All across America kids are returning to school. Meanwhile, parents everywhere can be heard collectively screaming, “You’re only NOW telling me none of your underwear fit?!?” It’s the age-old truth: The more experience we have, the worse we actually get at it.
That’s parenting, huh? In our house, my daughter just started 8th grade. But the more I think I have this all figured out, the more I realize I’m one step away from the child suing me for parental mismanagement and crippling oaf-ishness.
You feeling it, too? You recognize any of the signs of the great back-to-school parent-fail? Here are just a few first week of school missteps I’m guilty of:
• You think any clothes that were outgrown in the summer – now violating school dress codes for showing too much skin – can be fixed with duct tape and some extra pieces of fabric. This goes over especially well with your daughter, who threatens to give all of your Internet passwords to Russian hackers.
• Your wife tells you that your daughter needs a scientific calculator and you reply, in all seriousness, “Wait, really? Does anyone even do math anymore? Wasn’t there just a study that said in 5 years we won’t need math because we will be working for robots in the robot factories?”
• On the drive to the first day of school, your wife screams out, “We forgot to take the first day of school photo on the front porch!!!” This is an annual tradition. Strike that … this WAS an annual tradition. After a lot of screaming and shouting, we settled on a family selfie in the car, which may or may not have caused me to run a red light.
• You make your daughter late on her first day of school. Well, we all had a part to play in that, plus the 20 million cars backed up as everyone tried to beat us there. But I can feel a special sense of “pride” since I was doing the driving, and the 20 million cars all made it to school before me.
• Your wife asks you if you can take your daughter to school tomorrow. You reply, “Wait a minute, she already started school? I thought that was next week.” To which she replies, “Are you kidding!?! What do you think we’ve all been running around crazy for every morning?!?” To which you reply, “I thought it was a fire drill.” To which she starts looking for the perfect-sized frying pan to convey her extremely short answer.
• You think an acceptable lunch is an expired orange juice box from last school year, a piece of bread that is essentially a penicillin farm and a ketchup packet you found in the glove compartment of the car. You also think you can mask this wretchedness by putting a napkin over the top of it, and adding a cookie that may or may not actually be a dog treat.
• You still think asking your daughter, “How was your day?” may prompt an answer with actual substance, rather than a hearty, “harumph!” Can you blame the child? You lengthened her shorts with duct tape!