the kid

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Waiting Room Woolgathering

I am in a waiting room at the car place while my vehicle undergoes repairs for yet another recall. In fact, this is a re-recall because I already had this particular issue addressed a couple of years ago. Or, not addressed, apparently.

There is one other woman-presenting person in the waiting room with me. She just consented to a $160 tire alignment. I am 95% sure that the service member who came to speak with her referred to her as Suzanne, and the service person who checked me in already told me my car’s alignment failed. What are the chances that two Suzannes would both have failed tire alignments at the exact same time?!

It’s been kind of a rough start to the school year. Or maybe not rough so much as nonstop busy? None of it is BAD stuff; it’s all stuff that we’ve done or chosen on purpose. Well, except for the leak in our pool. No one wants that. I think it’s like this every year, and I simply block out the memory of the frenetic bustle of it all during the relative calm of the summer months. Annual or not, I currently feel like I’ve jumped into the middle of an ice-cold lake and I’m not that strong a swimmer.  

What I really want to be doing is spending my days walking, writing, and hanging out with my cat. That sounds like my ideal level of interpersonal interaction right about now.

Ignore the doorbell and the dishes and the laundry and the fact that you need to pick up your kid and the neighbor’s children from school and lie down with meeeeeeeeeee…

In practice, I’ve been spending an average of two hours a day in a school gymnasium, making conversation with other parents, cheering for our kids, and trying to stave off butt and back pain from the relentless discomfort of the bleachers. (This little purchase has helped quite a bit with the latter.) Or rushing to/waiting around my house to discuss various home maintenance and repair and improvement projects with a parade of vendors. Or scrolling aimlessly on my phone in an attempt to stay awake while my daughter finishes her homework (she hasn’t gone to bed before eleven a single time this school year). Or driving to or from school and/or sporting events. Or working on a volunteer project, which involves both in-person meetings and a group chat. I remain terrified of group chats.

This is all, like, totally normal parent and life stuff and yet I am feeling overwhelmed and overextended and wholly unsuited to any of it.

Let’s just hope this is all an ADJUSTMENT period, to which I will ADJUST. My kiddo, by the way – who is the one DOING THE SPORTS AND HOMEWORK which is quite a bit more strenuous than observing those things – seems to be handling everything with much more grace and much less whining than I am.

On the plus side, I have not cooked a single meal all week. On the minus side, I did buy ingredients to make a giant salad several days ago and I am pretty sure they are all gradually rotting into inedibility in my fridge.

There are five of us in the waiting room now. One of the staff members has chosen this very moment to vacuum the floor of the waiting room. Why now, buddy? It’s not like someone just spilled a bag of chip crumbs or anything. The floor looks perfectly clean. Is this a conscientious objection to the inanity of Jenna & Sheinelle, which I didn’t know was a show? Is it passive aggressive proof to his manager that he is Doing His Job? Puzzling.

Those of you with better memories and/or experience with middle school and high school kids, is this just… How Things Are? Carla goes to school, goes to sports, scarfs a quick and less-nutritionally-balanced-than-I’d-prefer dinner, immerses herself in homework, goes to bed, repeat. There is literally no time to do anything else. She doesn’t have a spare ten minutes to tidy her room or practice her instrument or go visit the neighbor dogs. The only time we talk is in the car or over a hasty meal of fast-food nuggets. We’ve been sacrificing a traditional breakfast in favor of a few more minutes of sleep, and she’s been eating ants on a log or drinking a smoothie in the car on the way to school. Our only “non productive” time is the five minutes of cat videos we watch together every morning, and the ten minutes I spend reading to her in bed every night.

(By the way, I am currently reading her this book, which I remember liking when I was a kid, although not enough to read any of the other books in the series. But I am finding it boring and kind of dumb???)

My husband thinks that it was like this for him when he was in school. My mom thinks it was like this for me when I was in school. But I have no recollection of doing three to five hours of schoolwork every night. Maybe in college, but even then, only when I had a paper due the next day. Three to five hours of schoolwork seems BONKERS, let alone doing it on top of two to three hours of Sports.

I keep spiraling about Carla’s commitments. The spiral starts with: This is too much! This school isn’t right for Carla! Something must be wrong, either with the teachers or with Carla’s ability to do the work! Should I email the teachers? The principal? Should I encourage Carla to email the teachers? The principal? Should I make her quit Sports?

Then eventually (sometimes with help from my much chiller husband) the spiral makes its way around to this: But Carla seems to be doing okay. She’s tired, sure, but isn’t that true of ALL teenagers, EVERYWHERE? The other parents I’ve talked to say their kids are doing similar amounts of homework, and going to bed similarly late. And none of them are pulling their kids out of school or making them quit the team or marching into the principal’s office demanding Action. And Carla really seems to enjoy Sports! She’s getting better, she seems to be making a positive contribution to the team. The physical activity is certainly good for her. As is the social interaction. She seems to be completing her homework, even if it’s late when she finishes it. Her grades are fine, so far. And her own father says that this is How It Was even back in the golden era of the nineteen-nineties.

The calm doesn’t last particularly long, though. It doesn’t help that I am also getting less sleep than I prefer, and I’m much busier than I prefer. Maybe once those things resolve (will they resolve?) I will be more zen about Carla’s level of busyness.

Speaking of being more zen: The last time I posted here, which was eons and eons ago, I mentioned my fret about feeding the sports team. THANK YOU for pointing out that doing such a thing is inadvisable. I spent the first three weeks of school not signing up, and simply taking Carla some nourishment to eat between games. She eats WRAPS now, can you believe it? Ham, tomato, and lettuce. (I wrap the tomato and lettuce in the ham, so they don’t soggify the tortilla.) (Yes, we have decided to throw caution to the wind and get back on the lettuce train.) Other parents have been signing up to provide sustenance, and I have been observing what they bring. They are not bringing dinner, they are bringing SNACKS. I can totally bring snacks for the team. That’s much less daunting than providing an entire meal. Thanks for talking me down, internet.

And there’s the service guy who checked me in. My car is done, and so is this post.

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Summertime Schedules

For the most part, summer has been great. Carla, I think, has had a good mix of being in camp and not being in camp. It’s been a good mix for me, too, because I’ve had some nice chunks of Not Driving. We could be doing more friend get-togethers, but those have proven surprisingly difficult to arrange; I’m assuming everyone else is in the same boat of trying to work vacation and camp and downtime into the remaining days before school starts.

The hardest part of summer for me is the lack of a set schedule. Sure, it seems nice, to have loose lazy days where we do not much of anything at all… but in practice, I end up feeling kind of yucky about it. I think if we had a more rigid schedule on most days, an occasional lazy day would feel more like a break than a waste of time.

Well, it feels quite late in the game to be thinking about re-jigging our schedule. Especially as we have both a two-week vacation AND another full week of sleepaway camp coming up which will throw everything into disarray.

It feels kind of stupid to be stressing about schedules in the summer. And yet, I persist. The stress is the result of two pressures. No, three pressures:

  • Academic Pressure: I want to make sure that Carla stays engaged in things that challenge her brain and encourage critical thinking. Plus, she has a robust array of summer assignments she’s supposed to complete.
  • Sports Pressure: Carla is an active, athletic kid who likes to participate in sports. We’ve never gotten into the whole travel/club sports scene, about which, frankly, I feel quite relieved. (My god, talk about stress and scheduling complexity.) She’s only participated in sports through school. For my particular child, who is unlikely to play sports in college let alone professionally, sports offer an array of benefits that go beyond Being A Star X Player. I want her to continue to play the sports she likes and continue to feel good about her contribution to her teams. As she gets older, and as her peers advance their own skills, it feels more and more important to encourage her to practice and build up her strength and endurance. I would also love for her to get into the habit of regular exercise, because it’s good and necessary for her. She got this for her birthday, which seems like a way to combine fun and exercise. If the weather would cooperate, maybe we can try it out.
  • Break Pressure: The counterweight to the above two pressures is the pressure to give Carla a freaking break, and let her experience the pleasure and freedom and, yes, boredom of long, lazy summer days with no commitments and no expectations. When I was her age, I had ZERO summer expectations. I’m pretty sure I either stayed at home with my brother and his nanny all day, or my mom dropped me off at various friends’ houses on her way to work in the morning and the friend and I roamed around town all day until my mom picked me up on her way home from work. I had no summer homework, no summer sports practice, no summer camps, no supervision. It was glorious. Clearly, it was a different time. For many, many reasons, I don’t think trying to recreate that experience for my kid would fly. But I do want her to have SOME of that summer freedom. It’s so fleeting.

My reaction to all these pressures has been to create a daily schedule.

I did a lot of research into schedules, and compromised my morals by asking ChatGPT for help fitting everything we wanted to do into each day. Then I designed the schedule in Canva and had Office Max print it out and laminate it for me, so we can add specifics to each day. It’s taped to the kitchen wall, directly across from Carla’s spot at the table.

I like this schedule because it incorporates all the things I want Carla to experience in a week: dedicated time for schoolwork, exercise, and music alongside plenty of time to do Summer Things. The key for me is that we get all the work done before noon, and then our afternoons are wide open. That feels both doable and like I’m not weighing her down with a grueling workload. I feel like having a half-hour dedicated to music practice, for instance, is a lot less onerous than telling her, “You need to practice your music today.” I want all her to-dos to be finite.

The schedule worked beautifully. For about a week and a half. Then, as is ALWAYS my problem, one little hiccup brought down the whole system. If I had to identify one culprit, it would be going to bed late. Carla still, at thirteen, does best if she gets ten to twelve hours of sleep a night, and sleep has always, always been one of my top priorities for her. Which means I am reluctant to wake her up at seven when she’s gone to bed at eleven the night before.

Nights are SO HARD though! My husband is not on a summer schedule. He is on his regular, everyday work schedule. He gets home at six or seven most nights, works out, and then we eat dinner at eight or so. We like to watch Taskmaster as a family, and it’s very difficult to keep ourselves to one episode a night (although we succeed, most nights). This means that Carla’s 8:30 bedtime creeps up to 9:30 or 10:00 and sometimes later.

Could I be more strict? Certainly. But it’s not easy, and I grow weary of being the Bedtime Bitch who is pushing and nagging and trying to keep everyone on track. (I would also prefer to go to bed at 9:30 or 10:00; but I still read to Carla every night, so when her bedtime gets pushed back, so does mine, and I end up in bed around midnight. I still wake up at 5:30, so I am VERY TIRED a lot of the time. Which also makes it harder for me to keep on top of things.)

Last night was one of the late nights – and I think Carla was up until midnight working on her summer reading, which is both commendable (and relatable) and also go to sleep. This morning, I feel groggy and unmotivated. How am I supposed to motivate my child into action when I struggle with motivating myself??? If I allow her to sleep in, she’ll have more energy for getting things done… but then our schedule will creep into the afternoon, and we won’t have time for the fun stuff… and then I’ll feel like a Mean Mom, or we’ll allow fun stuff to bleed into the evening, and then we’re in bed at midnight and the whole misshapen cycle continues.

Well, there’s not a lot to be done except try to get back on track.