The Real Meaning of Back to School Christmas

At the end of summer, I always feel like...

At the end of summer, I always feel like a neutered dog. I have this overwhelming groggy feeling with a huge sense that I lost an important piece of me somewhere, and I'm just sitting here asking myself, "What the fuck just happened?" 

I don't remember what summers and falls were like before kids outside of the smell of popcorn lingering across the bleachers at a high school football game while my underwear was frozen to my ass, which gave one of those gushing "It's Christmas" feelings in my chest. I love football season. I love autumn.

But now that I have kids, this is a time of year where the glory of sending them back to school is supposed to be a time to celebrate. Summer was full of days where the kids either had cabin fever stuck at home while I got things done, or we were out everywhere blowing pay checks on the cost of going to a pool, or goofy golf, or some little trip designed to amuse the children enough to cure symptoms of cabin fever like blind rage toward each other, walking on the walls, and climbing curtains literally and hope they actually fall asleep before midnight. (Note: I still have the Dora Blanket pinned up to my living room window courtesy of the children's summer redecorating program).

Anticipating the start of the school year reminds me of those days as a child when I anticipated vacation at Disney World or Christmas.

I expected this...

But then the reality of school sets in. The government isn't going to give you free babysitting for free. No. That would be too easy. You have to give them your soul for this trade.

Every year school begins, the schools start demanding a bunch of horse shit tasks of a parent that reminds them why they looked forward to summer to begin with. This year, I had the pleasure of enrolling my youngest in Pre-School. While excited that all 3 kids will be in school, finally, for the first time in my life, I was still hopping on one foot and then dancing on the other while rubbing my head and patting my belly to turn in the necessary paperwork and get the shots up to date and all the jive that comes with enrolling into school. Any time I showed the slightest amount of objection, the schools threatened not to babysit my kids for me. We all know the hardest most demanding job out there is that of a mother, so extra unnecessary tasks is what we love to add to our plate.

I wrote this one myself. Can you tell?

Then school starts and every morning in order to obtain free babysitting services, I have to get my kids there on time. On time. You might as well say, "You have to do a handstand every day with a duck's penis." I know some people are like, "That's not that hard," and duck's penis is not, but when it comes to parenting, those people either don't have kids or they only have like one kid and a bunch of supportive adults helping them. That's ok if you do get help, but you lose the high horse with that. I assure you when it's one woman doing all the work to get 3 kids somewhere, anywhere, "on time" is just not an option. But the schools mandate that we grow this tail out of our ass and defy the basic laws of physics.

One of my infamous excuse reasons on the sign in sheet at school describes what happens every morning with these kids. I'm willing to bet it went over most educators' heads because irony... The centripetal force of my kids is so strong it increased earth's gravitational pull [at our location] thereby slowing down time for us. That's precisely what happens on a metaphorical level, and possibly on a physical literal one as well. Time is relative, meaning it depends on where you are. It's so possible this is what happened to that hour that time you were wiping a butt one minute and then you moved onto finding shoes and you know that did not just take an hour to do, but according to the clock, yes it did.

I honestly suggest looking up the science to what I just said so you can teach it to your kids since the schools won't. And if you didn't click on duck penis earlier, you should. That's biology your kid won't learn at school.

Time Dilation for Dummies
Gravitational Time Dilation on Wikipedia


Common morning experiences getting kids ready for school... At least for me...

• all 3 kids decide they can't dress themselves
• they want to wear different shirt
• they won't wear anything but the dirty pink dress with a gaping hole in the arm pit
• they want to pack a lunch last second
• they can't find their homework
• nobody can find a matching shoe for the life of them (it's usually in the car)
• you forgot to make them take a bath the night before and you can tell by smell they aren't wiping right
• 2 of 3 kids refuse to let you brush their hair, so you chase them like a game of tag tricking them for each hair brush swipe before saying "fuck it go with bed head." 
• There's a pile of mysterious ketchup on the backpack
• The PreK kid's folder is covered, inside and out, in sticky wetness which requires the use of Fantastick and you just read in the 1st grader's folder that you have to fill out this form and turn it in that day and the 3rd grader isn't sure if she even brought her folder home
• You see an advertisement for Picture day and have a mini-heart attack that today could be that day before you realize it was last month or it's not until next week. This happens every day.
• You realize how messy your house is and find yourself uncontrollably cleaning a little or throwing in a quick load of laundry on your way out the door 
• You realize, usually about the time you are looking for your car keys, that you are wearing the same clothes you wore yesterday and the school might notice. Then you ponder about the costs and benefits to brushing your teeth as you change your shirt and hope nobody pays attention to pants. 
• You give 3 kids a shower at once, dry them off at once, dress them at once, find clothes and shoes for 3 kids at once, brush hair at once while they are asking things like, "Why does the color blue look blue?" and "Solma won't stop looking at me!" and "I want to take my fluffy unicorn to school with me, where is it?" It's really the mindfuck of all mindfucks.
• After 25 minutes of looking, you found the spare keys (nevermind the actual set you usually use) in a toy box in the closet in the kids' room. 
• You get everyone to the car for the first time, and one of them has to pee, they forgot something in the house, all now have to pee, or someone pees their pants, or falls into a mud puddle, or sits on an old milkshake your husband left in the car. 
• The second time you get everyone back into the car, the seat belt buckle won't buckle. She's in the front seat it's my turn to sit in the front. The Pre-K kid now wants to sit in the front knowing she's not allowed to. Someone wants to go in through the window instead of the door. The 3rd grader leaves the car to look at the rocks because we are taking too long.
• We start driving to school, FINALLY, and oh shit, I forgot my purse. I need the ID to get into the school building to drop of Pre-K kid. Turn around.
• Run in the house to get ID, and put all 3 kids back into the car because I took too long, which is any time longer than it takes for them to unbuckle themselves and "make themselves comfortable." 
• Show up 5 minutes late and deal with all the dirty glares from teachers and secretaries like I obviously just tarred and feathered my kids in the name of bad parenting. They do look at my kids with pity like, "Those poor kids have such a fucked-up mother." 

Dear teachers, can we not make this deal?

No seriously, I won't care that you gave my Gabby Logan's artwork in her folder if you promise not to care that her homework is covered in pancake syrup. I won't care that you give me my Gabby all hyper at the end of the day because you had her sitting still for most of it following absurd rules you made up for a false sense of control if you don't care that I do the exact opposite for cognitive growth and healthy psychological sense of trust, especially since I have no choice because you hogged all the quiet sit still time she could possibly give in a day. 

So by the time I actually get to school and drop them off, it's like I just left my stomach and working brain behind because it goes from complete chaos to complete peace in point five. It's so extreme it leaves me a state of blah for most of the day, too much so that I can't actually enjoy the few hours without the kids. The blah even smothers out the guilt of being late, or leaving a head unbrushed, or sending a kid with a lunch box full of marshmallows and fruit snacks, or a kid wearing black sweatpants with a navy blue top and sparkling pink slippers over stained, unmatching white socks. It doesn't really go away until I sleep it off all night, and the next morning, between the first cup of caffeine and the moment I have to wake up the kids for school, I feel human.

Then on top of it, schools are a melting pot of cooties like a hospital nobody disinfected. Yes kids have cooties. Lots of fucking cooties. And we herd them all into a school environment where it is managed, at best, with the occasional use of Clorox Cleanup Wipes. Kids can handle most cooties as their immune systems are developing and battling the germs like no other, but my immune system is old and set in its ways. It doesn't know what the fuck to do with all these germs, so every school year, I get sick. Usually within the first week of school, I'm sick, and I continue to be sick all year round, catching something new about the time I'm getting over something else.

So everything I just described, I generally do it with a sinus-induced migraine, sneezes, snot running out of my nose into my mouth while I'm trying to squeeze a kid into the wrong pair of pants.

Basically, at the end of summer, I feel blah. Numbing blah where I'm identifying what I'm looking at consciously, you know, like computer. That's a computer. TV, the noise is the TV. Dinner, that's something I have to make isn't it?

P.S. If you really think kids go to school to get educated, LOL you are naive. It's been nothing more than a free babysitting service provided by the government for decades. Check America out in how well we compare, in education, with other countries. They are not getting "educated." They are getting "conformed." I'm also not a hippy. I'm just not a sheeple. I'm the type of person who throws away the science textbook so I can read Einstein's notes. I'm such a rebel. No actually I had good teachers who didn't follow curriculum when I was a kid.

P.P.S. This is a blog post about MY FEELINGS. If you decided it was an invite to knock my parenting because you're so perfect (which you are not, you probably suck that bad-parenting cock down better than I ever could), I'm probably going to publicly humiliate you in several places.

For more Finish the Sentence Friday, check out the link-up on Finding Ninee