This Is Us
I Miss the 100 Days of May
Notes on parenting in the infinite present
For parents of school-age kids, May is filled with end-of-year concerts held in auditoriums with the acoustics of a school cafeteria, because it is the school cafeteria. These events are lovely and life-affirming, but they often start at nine in the morning or three in the afternoon or, occasionally, at the almost working-parent-friendly hour of six at night, which can still be impossible for anyone commuting during rush hour. May is also Mother’s Day, that special Sunday when your family insists that you not do the laundry or the cleaning, which just means you have more laundry and cleaning to do on Monday.
May means that every final project is due in every single one of your children’s classes, as if the teachers are unaware that the student has more than one class or that any family might have more than one child. And, yes, the projects were assigned in March or perhaps even in January, but my children have always waited until the last minute. And because they get this penchant for procrastination directly from me, it’s difficult to be mad about it, although I certainly have been mad about it for many Mays running. Because a person can only stand so many days in May being told by their children that they must be taken to the store right now to get poster board, and poster markers, and popsicle sticks. Will the side of a regular cardboard box covered in printer paper suffice? No, it will not. Will regular markers work or do you need poster markers? Poster markers. Obviously. Can you use the sticks I’ve been saving from the popsicles you’ve been eating since it got warm out? Mom. That’s disgusting.
And the point is not that I bought extra poster board last May, or that the markers I bought along with it should still work, if only my kids could remember where they left them. The point is that those things aren’t here now. And they need them now. Like right now.
And sometimes in May, when it is late on the night before the project is due, I take pity on them and offer to help. But they are wary of my artistic abilities and also the teachers have lectured them (and the parents, via email) that this is the student’s project and not the parent’s project and that the teacher will absolutely…
