Some Pig

Time Flies

Weeknights chez Pig resemble nothing so much as a three-ring circus, if three-ring circuses came with exasperated ringleaders chasing cast members who like to run around naked, whooping songs about their butts.  Warren has been traveling more often, which means there's been only one ringleader for most of this week. I am not too proud to admit that going solo has been kicking my @ss, let me tell you. So I was more than a little surprised the other night when, during the usual round of packing lunches and supervising homework and clearing up dinner and making sure pajamas eventually got put on the naked cast members, a thought suddenly popped into my head:  

It's not always going to be this way.

Even more surprisingly, my emotional response wasn't relief or joy, but disappointment, with a tinge of melancholy.  You mean, some day these kids aren't going to be here?  Really?  How is that possible?  They're so completely intertwined in the warp and weave of my life, it's impossible to fathom what it would mean to be in this house without them.  I had an epiphany about why empty-nesters always say "the house is so quiet," in tones of surprise.  Is it remotely possible to get things done in our house without a running commentary in the background?  I can't even imagine it anymore.

For whatever reason, it really struck home this week that all the noise, chaos, and activity we experience in our house is temporary.  Some day, our evenings will be uneventful again.  Some day, I'll tidy up the living room and it will stay tidied up for longer than the time it takes for two little girls to invent a game that requires a throw pillow, a deck of playing cards, and every piece of plasticware in the house.  Some day, we might even get some *real* furniture, instead of the secondhand-slash-inherited living room "suite" we've cobbled together over the years, whose most compelling positive feature is the fact that we don't care about the stray marker stains.  As much as I enjoy the calm and serenity when we're down a kid or two for an evening, I'm going to miss the energy they bring to our daily lives once they're grown and gone.  

Meantime, as I've been working on this post, I've had to tell Celeste to release her death grip on my arm, demand that India stop running a science experiment on my coffee table that involves soaking things in water, force Cici to brush her teeth under threat of immediate banishment from the couch, and ask both girls to settle down multiple times.  The dog keeps getting on the couch and nudging my arm for attention, while the girls are blowing up a balloon and releasing it over and over to fly around the room, laughing hysterically at the flatulent sound it makes.  I'm about to go out of my mind from irritation and empty-nest syndrome looks like a pretty good problem to have right about now.  But in ten minutes someone's going to want a sleepytime hug, or snuggle next to me for a story, or ask for one of Mommy's special tuck-ins, and all will be right in my world once again.  Even though parenting takes place in a never-ending now, I've made a conscious decision to savor these moments against the day when "now" turns into "then."

Clarification

"Mrs. S!"  Two of my students burst into the classroom during my prep period, clearly in a high state of dudgeon.  "Are we going on a cruise?"

"Whu-?" comes my snappy retort.  "A cruise?"

"Yes!" one of the girls replies, her voice climbing higher and higher.  "Our friends in the other classes?  They say they get to go on a cruise!  They're going out in a glass-bottomed boat or something?"

Then realization dawns.  "They're going on a field trip to the science center," I explained.  "They're going to go out on a boat and look for sea creatures!  They're not sitting on the Lido Deck, sipping drinks with paper umbrellas in them!"

My two young charges are visibly relieved.  "Oh!" said one, "I was going to be jealous if they got to go on a cruise and we didn't."

"Aren't you supposed to be somewhere?"  I asked, as it is now halfway through the period and presumably these two are expected to be ... someplace other than in my room.

"Yeah, but we needed to know why we weren't going on the cruise," they answered (the cruise that doesn't exist, let me remind us all).

And, scene

Letter From A Broad, Doesn't Add Up Edition

Dear Math HomeLinks,

We need to get a few things straight between us, HomeLinks.  When it comes to math, I'm not really very interested in linking home and school - at least, not in the way you want me to.  Let's begin:

The scene is my house, three nights ago.  After going through the usual afternoon thrash of kids, activities, groceries, and pets, I set India to work on her homework at the table while I ran out to pick up her sister from dance.  I come back to find India *not* doing her homework because she doesn't understand it.  Spread out on the table before her are a jumble of items - several pieces of cut-up paper, tape, scissors, a math book, and a directions sheet - along with some kind of misshapen, um, geometric form made out of paper secured with large quantities of tape.  

As it turns out, you had set my child the task of learning about volume by cutting out little squares of paper and taping them into some kind of box thingies called volume cubes.  After puzzling over the vague and not-very-illustrative directions, cross-referenced with the math textbook, we figured out that you wanted India to learn that different geometric shapes could have the same volume.  And it only took two college degrees, several cross exchanges, and one meltdown between us to figure it out!

The fun and excitement didn't stop there, however.  After we got the #$%(ing cubes measured, we were supposed to find some kind of dry goods, like flour or rice, pour it into one volume cube, measure how much it contained, and then pour it into the other volume cube to see if the volume was the same or different!  

Sweet.

Bleeding.

Jeebus.

Listen, HomeLinks, I don't know if you know my kid, but her fine motor skills are not what one would call exceptional for her age. The volume cube she put together looked more spherical than rectangular, just as an example, and you want me to let her pour a bunch of grains from one tiny paper receptacle that would fit on the tip of her little finger to another tiny little receptacle, ditto?  Gee, what possibly could go wrong with that???  So I put the kibosh on that idea and told India that she's a smart girl who is capable of figuring out what the answer is by using her powers of deductive reasoning.  But ohhhh, no, we can't do that!  And why can't we just eyeball the volume cubes and make an educated guess?  Because India, being the firstborn, feels compelled to FOLLOW DIRECTIONS, is why, and the directions say to POUR SH!T IN THE VOLUME CUBES AND MEASURE IT, DAMMIT, SO THAT'S WHAT SHE NEEDS TO DO, MOMMMMMM.  Now picture that punctuated with much wringing of hands and flopping across the table, and you'll have an idea of what went on chez Pig.

Look, I get what you're trying to do with the cutting and the rice and the clock faces and all the different tasks you want us to do.  You're trying to show kids that math is all around us!  And everyone uses math!!  And that math is part of our lives!!!  Clearly, as an education professional, I can appreciate that.  However, that kind of hands-on, experiential learning requires a few things my kid is short of at 6:00 at night, things like energy and focus and attention span.  It also requires a few things I'm short of at 6:00 at night, things like free time and patience.  If my kid walked in the door at 3:00 to find a plate of milk and cookies and a mom eager to relive third grade math, well, it would be a great idea for us to while away the afternoon cutting out math cubes and making fact triangles and the like.  But the reality is, she seldom starts homework before 4:30 at the earliest, and some nights not until 5 or 5:30.  The LAST thing either she or I can get jazzed about at that late hour is running around the house in pursuit of a task that requires a deck of playing cards, a pair of dice, and an abacus to complete.  Hey, I want my kid to love math and see the purpose in what she's learning and all that other good stuff - I just want the activities intended to instill said perspective to happen at school, where they belong, and not get dragged into my home by a hungry, tired child.

So let's strike a deal, you and I:  You will create brief, meaningful assignments that reinforce the concepts currently being taught and don't require me to build anything or make a trip to Staples, and I will make my daughter do them.  I will ask her about her academics on a regular basis.  I will feign interest in order of operations, Chief SOH CAH TOA and other math-y topics that didn't interest me the first time around.  I will point out how we're using fractions when we measure ingredients to bake together.  I will talk about ratios and the Golden Mean and the angle of repose and Fibonacci's Sequence and whatever math-ish stuff I can dredge up.  I will even try to figure out that horrendous lattice method of multiplying that India can do in a snap and I can't begin to fathom.  But let me tell you, you'd better keep up your part of the bargain - or I'm going to coach India to tell her teacher what one of her little classmates said the day after the Great Volume-Measuring Escapade, which was:

"I didn't do the homework last night because we don't have any scissors at home.  Or tape.  Or glue.  So I couldn't do it."

Numerically yours,

Some Pig

Tunnel Vision

I'm getting a little panicked.

Today at school, we had a meeting to plan out all our end-of-the-year stuff.  And there are a lot of stuffs -  School-wide stuff and grade-wide stuff and teaching team stuff and social studies stuff.  Add to that the normal round of crazy-making, like state testing and field trips and assemblies and oh by the way, Ms. S., I'm leaving next Thursday and I won't be back for, like, ten days, and can you give me all the work I'll need to do while I'm gone?  

In the past, this kind of thing didn't affect me much, because I worked with two women who are naturally organized and on top of things.  Not so much anymore.  One moved, the other had a baby, and now we're reduced to me, the math teacher, a newbie and a sub.  The sub isn't interested in taking on a slew of unpaid responsibilities on top of her not-exorbitant per diem rate; the newbie is focused on surviving the strange and wonderful thing known as the end of the school year; and the math teacher - well, let me put it this way:  His wife packs his lunch for him.  Every day.  With peeled apple slices, so my colleague doesn't have to go to the inconvenience of extra chewing.  It's a charmed life he leads, having a wife; I'd like to know what that's like myself.  So let's just say he's not very experienced with this kind of task and leave it at that.

In addition to the issues listed above, I feel this (admittedly self-inflicted) pressure to try to meet the impossibly high bar set by the colleague currently out on maternity leave.  This woman is craftier than Martha Stewart, thinks up more clever ideas than Pinterest, and has the single-minded determination of Attilla the Hun.  She's been known to whip up a tie-dying picnic/slide show assembly/crafts and games day on two days' notice.  When she's in charge of events, everything's already planned, documented, cross-referenced, and written up in color-coded Sharpie a month ahead of time.  I, on the other hand, consider a day to be a success if everyone in my house showed up where they needed to go wearing clothes.  Our measures of what constitutes "planning" and "organization" are not 100% in alignment, shall we say.  

As much as I'd love to just shut my door and ignore all the externalities in favor of some good ole fashioned larnin', someone's got to pick up the organizational ball.  This time of year gets really complicated, and if we're not on our game, we easily could find ourselves standing in front of the class with no students there because we forgot the parent assembly or some such (needless to say, administration frowns upon teachers forgetting little things like grades and assemblies). So I'm trying to figure out a mantra to get me through the next eternity five or so weeks; you know, like "one foot in front of the other," or, "one day at a time," or in my case, "ohshitwhatdidIforgettodotoday???"  It may not be very Zen, but it will have to do.

Letter From A Broad, Get Lost Edition

Dear 2012-2013 School Year,

I know it's a little harsh to break up with you in a blog post, but it's not you, it's me.  Well, actually, it's you.  It's time for you to go.  And it's not because of the kids or my job or administration or any of the usual suspects; it's because as a year?  You. Have. Sucked.  I mean, what has 2012-13 brought us?  Bombings.  Shootings.  Negativity about education and educators all over the place.  Tragedies on a national scale and a local scale.  So you won't be offended when I tell you that I'm really ready to put this one in the record books, will you?  Right now, what I'd really like to do is lie on my back and stare at the sky for a good long while, maybe with a glass of chilled white wine and some nice chocolate bonbons by my side.  But since that's not an option, I'm going to have to settle for doing my best to teach the Civil War to some level of coherence, keep on top of all the usual end-of-year craziness, and take care of business for the girls (open house, end-of-year concerts, dance recital, you name it).  Meanwhile, I promise I won't make this any harder for you than it has to be.  Just don't call me - I won't call you.

Love, 

Some Pig

Letter From A Broad, Fashion Victim Edition

Dear Ms. Kardashian,

First, can I call you Kim?  I feel as though I know you, what with all the quality time we spend together in the supermarket check-out lines.  No weekly trip to the Bucket to purchase provender for my family would be complete if it didn't end with a mad perusal of the checkout tabs, and their urgent! critical!! earthshattering!!! newsbriefs about Jennifer Aniston's impending nuptials and whether or not aliens have invaded the CIA.  And no celebrity rag worth its 72-point typeface would be complete without an update about something to do with the Kardashian clan, most recently focusing on you, your increasing girth, and the fashion dilemmas this engenders.

This brings me to the topic of this missive, Kim.  You seem to be missing the whole freaking point of pregnancy, my friend!  And that point is, you get a nine-month hiatus from feeling compelled to be skinny!  From the moment that cluster of cells implants in your uterine wall, you get to relax those ab muscles, put aside the Spanx, and break out the elastic waistbands for the duration - and if you're me, for several weeks postpartum as well (although I assume you're going to go straight for the mom job, given your chosen, um, 'career').  Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that you are in deep, deep denial about the realities of pregnancy.  How else do you explain this:

Hey, the pregnant female form in all its ripeness and curves is a beautiful thing, I agree, but the overall effect is much, much more pleasing when one dresses to accommodate it.  And this?  Well, it just looks uncomfortable, is what it looks like. As my dear departed grammie would say, you like like ten pounds of flour in a five-pound sack. Don't tell me you didn't run (okay, waddle) home right after that event and fling that thing off your body as fast as you could. How much cuter would you look in a nice, loose, Empire-waisted A-line dress?  Tons, is the answer, and you wouldn't have seam lines permanently imprinted in your skin afterward.  

Now, I've heard that you refuse to wear typical maternity clothes because Kanye doesn't like them or some such mess.  Really?  You're over the age of reason (30) and you're allowing someone else to dictate how you look?  If that is the case, Kimmy, then obviously you have bigger problems to resolve than what you're wearing, but that's a whole nother post.  What you need right now is a nice pair of maternity jeans (the kind with the foot-wide stretchy waistband), a cute peasant top, and a pair of sparkly flats.  Then you need to sit your preggo butt down in a chair and take a load off your feet for the next couple months, public appearances be damned.  We'll deal with the train wreck that is the immediately-postpartum-mom-body later...we'll take this one step at a time.

Yours in motherhood,

Some Pig 

Nineteen

I remember being nineteen (An aside to certain youthful coworkers of mine:  Shut it.  I'm not THAT old.).  Anyway, let me begin again, after I so rudely interrupted my own self:

I remember being nineteen.  

I remember being nineteen.  I remember desperately wanting to be recognized as an adult, even as I was completely and totally unaware of what that really entailed.  I remember thinking I had all the answers and feeling completely discombobulated by ... well, everything, really.  I remember thinking I had the world by the tail one day and wanting someone to tell me what I should do with myself the next.  I remember how raw and vulnerable and just-cracked-open life felt, at a stage when I was too old to stay at home anymore but too young to function independently.  I remember being my own worst enemy, pingponging from making rational, mature decisions to stupid, regrettable ones and back again and then back again.  

Fortunately for me, I managed to make it through those transitional years with no lasting damage other than a completely overloaded credit card.  But in retrospect, I was lucky.  I wanted to be a "real" grownup so badly that there was no way I was going to listen to old fuddy-duddies like, you know, parents, but I was still so naive that I would have been easy prey for a 26-year-old guy with a Svengali complex and a convincing line.  I would have been totally flattered that someone that old, that adult, would choose to confide in me and make plans with me that I probably would have done any number of stupid, irresponsible things on his say-so.  Thank Buddha no one like that happened to come along; instead, I was surrounded by people just as dingbatty and clueless as I was.  The blind leading the blind indeed. 

So I admit, I was stunned when I learned that one of the Boston bombers is a nineteen-year-old college kid.  Nineteen?  Isn't that the age when you're learning how to wash your laundry without ruining it?  What business does a 19-year-old have with death and destruction - particularly a kid who, by all accounts, was a well-adjusted, well-liked person?  I can only imagine that something happened between him and his older brother, some way his brother used an older sibling's influence and his status as an adult to turn that kid's head.  That doesn't excuse Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from being responsible for his actions, of course; he deserves every iota of what's coming to him.  But it does make me sad to think that a kid who, in the fullness of time, might have grown out of whatever twisted thinking he was influenced to adopt, instead is following a path of death and destruction to what is really an inevitable conclusion.  

Not Nice

A longtime friend of mine - perhaps the longest-term friend I have - defriended me on Facebook recently.  (I guess that's the modern equivalent of not accepting one's calling card, which is what we did back when I was a slip of a girl.  That and pointedly turn one's head in the opposite direction when your former friend's brougham pulled alongside yours, but that was a different era, clearly.)  Anyway, she cut me off for some reasons I understand and some reasons I don't, but what led me to the keyboard were her comments to the effect that my posts are often complaints and make me seem like a miserable person, or words to that effect.  This is the point at which a lot of people I've seen on FB would make a statement to the effect that you like me the way I am or you don't, and if you don't like what I say then unfriend me, bold statement of individual right to free expression, the end.  But if that were the sum of it, I would have done that on my FB page and that would be the end.   But here's the thing - I *am* a sarcastic, snippy, exasperated b!tch on my FB page, and I've often wondered if, and how, other people understood what I was saying.

Well, I got that partially answered, anyway.

Her comments pushed me to examine my sense of humor more closely, and this is what I've come up with:  As far as personality traits go, I have my share of the good and bad.  I can number among the less positive traits the tendency to be impatient and irritable, and a lot of what I put on FB reflects that.  My FB feed is basically the uncensored voice in my head reacting to the immediacy of life around me, and that often takes the form of me venting my frustrations with whatever's going on at the moment.  For example, yesterday I was stuck in the waiting room at gymnastics, correcting papers, while two little boys ran amok.  Now, I've been there.  I know how hard it is to keep two energetic preschoolers contained for longer than ten consecutive minutes in a space with little to no intrinsic entertainment value.  If I were a better person, I would have summoned up my empathy and compassion and, I don't know, offered to play a game with them or read them a story.  If I were a worse person, I'd've marched over to the parents and told them to corral their beasts instead of yammering away obliviously while their kids made it impossible for anyone else to have a conversation.  But I'm me, so I posted a snappy status update and went back to my correcting.  For me, this serves a valuable purpose - I get to blow off some steam, which allows me to cope with being irritated without losing my cool.  I also try to frame what I'm saying in a way that people know that I know I'm being high maintenance or douche-y or whatever you want to call it, and I'm not taking it, or myself,  too seriously.  I think a lot of my friends use FB the same way, and I follow a number of other "mommybloggers" and people with social media presence (Crunchy Mommy, Baby Sideburns, Jen Lancaster) who certainly don't hold back, either.

My friend chided me for not appreciating what I have and sounding like I'm miserable all the time.  She has a valid point, in that people who don't know my approach to life or understand my sense of humor probably would read my posts and think I'm an ungrateful wretch.  But I'm not that at all.  I'm incredibly fortunate, and I know it.  I have a home and a family and a dog and a cat and another cat.  My life is stable, my girls are healthy, my husband and I are both employed, I do what I love to do for a living.  We have health insurance, dental insurance, money in the bank, and two cars that run consistently.  In absolute terms, I have it better than 99.9% of most human beings who have ever lived on earth, and I both understand and appreciate that.  I also have a sarcastic sense of humor, a predilection to see the absurdity in everyday situations, and a sharp tongue.  I could pretend not to be that person, but I know from previous experience that denying your nature to yourself is a one-way ticket to real misery, not the kind of pseudo-misery of daily life that I vent about.  I could post status updates about gratitude and joy and forgiveness and only the positive and uplifting elements of life, and if I truly had that kind of personality, I'd do it.  But first of all, most of my friends wouldn't buy it, and second, it would feel insincere and patronizing.  I'd rather be an honest, flawed version of myself than a socially less-offensive facade.  

So where does this leave me?  Well, clearly it doesn't feel very good at all to lose a friend.  There were other issues she alluded to; maybe we'll resolve them and maybe we won't, but those are a whole nother matter.  But the TL;DR version of the point I'm trying to make is that what I post on FB is me, but it's only that part of me that I choose to share, and I don't consider it to be everything there is to me.  Maybe we should be real-world friends only, if such a thing exists anymore.  We'll have to wait and see.

Letter From A Broad, Hale and Hearty Edition

Dear Dr. Oz,

Why, might I ask, are you stalking me?

Seriously, every time I get on Facebook (which, during a vacation week is kinda sorta ALLTHETIME), there's another post on my news feed of your concerned-looking mug over a heading telling me how to lose eight pounds of belly fat, or reduce my blood pressure, or look ten years younger than I am.  To which I say, um, don't I already look ten years younger?  Okay, don't answer that.  Anywhoo,  you and I, Dr. Ox, we need to talk.  I know you mean well, but you are totally harshing my mellow.  If I want to have a middle-aged male constantly yammering reminders in my ear of the need for a healthful diet and a disciplined exercise regime, well, I married someone who is more than willing to take on that role.  Hell, I go to online media to blot that kinda noise out; the last thing I need is you asking me for my blood pressure (which is perfectlyfinethankyou over nunnayourbeeswax).  Besides, aren't there fancy algo- ... Al Gore .... mathematical formula-thingies that look at what people post to see if they're good candidates for whatever it is you're selling?  Given the fact that 90-some-odd percent of my posts and comments focus on wine, chocolate, laziness, self-indulgence, or self-indulgent-chocolate-stained-wine-sodden laziness, I would think your mathematical formula whatsis thingies would take one look at the ones and zeroes and figure DON'T EVEN BOTHER.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to grab some double-chocolate Milanos to nibble on whilst I figure out how to make a Some E-Card about how slothful I am when I'm drinking wine. 

Here's to your health!

Some Pig

Productive

So how are all y'all weathering Snowmageddon?  Or is the Snowpocalypse?  Blizzaster?  Whatever.  We're all safe and snug here in the First In The Nation Primary State, although the dog was somewhat distressed by the fact that I wouldn't let him walk off-lead in the dusk while the town plow trucks were about, a decision that proved to be prudent when he tried to take off into the woods after a squirrel, and succeeded only in giving himself whiplash and me a wrenched shoulder.  

Anywhat, we spent a lovely day here at home.  Since today would have been a school day for the girls, I decided that we shouldn't pass up an opportunity to enrich their minds.  So I planned out activities for the girls to fill the hours that corresponded with their usual schooling.  After we ate a healthful breakfast of homemade granola topped with yogurt, I had the girls pretend they were living on the frontier and make their beds and tidy their rooms while I performed a dramatic reading of a chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter in honor of the author's recent birthday.  After that, I took the girls on a walk in the woods to identify animals by their Latin names from their tracks (just genus and species, of course; today is a relaxing day, after all).  When we got home, they made their own tisanes from fresh herbs we've been growing in window boxes all winter.  We settled in to listen to Gabriel Faure's Pavane while I lectured on the difference between the Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, and we wrapped up the day with a spirited round of non-Euclidean geometry using six-sided figures.  Now the girls are sitting in front of the fire, chatting quietly together in French using their irregular verbs, while I make a simple stew of quinoa and seasonal root vegetables.  

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!  Oh, I sure had you going there, didn't I?  For just one split second, you seriously thought that homeschooling-from-hell scenario was real!  In actuality, I spent all morning reading a book while the girls systematically trashed their rooms, after which I let them rot their minds watching a made-for-cable Disney movie about a homecoming princess-turned-kung fu warrior as I marched through this house like Caesar's troops through Gaul.  India made brownies (non-organic!  from a box!), Celeste trashed the dining area doing a craft, and I folded a metric sh!tton of laundry before their father got home.  Plans for the evening include preparing for the imminent blackout that always occurs in our neighborhood and watching even more TV.  In all likelihood, no one in this house learned anything today, and that is just fine by me.

P.S. After I post this on Facebook, no doubt one of my beloved but hopelessly overachieving friends will read only as far as the first two paragraphs, and then post some kind of comment like "OMG, we did the EXACT SAME THING TODAY!!!"  And then I will feel like an underachieving slacker mom who doesn't deserve to have kids.