennis shoes here at the end of the school year, they won’t get worn. And by the time my sons start school in the fall, their feet will have grown three sizes. I’ll save my cash, thanks. Son number two can walk with flapping soles, for all I care.
The end of every school year cannot be mentioned without this failure: an increased number of tardies. I used to care about my boys being late to school, but, honestly, we’re all a little tired of trying to get to school by 7:40 a.m. When someone didn’t even climb out of bed until 7:15 because he stayed up too late eating the frozen pancakes I put in the freezer so they’d have breakfast this morning, there’s no point in really trying. It’s gonna be a late day.
When I was in eighth grade, I ran track and won the district gold medal in the four-hundred-meter dash. The first track meet of my freshman year of high school, my track coach thought it would be a good idea to put me, who was only used to running the four-hundred-meter dash, in the eight-hundred-meter run. This is not a dash, it’s a run.
I ran it like a dash.
I started out the race in first place. I finished the first lap with all the other runners two hundred meters behind me, and then I remembered I still had another lap. And then, because I still had another lap and my legs had already turned into floppy limbs made of pudding that I couldn’t feel anymore, all those runners passed me.
My pride was so wounded by that appalling race that I crossed the finish line with the biggest, most sheepish smile I could muster. When my coach angrily strode over to me, she said, “If I ever see you cross another finish line like a beauty queen, I’m going to put you in the mile.”
Well, personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with finishing a race dead last and looking like a beauty queen.
So I’m finishing this school year strong, with a sparkling smile and a wave.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Feliphe Schiarolli on Unsplash)
