school is dumb
even, or maybe especially? when I'm not the one going to it
I’m really on the struggle speed train lately, y’all. Very much struggle, extreme intense. Train is fast and has no stops, can’t get off until the end or unless I jump out the window and attempt a tuck-and-roll. I’ve written some snippets of things over the past couple weeks of feelings and moments and after taking those couple weeks off to hang out with Charlie before school plus the phase we’re in with him and baby J right now, I am also now very behind on too many client projects. Sounds a lot like I’m complaining and I absolutely am! Shit is hard. It feels hard because it is hard, a reminder I love to hear and share because it applies to all of us. It’s not hard because we’re doing it wrong. It’s hard because it’s hard.
That’s what she said. [It’s hard because you’re doing it right?? Heh.]
Anyway. I managed to write a couple things down during the first two weeks of school, which was really cute and simultaneously a shit show per usual with small children. The whiplash of parenting is potentially worse than actual IRL whiplash?! I don’t know, never experienced it physically so maybe that’s unfair, but either way, DIFF. ICULT.
So here’s some shit I wrote down about all the nonsense that was happening that week. My relief to be making it through these days is palpable sometimes but so is the helplessness and hopelessness that can accompany hard times with toddlers and preschoolers. Their irrationality breeds mine, and I just have to remember to use the tools I have - asking for help, therapy, other stuff I can’t think of right now because my collection of cups is mostly empty. There is like ONE SIP of cold latte left in my cup and I’m trying to pretend that it’s still enjoyable and will sustain me when really I need to go to a completely different coffee shop and get a fresh latte, maybe put it in an insulated mug this time so it stays warm longer.
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Today is the first day of school. The first day of the last year of preschool, the first day of a school year in which he attends 5 days a week and will be out of the house more than he’s in it during the day. He’s such a big boy now and I’m so sad and tired and desperate for more time and desperate for him to be out of the house and occupied and desperate for a schedule and routine for him so he will go the fuck to sleep at night and stop being a tiny hell hound between the hours of 6pm and 10pm.
Today is the second day of school. Charlie lost his shit over wanting yogurt, getting yogurt, but then not wanting yogurt, but then again wanting yogurt only a few minutes later when it was too late to eat the yogurt and I am not the kind of mom who will allow a 4-year-old to attempt eating a bowl of yogurt in the car. Hard no.
He was still very distraught when it was his turn to get out of the car, so I had to pull out of carpool line, convince him to get out of the car, carry him to his classroom, and sit with him for a few minutes while his teachers gently welcomed him into the room and got him excited about painting something. At that point I silently fled the room to be 18 minutes late to a meeting with a potential new client - a client I had never met and was meeting with for the first time to try to convince them I am a reliable and capable person to be in charge of a rather critical piece of their business. IT’S FINE.
Over the course of the day I’ve cried 4 or 5 separate times, dropped giant and at times loud f-bombs on my 4-year-old between a half and a baker’s dozen times. By the end of today my body was shaking. Hands shaking, chest shaking. And it’s only Wednesday, so we have to do all of this again tomorrow.
One good thing: the client is mine now, they were apparently not put off by my lateness or preschool drama. Proving there is good in humanity? I don’t know but it was a single thread I clung to.
Yesterday was the first full day of school for Charlie - lunch, staying until 2:45 in the afternoon, normal pickup in the carpool line, all of it. On the way there, he was playing with a Buzz Lightyear figure I think, and I didn’t turn any music on for once, hoping to avoid any spontaneous Moana or Encanto requests (better than other things he has asked for repeatedly. Lin really writes some bangers. 2022 was the year of Wizard of Oz, 2021 was Mickey Mouse Club, 2020 was I don’t know because that book is banned from my library. This year’s song will be either YMCA, something by Harry Styles, or The Beatles’ Octopus’s Garden. What a lineup.)
What was I even talking about, that parenthetical was way too long.
Ah yes, a fraught drive to school. Yesterday’s drive was actually NOT fraught, and that’s the point. Anxiety causes me to anticipate fraught-ness but a lot of the time the fraught never arrives, so I am just fraught, waiting to be so.
Anxiety is so great. Also, potentially wildly misusing the word “fraught” here.
We’re 2 stoplights away from the turn into school, and he pipes up quietly from the back: “Hey Mama do you remember yesterday [aka last week] when I didn’t want to go to school and I cried?” BOY DO I EVER.
He’s talking about last week, second day of school, when the entire morning went sideways almost from the moment he emerged from his room tossing his pull-up on my bathroom floor like peanut shells at a Five Guys. Careless. Disgusting. Way smellier than peanuts.
He lost his shit over breakfast, which show to watch, not wanting to get dressed, not wanting to wear shoes, then agreeing to shoes but not THOSE shoes, then refused to keep his seatbelt on throughout the drive to school, on one of Raleigh’s busiest and most dangerous non-interstate roads. FRAUGHT, as I said.
So, yes, I say, I remember. “Well I think today I’m gon’ be dat again, probly gonna do the same thing as den.” COOL COOL, I think, panic rising inside my body like a disco. Because I’m a genius, I say nothing. The final stoplight turns green, I still say nothing. He goes back to talking to or for Buzz, couldn’t tell, and everything is fine. He’s excited to wave to his friends out the window as we wind our way through school campus in the carpool line. He’s holding his hand up in a stop motion to the car behind me, to let them know they need to stop because he doesn’t know about brake lights yet. He hasn’t said anything else about “being dat again,” and I’m taking deep breaths silently in the front seat hoping this drop-off will NOT be fraught with anything, if only we can make it the final 25 yards to the drop spot where the super sweet volunteer moms (last year there were moms AND dads volunteering to get preschoolers out of their vehicles and this year so far, only moms, and I am not ok with it but we don’t have time to get into that today) greet him like they know him, help him hop down and get his free PBS gift-with-donation tote bag over his shoulder so he can hustle down to his classroom without a backward glance at me. “I love you!” I say, as he gets out of the car. “K!” he yells over his shoulder, hand on his head to keep the tote bag in place.
And now I’m fraught with something else, aren’t I?
Aside from switching tense inappropriately and way too often, I find these reflections to be interesting. When you’re IN IT, it’s hard to access all the data about how everything is fine and will be fine. It’s hard to remember you’re the best mom for your kid, because he’s your kid and no one else could do it the right way for him but you. When he’s making that intensely annoying whining noise, and you feel the need to wring necks and/or drive off into the sunset never to return, not even for 2:45pm preschool pickup and hope everyone can figure shit out without you, thinking they probably can, but hoping they can’t because then that means that all this shit you’re doing and enduring actually MEANS something.
It does. I promise, I tell myself. I promise it means something, it’s worth something. It’s just a phase, every friend with a kid who survived being 4 has told me. It feels like it’s not going to end but it will. Remember when baby J was 5 months old and I thought I’d never sleep again? Guess which baby loves to sleep 12 plus hours every night for almost an entire year now? These are things my rational Man-Piece reminds me. And when I can take a deep breath and access the data, I know it’s all going to be ok.
In the in between times, I’ve been jamming to this extremely random song by an extremely random indie artist about running away. I have been playing it on repeat in the car, turning the volume up loud like I’m 16 busting the factory speakers on my 2000 VW beetle, and singing about running away because I know I won’t, and I know I don’t *really* want to, but it feels good to think about and it say it out loud.
Do you ever want to run away? Yes.
Is it all going to be ok? Yes.
kbye.
