The week before last, Seattle Schools closed for a full week because of snow. More often, the schools here close because of the mere possibility of the suggestion of snow. If someone on the top of Queen Anne Hill accidentally drops a bag of ice on the sidewalk on their way to a kegger, Seattle Schools shut down. If someone on Beacon Hill shakes a rug out of a window, releasing a cloud of dust that might be mistaken for snow, Seattle Schools shut down. If 7-11 has a sale on ICEEs, Seattle Schools shut down. I pass no judgment (and I’m a skinny blonde Olympic skier). Clearly three of those days needed to be cancelled, so let’s not go into the school closure on Tuesday (NO SNOW) and how often the schools here close unnecessarily. I know it’s complicated, and I know that the bottom line is that the schools are trying to keep our kids safe in terrain that can be unpredictably treacherous.
Despite the difference in weather, last week brought back visceral memories of last summer. Visceral as in viscera, blood and guts and tendons and stuff you would rather not think about nor touch. Here in the Skinny House (where I got wider during the week because of compulsive snacking on peanuts and abstaining from my recent abstinence), the Little Monster practiced math every day during the unexpected week off. Not only did he practice math, but the Man I Married suggested that it would be a great opportunity for the Little Monster to learn long division. The long division unit is coming up in school, and MIM insisted that he’d already taught this minor skill to the Little Monster, so it would just be a teeny weeny recap.
Had I learned nothing since last summer?
School let out for summer on June 21.
Math lessons began at home on June 22.
During the entire 77 days of summer (why does that number seem so much smaller than it felt in reality?), the Little Monster missed only a single day of math. He did math every day even during our two-week car camping trip. He did math on his birthday. Which means: his mother missed only one day of math, too. Genius Mom bought a book that didn’t include answers at the back. All of that work had better help to ward off Alzheimer’s for me. (But don’t tell the Little Monster that I still don’t know my times-twelves. I kept a cheat-sheet handy for those.)
But it’s only fair. If LM had to do math all summer long, why shouldn’t I? Oh, yeah, because I didn’t goof off and play Class Clown during math for the entire third grade, because I processed $1.5 million in payroll every month for a decade and thus am quite done with math and its negative connotations with calculating raises that were never mine, and because I can use something called a calculator.
He’s a stubborn thing, though.
“These are all great, Little Monster,” I might say when he brings me his completed homework, covered with holes that he’s drummed through the paper with his pencil so that it looks like it doubled as target practice. “You’re doing really well. You’ve got almost all of these correct! Wow! You’re making so much progress, but number six is not right. So please go back to your desk and see if you can correct that one.”
Let’s say that LM has written 13 as his answer.
He will return after a few minutes with his first 13 crossed off, with 13 carefully written above it, darker and bigger this time.
“That’s the same answer, Little Monster. It wasn’t correct the first time, and it’s still not correct. Try again.”
He will return a few minutes later with an arrow drawn toward the 13, and a note saying, “It’s correct.”
“Still not right.”
This will go on and on (not quietly on his part, I might add; he could put a grieving Ancient Greek to shame with his wailing and gnashing of teeth). He will fill up all of the white space on the page detailing why his answer is correct. The author of the math book is wrong (I did break down and buy a different book with an answer key, after I had a different kind of breakdown). His mom is wrong. The professors at MIT would be wrong. He is right, absolutely. He is eight, but he is correct.
One look at the math book and our little terrier begins trembling like cottonwood leaves in a stiff wind. At least she doesn’t piddle.
The only smart one in all of this is the Man I Married. “Great job, Mom!” he says to me. “You are really onto something with this. Wow. This is really good for him. Go, Mom!” He waxes poetic on the praise as he passes the math over to me to correct. The only time he couldn’t manage the handoff was when I was driving.
Somehow this happened again last week, when after suggesting that we “review” long division, he sealed himself off in the Barage to bottle cider.
Why do we torment the Little Monster like this? you ask.
Why not let the poor kid off the hook for a summer? Or for the snow week? Smell the daisies, eat the yellow snow (which he told me he did, reminding me of the toilet water conversation), blah blah?
Believe me, I asked myself that question every day last summer. Isn’t life good? Do I have to make it difficult? Who the hell cares about how to find the area of a square? Or the perimeter of a rectangle? Or how many weeks are in a year? Or what the equivalent fraction to 6/8 is? A machine can do all of that for us, now.
But on Monday, August 8, the Little Monster, for the first time, got every single problem correct on both sides of the homework page. I hung it on the refrigerator. We high-fived. We hip-bumped. We extra-desserted. This success was repeated on August 10. By jove, I think he’s got it! That’s why I’m doing it. No meltdown, no agony, no crying, no yelling, no tantrum, no Greek chorus. Breakthrough!
The Little Monster consistently tests right at the border of two grades. If 300 is the cutoff between third and fourth grade level, LM tests at exactly 300, across the board in all subjects. Not 299, not 301. It reminds me of my brother, The Agitator, who spent a great many hours computing the lowest score he could get on a test but still pass—instead of just studying for the test.
When the Man I Married voiced his concern to a friend about LM’s borderline passing of his grade level, the friend said, “Gee, considering his history, seems to me like that’s actually doing really well!”
Duh. Gosh, it’s nice to get an outside perspective.
But because of the work he did over the summer, LM successfully mainstreamed into the regular math class with his fourth grade classmates. He’d been having to take a hike down the hall to go to a “special” math class, and we all know how cruel kids can be to those taking the metaphorical short bus. So although we don’t necessarily care about his someday solving for pi, I realized why this arduous daily math was important: because it’s good for his morale and self-confidence, both of which are understandably well-below par. Helping him to be good at something is worth the time and aggravation, because he wants so badly to be liked (don’t we all?), and he makes bad decisions in order to fake everyone out, like being the Class Clown. And as he gets older, Class Clown will pale next to grim possibilities like gangs and drugs. Confidence and safety are the biggest gifts given to MIM and me by our parents, and I never even knew that until I met the Little Monster. I took both for granted. As all kids should.
Between LM’s achievement and the observation of our friend, I decided that maybe I could back off from the poor little guy. At the beginning of the school year, I met with his teacher and school counselors and confided that I thought that the math was hurting my relationship with LM (another DUH), and considering how hard we’d had to work on our relationship, I suggested to them that I not even look at his homework as I had in past grades. I needed to remove myself from the math equation. They heartily agreed. Not checking his homework every night made me feel like a bad, lazy parent, but the dog was happy. Everyone was happy. We were all so happy that we adopted LM, reaffirming the cosmic belief that math equations—particularly word problems—are the root of all evil.
When he asked me the difference between mean and median one night, showing me a chart he had to figure out and fill in, I refrained myself from saying, “Who cares? I’m 47 and don’t have the slightest idea, but that hasn’t hurt my career trajectory one bit.” The fact that my career trajectory is downwards is irrelevant. But I shrugged and said, “Ask your teacher.” It’s a feeling like when you finally cave in and buy a bigger size of pants. Such liberation! But also guilt and self-loathing. Ultimately this can’t be good but right now I can breathe a sigh of relief. Sure, I’ll have another peanut.
But a week of no school in January? No nothing? I could just as well allow that as I could keep my hand out of the peanuts during a claustrophobic, housebound week in which I ran out of gin. It’s one thing to abstain from alcohol while you have gin, which I’d been doing for months. But abstaining from gin while you have none is like having a loudspeaker in your kitchen cabinet making martini-shaker and ice-clinking noises, and then comes the dreaded “neener neener” taunts through a bullhorn.
Enter MIM and his suggestion of a long division “refresher.” Great. Easy. It’ll give LM a nice head start on the next unit, and won’t he feel great about that? Ahead of the mainstream class!
I came up with a strategy, because LM loves to dawdle and waste time. “Okay, Little Monster,” I said after going over a few dozen division problems with him. “Here’s a page of problems. As soon as you can get one page of problems done correctly, the rest of the day is yours to play.” MOTIVATION is key.
Three days later, with the dog a nervous wreck, I begged MIM to try explaining long division to LM; sometimes a difficult notion can click in to place just by having someone else explain it differently. MIM returned from his mission at the kitchen table thirty seconds later to announce to me, “He can’t do division because he doesn’t know multiplication.”
“Yes, he does. He had the whole multiplication table memorized last summer.”
“Not anymore, he doesn’t.”
His current teacher tells them that it’s fine to use their fingers, so he does. Of course he’s going to do what everyone else is doing. All of those hard-won memorized multiplication tables were out the window. I cast no blame on the teacher—I’m filled with wonder and admiration that the teachers manage to teach anything at all with kids like mine disrupting their classrooms. Plus, as a couple of friends reminded me, it’s possible that the kids still need this aid in order to understand the concept. The Little Monster is a haptic and kinesthetic learner (blame MIM that I even know words and concepts like that), so he learns best with touch and movement. Still, he had the mother f&ckers memorized, and we were back to square negative one.
“What are you looking for?” MIM asked me as I rifled through the yellow pages. “Math tutors?”
“Pawn shops.”
“But you can’t drive anywhere.”
“I’ll manage.”
“What, another tiara?”
“No, a gun.” For me, of course. Someplace where I wouldn’t leave a mess, and the gun would be loaded with just the one bullet so as not to cause an inadvertent gun accident if it went off after my swift demise.
“Okey dokey, how ‘bout I take over with the multiplication tables?”
“That’d be swell, sweetheart.”
“No problem, honey. You know, I think the road’s are clearing. How about I go get you some gin?”
“Thanks, shnookums. Just no bottom shelf stuff, okay, Bubba?”
“Of course not, Bubba Lu!” He returned home with a nice gin for me and a scotch that cost twice as much for him. Once I had a full bottle of gin in the cupboard, I had no need for it, and the cupboard harumphed itself back into silence.
I make suicide-by-gun jokes, although it still makes me sad that Meriwether Lewis took himself out that way. The man accomplished the unaccomplishable yet still felt hopeless. I use gallows humor because, 1) it’s in my DNA, and, 2) to illustrate how f&cking bonkers many moms I know felt during the housebound snow week. And they, to my knowledge, were not even doing long division. But they all, to my knowledge, were running out of booze and/or chocolate, and the distress signals from moms needing a fix or a break from their kids–or even a fleeting moment in which they felt like they’d accomplished one small task from start to finish–began to sound like Starlight Barking.
So now that LM’s re-learned his multiplication tables with the help of MIM and has returned to the classroom, do you think I’m going to be able to resist the urge to check his homework every night?
Damn straight I am. I’m going to beat that mother-lovin’ notion off with a stick.
I may have some daft ideas, but I’m not STOOPID. Parent involvement is important, but parent uninvolvement is more important for me and the Little Monster. We worked too hard to get to this happy place where I feel no anxiety about a small stranger who by some miracle and some tragedy became my son, and I can’t afford for that to go out the window in favor of 8×7. If I did that, somebody should hit me over the head with a 2×4.
“Jennifer D. Munro had me howling with [her] irony…” —Susie Bright, Best American Erotica Editor
“It was wonderful to read Munro’s eloquent, funny frustrations and confirmations.” —Eden, Clean Sheets Reader Comments
“…a resonant hoot!” —Paula, Clean Sheets Reader Comments
“…devastatingly relevant/funny…” —Rob, Clean Sheets Reader Comments
At the end of 2010, I 
I can say only one thing for sure about Bad Mommies:
I can’t imagine the gall it takes to call someone a Bad Mommy. Because if we are judging another mother, that must mean we think we are ourselves perfect. Which we are not. Oh, believe me, my eyebrows raise sometimes at other people’s parenting, and the Man and I Married and I congratulate ourselves heartily on the vastly superior job that we are doing. Then the very big Little Monster does something like have a protracted, screaming meltdown in the middle of K-Mart, a store that I’d largely managed to avoid for the last quarter century, and the eyebrows all raise in my direction. I pat myself on the back for allowing all of the parents in the store to feel smug about themselves for that small moment.
Because the Good Enough Mommies I know are a lot harder on themselves than on other mothers. So they need a smug moment or two.
Is it tempting to call her a Bad Mommy? Sure. Especially after two martinis (with the Little Monster tucked into bed with the stuffed animals that are frighteningly adept at procreating), and I find myself waxing poetic about the answers to all of life’s questions. She helps me to understand during these ridiculous Mommy Wars that it’s not about how much sugar or television we allow them, or what our discipline methods are, or whether we said a really bad word when the dump truck almost pancaked our car. It’s about doing our damndest to keep them safe.
How about we eliminate the term Bad Mommy and rename it Struggling Mommy?
Straight-no-Chaser Mom 