‘Are you relieved that the kids are back in school?” a kind soul asked me just last week.
I think I shocked him when I said I was not happy at all. After all, one might think that a mother of four boys would be doing a lighthearted salsa routine all about the abode when she hears the first school bell ring.
Not so. Any mother worth her salt knows that the tolling of the school bells is simply nothing more than the sound of a loudspeaker announcing, “Let the chaos begin!”
Take last Wednesday night for instance.
I, for one, would have liked to curl up on the couch and take in a night of TV, but my family had other plans. My husband needed to rehash his day’s work, the dog wasn’t going to rest until he’d been fed, and the supper dishes weren’t about to do themselves.
In the midst of it all, the kids had homework. And they didn’t just have your run-of-the-mill homework. No, they had complications. Little Charlie couldn’t figure out where he’d gone wrong with his math, Huey needed help reviewing his Spanish, and Lawrence had a bug collection that would be due, in its entirety, long before the first frost makes the last cricket croak.
Did I mention that I just wanted to curl up on the couch? Just the thought of a night of studies had me conjuring up thoughts of cutting class. I don’t know my decimals from my decibels, a dragonfly from an earwig, and I’ll be darned if I can remember how to conjugate a Spanish verb. Yet I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would be sucked into the world of digits and insects from mi muchachos before the night’s end.
In a last-ditch attempt at escaping, I dropped to my knees, slid a TV guide off the counter, and was preparing to slink out of the kitchen when I heard Little Charlie exclaim with sheer desperation, “My teacher is going to be mad at me!” I peeked around the corner and saw his darling little face pleading. I couldn’t help but feel compassion as he said with great sorrow, “She might even take away my recess!”
I knew that I’d never forgive myself if the little guy had to miss recess. So I gave in to responsibility and walked back into the room. “What about me?” exclaimed Huey as I pulled up a chair next to Charlie. “I have to learn a dialogue in Spanish. You can’t help Charlie if you don’t help me. How about the two of us have a conversation?”
Since my Spanish speaking abilities have long since gone rusty, I decided to ignore him. I sidled up next to Charlie and turned his math book back to the first page. If I was going to explain it to him, I was going to have to remember how to subtract decimals without a calculator. Suddenly Lawrence started coming at me with large bugs that needed to be pinned, and Huey again said, “Just say something in Spanish, please!”
It was more than my feeble mind could handle. “One at a time boys,” I said in desperation, “Mommy’s not so young anymore. Story problems are not my forte, crickets give me the creeps, and the only Spanish term that I can remember is, ‘adios,’ which, sadly enough, cannot be used right now.”
As the clock ticked away the time, I knew it was time to buck up or I’d never get to see the TV. I showed Charlie how to figure out Bob’s weekly budget as best I could, stuck a damselfly between the eyes and finally turned to face Huey.
I dug deep into my high school memory banks and pulled out the first Spanish term that came to mind. In a great attempt to “wow” my child with my Spanish speaking wisdom, I looked at him and said, “El bano es rojo.”
As unbelievable as it may seem, I was met with blank stares. Lawrence held a lubber grasshopper in midair, Little Charlie stopped thinking about his failure as a student for a minute, and Huey, the child who desperately needed Spanish dialogue from his mother, dropped his jaw and asked, “The bathroom is red?”
“Si,” I said and I was so darned proud of myself that I decided to say it again, “el bano es rojo.”
“And there you have it, folks!” Huey announced to an audience that was less than astonished, “Mom has a red bathroom.”
Lori Clinch is the mother of four sons
and the author of the book “Are We There
Yet?” You can reach her at www.loriclinch.
com.