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From where I’m sitting on the balcony of our Airbnb, I can see into the houses or yards of at least seven other apartments. Surprisingly, it’s quite quiet for a Saturday morning. The only activity I can observe right now is a guy in the yard below and to the right who is digging up some kind of slate tiles or chunks of flagstone that were haphazardly leading from the alley behind the building to the wooden patio of the house. I don’t know if this space is supposed to be a garden or a place to park your car (it’s big enough) but right now it’s dirt and plants (weeds?) and a large and lovely tree. I wish we could stay to see the “after” picture.
The cool breeze through the trees is a peaceful contrast with our adventure from last night, when we walked down Mont-Royal Avenue and Saint Denis Street looking for a place to eat a late dinner. This neighborhood is apparently the place to be on a Friday night if you’re young and cool in Montreal. And we were there anyway. There are infinite bars and restaurants, many with wooden, lighted outside seating areas. There are tons of benches out in the streets–closed off to traffic–seemingly for the sole purpose of people hanging out. There were chairs set up in an area where you could watch street performers. It was all thoughtfully designed with people enjoying themselves in mind. After walking up and down both streets to see what was on offer to eat, we decided to try a dumpling place, only to discover their kitchen was about to close. Then we decided to try a tapas place, only to discover that their kitchen was about to close. Finally we settled on a bar full of people (so we decided it must be decent) that was named after the Catholic church across the street. They were blasting American rock music from the 80s, but everyone was speaking French so it seemed authentic enough. We attempted to order in French and they quickly caught onto the fact that our French is terrible and switched to speaking to us in English, but in a friendly way. We ordered a cider and a beer and a half kilo of chicken wings (which seemed like a lot, and it was) and poutine, and relaxed after two long days of driving.
So far we’ve covered more than 700 miles on this trip, and gone back and forth through several states before reaching Canada. We delivered Niki to camp in Western New York on Thursday afternoon and stayed in a hotel in Pennsylvania, just a couple miles from the New York border. We planned to leave for Montreal first thing on Friday, but then things happened and we didn’t. But while Randy was on a call, I found a cool coffee shop that also had antique axes and knives on display and a vast array of tinned fish for sale. Sardines have never appealed to me, but these looked so cool!
We finally started heading north and stopped to use a bathroom in Catskill, New York. We happened to park in front of a used bookstore. This was not planned, I promise. So we bought some books! And there was an art gallery. So I bought some art! Then we drove north some more and decided to have lunch in Saratoga Springs, where I once lost $20 at the racetrack and decided never to gamble again because there’s so much other stuff I’d rather do with $20. Saratoga Springs is a lovely little city. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on the way you look at it, there’s a phenomenal bookstore there. We swore to each other we would only stay for five minutes…
So…by the time we got to Montreal it was after 8pm. But we found our cute little apartment and rallied to go eat. Now we get to explore Montreal in the daytime.
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Instead of taking a last day of school photo, I’m tracking Zoe’s progress toward Central Virginia using the Find My Friends app on my phone. I take a screenshot when I see she’s arrived, her photo floating above the trees at the summer camp where she’ll be working as a counselor for the next 10 weeks. To prepare for this, we went to Costco for sunscreen, bug spray, socks, and other supplies. We ordered rain boots, a jacket, a rainbow of $6 tank tops, and her favorite hair product online. We emptied her trunk–originally purchased for her first time at camp in 2015 and still in astonishingly good shape–and filled it with carefully labeled and rolled-up t-shirts and shorts stuffed into gallon-sized Ziplock bags. We dug out of the closet her camp backpack, which still contained items from last summer, including a sock she’d been looking for everywhere. Last night I filled her tank with gas and this morning I ordered Starbucks for her to pick up at 6:30am on her way out of town.
I have done everything I can to make things easier for her, so she can go out and do hard things on her own.
She’s already done an admirable amount of adulting this year. She navigated junior year with challenging classes and two part-time jobs (three if you count occasional gigs babysitting for a family with three kids and a dog). She learned how expensive gas is (and therefore why it’s important to look for the cheapest gas) and how to get her car serviced and inspected on her own. She’s done banking and cooking and traveling out of state without her family and now she’s driven 90-some miles by herself four times in one week. She wrote her own end-of-the-year thank you note to her English teacher. She’s visited dozens of colleges and made thoughtful decisions about where she will apply this fall, demonstrating maturity and self-awareness.
And now she’s off to work and play for the summer. When she was a younger camper, I asked a few times if she would someday want to be a counselor, and she couldn’t imagine such a grown-up responsibility. Just like when she was a young martial artist and I asked her to picture herself as a black belt and she wasn’t ready to even conceive of the challenge. But her counselors knew that she would join them eventually. They could see it in her even when she couldn’t yet see it in herself. Last weekend she went down to camp for three days of staff training. She was nervous but ready. She was worried she wouldn’t have anyone to talk to or hang out with. By the end of the third day she had already made a friend who she didn’t want to be apart from for the two days she would be home before returning to camp. Thank goodness they are reunited now.
The evolution of parenting takes you from solving all your child’s problems–once you discern what they are–for them to figuring out, one by one, which problems they are ready to take on themselves. This requires careful observation and immense amounts of patience and often guidance from other people who’ve been through it before and can see things more clearly than you can. And as they get older, paradoxically it gets harder. I’d heard that adage from older parents since my kids were small–“little kids, little problems, big kids, bigger problems,” but of course I didn’t believe it until my kids were big. Making the decisions about what decisions to let them make for themselves is actually a lot more overwhelming than changing diapers, if less smelly.
At this point I feel like most of what we can do is gently and as subtly as possible guide them toward what we think would be good paths for them to explore. We are not the type of parents to force them into anything, barring what is required by law or basic human needs. We’ve taught them everything we know (for better or for worse) and to think for themselves. We’ve also taught them that we will always unconditionally be here for them when they need us. And that we trust them to make good decisions, and know that sometimes they won’t, because sometimes we don’t, because we’re human. So hopefully we’ve taught them how to learn from their mistakes. Or at least how to pick themselves up and dust themselves off and keep going.
So this summer while Zoe is working as a camp counselor, I hope she has fun–both with the other counselors and with the kids she will work with. She probably has no idea that so many young kids will look at her as a role model, and talk about how cool she is long after they’ve gotten home from camp, and introduce their friends back home to the music that Zoe introduced them to. I hope they come to her with problems and she helps them figure out what to do, or takes them to whoever can. I hope she learns incredible things from the 70+ other counselors who are there from all over the world, and from however many campers pass through her cabin or the archery range or the arts and crafts building throughout the summer. I hope she sees and hears stories and perspectives that will change the way she thinks and that she will never forget. I hope she tries things she’s never tried before. I hope she can shake off the mistakes she makes, because I’m sure she’ll make them.
I could not be prouder of her, or more excited for what lies ahead for her this summer. And I know I’m going to miss her like crazy. Patience has never been my strong suit, but I will have no choice but to wait for her to be ready to share the stories of her adventures. I know both of us can do hard things.
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It is true that I like to plan and organize things, particularly if they are related to something I’m excited about. I will never become a corporate event planner or a travel agent, but I like planning things that matter to me. Right now, for example, I am in the midst of planning an event at my church for families with LGBTQIA+ kids. I love to plan trips for my family, complete with detailed itineraries that everyone makes fun of and we always stray from but at least we have a starting point and options. I love options. Which is why I have thoroughly enjoyed envisioning and implementing my 16-year-old’s college search process. Why am I doing this instead of her, you might ask? I’ll tell you.
- I understand what college is and how it works much better than she does, since I went through the search process and attended college and graduated, and I know many other people who have done the same. At first I thought she magically knew all the things I knew about college, but it turns out that’s not the case.
- One thing I’ve learned about parenting her over the past 16 years is that I have a pretty good sense of what she wants and what she needs even if she doesn’t realize what she wants and what she needs at the moment. I am proud of my track record of things I’ve mildly coerced her into doing (which she resisted simply because they were unfamiliar) that she ended up really loving. So I have come to understand that she often hesitates about jumping into something she hasn’t seen for herself. I think she connects with experiential learning. It turns out that our college visits have helped her learn about her interests, or at least reveal to us interests we didn’t realize she had.
- I like to plan ahead. See above comment about often-mocked but still appreciated vacation itineraries. I’ve wondered for a while why so many families and schools wait until it’s almost time to apply to colleges to start looking at colleges. By the time you’re a senior, or even well into junior year, your GPA is pretty firmly established. You may not have the opportunity to sign up for any more classes. When you’re touring colleges, they say they want to see that you’ve challenged yourself in high school. By late junior year or early senior year, you’ve already taken or at least signed up for all your high school classes. You’ve already been doing most of the activities you’re going to do. It’s certainly possible you will take up a new sport or learn to play a new instrument as a junior or senior, but probably not likely. So that’s why I started this process when my daughter was in 10th grade, so there was still time for her to absorb the information we learned from college visits and act on it. I also anticipated that she would be unavailable for the entire summer between 11th and 12th grades because she aspires to work as a camp counselor at the sleepaway camp she attended for eight summers. That would mean no college visits during that time, which is often when families have the opportunity to tour.
Many people have asked how I started the search, since the universe of universities can seem so overwhelming, given that there are approximately 4,000 of them in the US. So the first thing is to narrow the scope. This does not mean that the initial list you make will be the final list, or that your kid won’t change their minds about what they want many times. And that is totally fine. But you have to start somewhere. Here’s the path we’ve taken so far. (Disclaimer: I am not saying this is the path for your kid, and I am not inviting debate or discussion here. Just explaining our experience).
- During her freshman year, I was concerned about the lack of self-confidence she expressed when talking about people she knew who were being accepted into colleges that she felt sure she could not get into. Similarly, she seemed daunted by the prospect of taking AP classes because she had heard how hard they were. Of course this prompted me to launch into one of many “you can do hard things” speeches that parents pull out of their back pockets when needed. I attempted to explain to her that she did not have to go to any particular kind of college, or a famous or prestigious college, and that she could take a gap year if she didn’t want to go to college right after school. She could work or volunteer or take time to think if she wasn’t ready for college. We’ve emphasized this a lot. But that she does eventually have to go to college and she does have to take hard classes because she is capable and it’s important to challenge yourself. At this point it was still all theoretical.
- While we were on vacation, we toured a well-known college in that city. Not because of any particular program that school offered, but simply because it was there. As in, “hey, here’s a college! Let’s look at it just for fun!” I hadn’t really prepared her for this tour and she mentally freaked out, as demonstrated by total silence, walking 20 feet ahead or behind us at all times, refusal to discuss anything during or after the tour, and unwillingness to read the brochure. So that didn’t go super well.
- Later, when everyone was in a better mood. Perhaps this was days or weeks later, I don’t really remember, she asked me a lot of questions about how college works which I didn’t realize she didn’t know. After that, she seemed to feel reassured that she could, in fact, handle the concept of college, and was more open to thinking and talking about it.
- One of her teachers suggested to me that my daughter might be interested in one of the Seven Sisters women’s colleges. My first reaction was, “Whoa aren’t those super expensive? We are not rich!” But her teacher assured me that these schools give generous scholarships, which turns out to be true, and was one of the first lessons I learned during the search process, which is that the sticker price of a private university is basically meaningless. I am still trying to understand exactly why that is the case, but I know that it is. There is a lot of money out there, whether or not you qualify for need-based financial aid. For example, at one school we visited, they give you an automatic $25,000 scholarship if you were a member of the National Honor Society. I felt so vindicated when we learned this in an info session because I made Zoe apply to her school’s NHS even though she didn’t understand why it mattered. Another school that we’re planning to visit this fall just sent us an email saying “every admitted student receives at least $24,000 in renewable scholarship upon admission.” Like I said, the way this works does not make sense to me, but there it is. What I have told my daughter is that she can apply anywhere she wants, and we’ll see where she gets in and what aid they offer her. Anyway the point here is that we took a day trip to the nearest Seven Sisters school, which was beautiful, and my daughter was receptive to learning about the school, appreciated its intimacy and traditions and proximity to a cool city, and she was able to start seeing herself as a college student.
- At this point I was able to start asking questions, since she had some context for coming up with answers. We discussed geography, and she said she wanted to stay on the East Coast, basically within a day’s drive. A smaller school where she can get to know professors appeals to her, so we’ve concentrated on schools with populations roughly 5,000 or fewer. However, a few larger schools with smaller programs in her area of focus have recently made their way on to the list, but she definitely wants to be part of a tight community. We’ll get to that later. She also mentioned that she did not want to go to a school with a Greek system or a big focus on sports. It turns out, we’ve since learned, that this means Division III athletics. I think almost every college we’ve visited is Division III, which means they definitely have sports but sports are not the most important thing at the school. At one college we we toured, when they took us to the gym, I asked if many students attend games. The tour guide said that their women’s volleyball team had recently won the division championship, and that volleyball games in that gym were usually standing room only, better attended than basketball or football, which my daughter and I both thought was awesome. She knew that she wants to study abroad so it was important to find a school that offers plenty of opportunities for that. And I knew, even if she didn’t yet realize it, that we needed to look at schools that offer generous financial aid.
- Armed with this information, I started looking at lists. My first stop was Colleges that Change Lives. I don’t remember where I first heard of this book, which is now also a website and a whole organization, but it seemed like a good place to start. First of all, college should be a transformative experience, and second, I liked the idea that someone had already vetted these schools and decided they were special in some way. I read about many of the 44 colleges, focusing on those within roughly 600 miles north and south of us. I requested information from any of them that seemed even remotely like a good fit. At this point, my daughter didn’t really have any idea what she wanted to study. The only class she was especially interested in was psychology, so we used that as a placeholder. Most colleges have psychology programs, so we weren’t ruling anything out based on academic offerings yet.
- I created a spreadsheet with a row for each prospective colleges, and columns to fill in info like location, size, admission rate, average GPA of admitted students, percentage of students of color (we wanted a school that is diverse, like our high school and community), percentage of students who study abroad, etc. I’ve modified the spreadsheet many times and it has given birth to baby spreadsheets with subsets of information.
- Understanding that Colleges that Change Lives is just a small slice of the big pie of possibly great colleges, I opened up the Fiske Guide. This is one of the few nods to my own college search process, which was much narrower and seemingly haphazard. I love a nice big reference book, and Fiske is just that. I had bought a copy earlier when I was introducing the idea of the Seven Sisters schools, so my daughter could get a little insight into them. Each entry is only a couple pages long, and they include ratings on social life and environment and cost and things like that. She underlined and highlighted elements of the entries that interested her. This was kind of a baby step in terms of her engagement in the process, but it was an important one. One of the most useful parts of the Fiske, in my opinion, is where they say something like “people who applied to this school also applied to these other five schools.” If you liked this book, be sure to check out these other books with a similar vibe. So I looked up every school on our list in Fiske, and added relevant details to the spreadsheet. Then I looked up every school listed in the “if you liked this school” part of the entry, and read about them to see if they met our other criteria. If they did –or came close–I added them to the spreadsheet and requested information on their websites.
- A friend whose daughter had just gone through the college search process mentioned Niche.com. This is a handy website where you can look up a college and find a lot of information at a glance, including their “grades” for each school based on value, academics, campus, etc. These may be useful but should not be taken as gospel. Different things matter more or less to different people. Overall it’s a great resource, but I have two favorite features on Niche.com. 1) a more robust version of the “if you liked this college…” component of the Fiske, which suggests schools that similar to the one you’re looking at based on several different metrics, like “here’s another school with 2,000 students or fewer,” or “here’s another school with a top nursing program,” or “here’s another school in Pennsylvania.” So you can certainly go down many rabbit holes, but eventually you feel like you’ve thoroughly examined each category. 2) You can compare schools side by side, just like you would when you’re buying a refrigerator from Home Depot or a coffeemaker on Amazon. Comparing schools has been useful when looking at net costs, acceptance rates, and other numbers. I will reiterate that these are all numbers and not the only factors in decision making. Niche.com can’t tell you if the vibe at a school feels right to your kid. But it may be able to tell you if your kid is likely to get in or not, so you can make sure they’re applying to some schools they definitely will get into, as well as maybe some schools they’d like to attend but might be a reach. So I added several schools to the spreadsheet that Niche.com suggested.
- We started to schedule visits. I’ve heard from many experienced parents that it’s just as important to tour schools you don’t like so your student continues to sharpen their sense of what appeals to them, what matters to them, and what they might want to avoid. So, while I didn’t want to waste our time going places I thought my daughter would hate, I definitely included some maybes on the schedule. Here’s what I’ve learned since we started doing tours. 1) Don’t schedule more than one school in a day, even if they’re in the same town or city. It’s too much, mentally and physically, to absorb and process. 2) Do schedule an info session and a tour. You will get different information and perspectives from each. Info sessions are typically (but not always) led by admission staff, while tours are led by students. 3) Ask questions during both the info session and the tour, but also remember you can read the brochure and look things up online, so you don’t have to ask everything. 4) Bring a water bottle and wear comfortable shoes. Maybe a raincoat and umbrella. Some people I know like to eat on campus when they visit. I do not, because 1) I feel like it’s weird to eat there when you’re not a student and you have other options, like a real restaurant. 2)You can find out how the food is from other sources, and 3) a given meal might not be an accurate representation of the food overall.
- Somewhere in the middle of all this, my daughter discovered what she wants to study and do for a living, which is something in the realm of filmmaking, video production, photography, broadcast journalism, or media arts. Every school seems to call it something different, and she is still exploring what areas of the field she wants to dig into–which is great–she has so much time ahead of her to figure it out. But once she had this epiphany, that definitely changed the shape of our search. We started looking more intentionally for schools with film/video/media arts programs. This is slightly tricky because, as I mentioned, different schools label these things differently. She doesn’t want to study film, or theory, or just communications. She wants to make things. So that has added and eliminated schools to and from our list. It is important to note, however, that we have not struck a college from the list simply because it doesn’t have a media program if it is in a consortium with other schools that do offer great options in this field. It’s quite possible that she could attend a small women’s college that has amazing leadership opportunities and a progressive vibe and close-knit community while also taking film and photography courses at one of its partner institutions. We have learned that most schools, at least in big cities, are part of these consortia and you can easily cross-register for classes and basically have the resources of several schools available to you.
- And that brings us up to speed. So far we’ve visited 8 of the 14 colleges currently on our list. We have tours scheduled for three more this fall, and are planning to take on two more next spring break. We have one late-breaking entry that we haven’t schedule yet, but it’s relatively close by, so we can squeeze it in. And there are few more schools that are basically like notes in the margin of the spreadsheet right now. Maybe someone suggested we check them out, or we heard them mentioned somewhere, so I will do a little research to see if they merit a trip. I’m sure that some of the schools will be crossed off the list after we visit, and some may rise to the top. We still have 14 months until any applications are due. I imagine by then my daughter will have forgotten her impressions from some of our trips. Between now and then she will probably meet with some admissions officers when they visit her school, or at college fairs. Her school counselor encouraged her to contact the admissions office or professors in the departments she’s interested in to ask questions, as colleges look favorable upon applicants who have demonstrated a deeper than average curiosity and interest in the school. The list of schools where she actually applies will probably look pretty different from our current list. We have time to sort it all out. Once she knows where she’s been accepted, she can always visit again for admitted students day or an overnight.
- Of course I’ve already been thinking about next spreadsheet. This one I’m going to have her create, but I’ll help. This one will include the name of the admissions officer and the application requirements and deadlines, and the requirements and deadlines for the scholarships each school offers. And of course there will be another spreadsheet for other scholarships. Thank goodness for the internet. When I was in high school I had to look these things up at the library. I think I only knew about a fraction of the opportunities that were out there. Fortunately, I found one school I wanted to attend, and I applied early and got in and I loved my time there and it all worked out. But I was a different kind of student with a different personality than my daughter, and the world is different than in was in the 90s, so I want to open up the world for her as much as it’s in my power to do.
In the meantime, I will keep loving our road trips. Our next one is to upstate New York, to a city neither of us has ever seen. Every time we travel–for college visits or otherwise–we get excited about finding local coffee shops with resident cats, browsing through independent bookstores, and eating at funky little restaurants. We usually end up walking for miles. We listen to our favorite music and stock up on snacks for the car and notice weird and wonderful things outside as we drive. We laugh a lot. I’m soaking up every minute with her before she leaves on this grand adventure that I’m helping her imagine into being.
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I feel like I’ve been holding it in all summer.
What it is I’ve been holding in, I’m not exactly sure. My breath? My thoughts? My feelings? You know when a writer holds in all those words for a long time it’s not healthy. Eventually they’re going to find a way out.
Maybe there’s an imbalance of words because I have spent so much of my time off this summer reading. I have devoured at least two dozen books. I attended the national gathering of Unitarian Universalists and absorbed ideas and songs and Pittsburgh and ate a lot of food and had a lot of conversations. I’ve returned to church and gotten back up on the chancel as a worship associate and a speaker. I’ve made new friends. I’ve eaten a lot of lunches and taken miles of walks with old friends. I’ve been rebuilding my soccer team–now known as Athena’s Arsenal! I am the only player who remains from the original Ice & Ibuprofen squad that made our debut in 2016. I&I merged last year with a team called Far Gone and we’ve had to recruit a lot of folks to build up our roster. In choosing our new name, someone suggested Tottenham Hotties (a riff on the Premiership team Tottenham Hotspurs) and I countered with Tottenham Hot Flashes, but that didn’t win. Perhaps it’s just a reflection of my personal situation. It turns out I am still not really any good at soccer and I’m not sure why I am playing other than to prove to myself that I can and to give myself the gift of two hours a week when I am not thinking about anything else even if I have to run around in circles while that happens. I am organizing an event through church called QA2: Queer or Questioning, Awareness and Acceptance to provide LGBTQIA+ kids and families with an opportunity to make connections and find resources and support. I’m still trying to teach myself to read tarot. What little I have learned so far has offered insights that given me pause and steered me in new directions with surprising confidence.
I’ve been watching my kids grow up before my eyes. It’s like time-lapse photography of their emotional maturity and ability to navigate the world. Niki can bake on their own from start to finish now after a week at baking camp. At the back-to-school open house, they brought cookies they made and gave them out to all the teachers and staff. At film camp they made a silent film–a dark and modern twist on Hansel and Gretel in which they played Gretel. They discovered a previously unknown talent for an interest in being an emcee after performing that role at the end-of-camp presentation at two different camps. They’ve made all kinds of friends at all these camps and are now immersed in various group chats and FaceTime calls. Niki earned their blue solid belt in martial arts after a long stint as a green solid and a final burst of energy and dedication that enabled them to move up. We’ve attended so many martial arts growth ceremonies and they never fail to move me to tears. Always and especially when there are those kids who struggle to break their boards long after their peers have had their new belts tied on by their instructors, I cheer the hardest. We did a bit of rearranging of their room this summer, taking down drawings they’d made during the pandemic (signed with their old name) and hanging photos of them with animals from our trip to the Houston Zoo, and pride posters, and a picture of Megan Rapinoe with the slogan “Be Proud.” And they are. They own their identity and their uniqueness 100% and I am there for it.
Zoe spent a month away from us at Camp Friendship, her home away from home. This was her eighth and final summer as a camper, and her plan is to return next year as a counselor. I remember when she was little and in martial arts and we’d be at the growth ceremony and I would ask her if she could imagine being a black belt, and for a long time she would shake her head, wide-eyed and in awe, and say no. Until one day she nodded and said yes. It’s been the same way at camp. We always asked her if she would be a counselor some day and she couldn’t see herself having that kind of responsibility, until suddenly she could. She said this summer as a camper, she imagined everything she did as if through a counselor’s eyes, and thought about what it would be like to lead little kids in the activities that she has loved learning so much herself. The first week of camp this year, she didn’t know many campers or counselors, as several of her favorite counselors had moved on to other jobs, and many of her camper friends had aged out. She wrote us saying she was homesick, but didn’t let it keep her from making the most of camp life. As more familiar faces arrived each week and she cultivated the relationships with folks she had just met, everything fell into place, as it always does. The camp has a system where parents can write emails through the parent portal and camp will print them out and give them to the campers, and campers can handwrite messages back and camp will scan them and email them to us. It’s much quicker than snail mail but eliminates the need for campers to have their phones with them at camp (which is one of my and Zoe’s favorite things about camp). I loved having the opportunity to update Zoe on the goings on of life at home (mostly boring, without her!) and hear from her about developments at camp. I wish we had some way of continuing that correspondence at home, even though we’re both in the same house. That’s one reason that I am so happy to be taking road trips with her to visit colleges. We’ve toured a bunch of colleges in Maryland and Pennsylvania and New England so far and have several more up and down the east coast on the calendar for this fall and next spring. I love claiming this time in the car with her, to listen to music and books and talk about anything and everything, and notice weird signs and unusual sights along the way, and stop at little bookstores and find cute coffeeshops with resident cats.
This fall, Niki will practice walking to and from school on their own. We’re going to teach them how to take the bus. Zoe is so close to finishing the requirements to earn her driver’s license. Then she will be given a vintage minivan by her grandparents and will be set loose on the world. We’ve discussed curfews and she has gainful employment. This morning at church it gave me so much joy to watch these four-year-old girls dancing around at the front of the sanctuary during the service. I love four-year-olds. But I don’t wish my kids were younger. Or older. I am so excited to be with them at this exact moment in their lives, where they are learning so much about themselves and about the world. Sometimes, that means seeing how people can be awful and the world is kind of a mess. But sometimes we get to fill it with cookies and music and hugs and laughter and forget about the rest of it for a while.
So I will take in a breath and remember to fully and deeply exhale. All the way from my belly up out into the world. I will take it all it, and release. Because I have to let it go so I can take another breath.
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If my teenager devotes as much time and attention to preparing for and applying to college as she has plotting and organizing her efforts to buy tickets to see Taylor Swift, she will get in anywhere she wants with scholarship offers to boot. In fact she has said that she and her friends (both real life and online Swifties) are comparing receiving the magic presale code by text (required to buy tickets before the general public, if any are even left at that point) to hearing whether you’ve been accepted to your first choice school. Her excitement and anxiety around this concert tour have been enormous. She has said many times, “I am so scared.” As in, that we won’t get tickets, or maybe won’t get tickets for the right show, or won’t get good seats. The emotional intensity is palpable. I get it. This is someone whose music and persona she cares a lot about. I’ve certainly felt that way about musicians throughout my life. I know that problems, like gas or water, can expand to fill up all available room, regardless of their overall seriousness or significance. Hopefully we will be able to get the tickets tomorrow morning and all will be well. And between now and two years from now when she is actually applying for college, we will take lots and lots of deep breaths.
Meanwhile, we are also facing the superficially less dramatic but actually much more daunting prospect of her learning to drive. She and I attended a mandatory two-hour presentation about driver safety and education last week. Her school auditorium was filled with other sophomores and their parents and I wondered what was going through all of their heads. Here’s what I learned that night:
You’re no longer supposed to position your hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. Now 8 and 4 are recommended, so you don’t have to cross your arms when you turn and if the airbag goes off you’re less likely to sustain injuries from your arms being crossed, and to reduce fatigue from driving. I thought this was an interesting tip, and wondered why no one is making an effort to tell adults who have already been driving for years to change their habits. There’s also a new way you’re supposed to position your side mirrors to eliminate the blind spot and avoid accidents. I know if you have a newer car you have the fancy indicators that tell you when someone is close by in the lanes next to you, but I drive a 2010 minivan so I have no such luxury. There were actually a few driving tips that seemed useful and I wondered why adults are required to do so little to renew their licenses. Not that I want extra administrative hurdles in my life, but I am sure my driving has gotten worse and I could use a little refresher course. I guess that’s what I was getting last week.
Allegedly, parents have the most influence on teens’ driving habits. The presentation was heavy on telling us to get ourselves together to both model proper behavior when we’re driving and set the rules and to feel free to take away driving privileges. We are supposed to go through step-by-step driving lessons in the booklet they gave us, and log 45 hours of driving practice with our kids while they have their learners permit. And review and sign and make them sign various contracts in the back of the booklet outlining what they are and are not allowed to do and what happens if they mess up. That is all in addition to the classroom portion of driver’s ed they take during gym class, and the behind-the-wheel training they have to take with licensed instructors. No pressure. The driver’s ed teachers who were presenting emphasized the importance of establishing a bond with your children to effectively encourage safe driving habits. If you haven’t already established a bond by the time they’re 15 and 6 months, it may be a challenge to start now. The slide show also included a smiling dad and daughter sitting in the front seat of a car and advised us to leave our family problems at home when we practice driving, to make it a fun experience for everyone.
I wondered how kids who don’t have reliable parents, or parents who drive, or parents who own a car, are supposed to manage all this. Today as part of my job I was downtown meeting with DC Council Members and their staffs to discuss issues related to youth homelessness. Included in our group were three young adults who have experienced homelessness and are now advocating on behalf of themselves and their peers for tailored workforce development programs and mobile mental health services that meet their needs. One of the service providers mentioned that abundant driver jobs are available in the DC area, working for Amazon or FedEx or UPS, among others. And many young people she works with are eager to apply for the jobs, but they don’t have driver’s licenses because they grew up taking public transportation, and they don’t have parents available to teach them to drive, or cars to learn on. One of the young people said that the logistical barriers are so significant that many teens don’t bother with them, and drive anyway, often taking cars that don’t belong to them because they literally have no legitimate way of getting a license and buying and insuring their own cars.
Which brings me back to the driver’s ed presentation and the talk by the police officer. He was there, ostensibly, to talk about how to behave when you’re pulled over while driving. He did that, but only after he offered a lot of his own perspective on teens and driving and how judges where we live don’t like to see teens in court for traffic violations because the judges know the teens should know better and are very strict. All of it felt like a lecture designed to scare the kids, which it probably was. But it irritated me. Perhaps because this is not my preferred parenting technique and I am not a police officer and I know a lot of the people in the audience probably bristled the moment the officer walked up to the front of the auditorium. I should mention that the officer was Black, and at least half if not three-quarters of the young people in the audience were people of color. So the officer said that if you’re pulled over, you should roll down the windows and put your hands on the steering wheel where they’re visible. He said that if the officer asks for your license you should say, “it’s in my pocket, can I reach behind me and get it out of my wallet,” or “it’s in my bag on the passenger seat, may I reach over and get it,” or whatever the case may be, so you have permission to move. “So we don’t have any accidents,” the officer said. Which translates to, “so we don’t shoot you and kill you for no reason,” I guess. He said, “Be polite. When you’re pulled over it’s not the time to practice your trial lawyer skills. If you feel like the officer did something wrong, your parents can deal with that later. It’s your job to be polite.” Are your parents really going to sort it out later? Whose parents are going to do that? Maybe parents who actually are trial lawyers? The more he talked, the more I did not want to listen.
I am a middle-aged white woman who has been pulled over a handful of times for stupid things. Mostly I have avoided getting tickets, perhaps because I legitimately didn’t know my tail light was out, or I wasn’t actually drunk but just trying to get the hair out of my eyes with a barrette (that did actually happen). Maybe I just seem idiotic and pathetic when they pull me over because I get flustered easily. And I seriously didn’t know that it’s illegal to drive through a parking lot in order to get onto a different road if the traffic is bad. Did you know that? (I did get the ticket for that one, and as a result I was even later to pick my kid up from day care). I am acutely aware that I have never been racially profiled and no officer has ever pulled out his gun when I reached for my license or registration. My daughter will likely be treated the same way because she is white. Unfortunately some of her friends and some of the teenagers in that auditorium will not be. We have to do a lot more to change the way police officers behave or even at a more basic level how we approach and achieve community safety with or without police, so no one else who is unarmed, nonthreatening, and completely innocent, gets killed by a cop for any reason.
Our lives are not perfect or without challenges, but I understand how privileged we are. Listening to the stories of these young people today talk about times in their lives when they were trying to find a place to stay from day to day, without any support from family, was important. One of them, who is currently studying for the LSAT and trying to figure out her path to law school, was homeless for her final two years of college. Another talked about the value of his lived experience as a prospective employee. He wants to be a social worker and he can draw on his knowledge of earning his GED while incarcerated, having been part of the foster care system, and being a parent, to help others. He’s already doing that by serving on several advisory boards and speaking at meetings and events across the city.
I try to provide all kinds of fun and enriching experiences for my kids. I want them to be exposed to all kinds of things. But hopefully they will never have to know what it’s like to be homeless or involved in the justice system or profiled by the police. Hopefully I will be able to model good behavior when I’m driving so none of us will crash because we’re distracted or sleepy. Hopefully my daughter will get a job so she can afford the concert tickets and the merch and the meals out with friends and excursions to Starbucks. And we will all keep in mind that even when we struggle, we do it with privilege.
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When I pulled up in front of her high school, Zoe ran over to the minivan to collect her backpack and duffel bag, packed the night before and stuffed with everything she thought she might possibly need for the next three days. I offered to carry something for her and she declined. I started to walk with her to the entrance of the school where the rest of the crew team and the coaches and the parent chaperones were gathered. She stopped me.
“I was just going to walk you over there,” I said. “And give you a hug goodbye.”
“Can you just do that here?” she asked. I got it. I gave her a hug. Told her to have fun and not get hurt and do a good job cheering or rowing, whatever she ended up doing. She told me not to cry and walked away toward her friends.
For the record, I didn’t cry.
I don’t think of myself as an embarrassing mom, but I guess no parent ever does. I went home and got a consolation hug from my husband.
Now, several hours later, my favorite app–Find My Friends–indicates that Zoe made it to Philadelphia and actually all the way to the river where the regatta will take place. I think they’re scoping out the course, or maybe even practicing, before the race tomorrow. Zoe was invited to go with the team as an alternate for the women’s freshman eight boat, because if one person in an eight gets ill or injured, the whole boat is sunk (not literally). So Zoe will be as supportive and enthusiastic a cheerleader as anyone could want, unless of course someone wakes up tomorrow with a fever or trips while carrying an oar and breaks their leg. I would never wish this to happen, but it’s hard not to hope just a little bit that my kid would get the chance to row in what’s apparently the largest high school rowing event in the country. She, however, seems perfectly content to go along for the ride–basically taking a field trip to a cool city with people she loves.
This is the last regatta she will participate in this season. Next weekend is the national championship, and although her novice women’s eight boat took silver in the state championships earlier this month, novices don’t get to go to nationals. Don’t ask me why. But truthfully, this fact has saved me some amount of stress, because she’s also a member of the courtship for her good friend’s quinceañera that weekend. If you’re not familiar with the quinceañera, it’s a huge party (maybe somewhere between a bar/bat mitzvah and a wedding?) to celebrate a Latina girl turning 15. And the courtship is like a bridal party. Part of the courtship’s responsibility is doing a choreographed dance at the party with the birthday girl. Zoe is helping choreograph. The morning of the party, the courtship kids are gathering to get hair and makeup done, and then taking a party bus downtown for photos. So this is, you might imagine, a big deal. Also we need to get her a gold, floor-length dress. We haven’t yet found said dress. But we will!
Rowing has been one of the most challenging and exhilarating things Zoe has ever done, on par with earning her black belt in martial arts, or maybe she would say even harder, as martial arts practice was never held at 5:30am. During the spring season, the crew team practices six days a week. Typically, freshmen and novices practiced in the afternoon and varsity in the morning (at 5:30, arriving at the boathouse in the dark). But on several occasions Zoe’s coaches asked her and various combinations of other newer rowers to come in the morning. The first time they asked her to come to morning practice, she was thrilled. I was slightly less so, since I was the one driving her at 5am, but I got used to it. And she did too, although there was definitely a night when she had been at practice in the afternoon and her boat (a double that day, not an eight) had flipped, and she hurt her foot when it got stuck in the shoe of the boat (where you put your feet while you’re rowing) and she was supposed to go to morning practice the next day and I sat with her in her room trying to reassure her because she was worried that she just couldn’t do it. Of course, she didn’t actually do it because when she woke up at 5 she couldn’t put weight on her foot and we had to go to urgent care. But she was back at practice three days later, preparing for the next day’s regatta.
Over the course of three months, the skin on Zoe’s hands was shredded from gripping the oars. She complained that everything hurt. She was exhausted. But she was tough. Every night she made her lunch for the next day, and packed her crew bag. We went to the chiropractor a few times. She took a fair amount of Tylenol. She spent a lot of hours rigging and de-rigging boats. She has learned so many technical and practical things about boats and rowing that are beyond my understanding. It took me months to understand the difference between novice and freshman, which is relevant because Zoe was moved back and forth between the novice and freshman boats throughout the season. A freshman can be a novice but a novice isn’t necessarily a freshman–just someone new to the sport, which can include 8th graders. So the freshman boat is usually just a little bit faster than the novice boat. There are always going to be people who are faster and people who are slower. Such is life. And even when you work really hard, sometimes you’re not going to make it into the fastest boat. But there are many boats to fill, and someone has to row in all of them. In the midst of all this I had a good conversation with a friend of mine whose kid also rows. She reminded me of his similar struggles the year before and how she, like me, was hoping he would make a certain boat and he wisely said to her, “I row where I row.”
Then there’s this tension. There’s my core belief that you should do things because you love to do them, and you have fun, and you make friends, and you work hard, whether or not you have any natural talent or skill, and whether or not you’re getting any better, and whether or not you plan to do the thing in the future or just for a season. It’s what I tell myself when I play soccer. It’s what I told myself when I was singing in gospel choirs. It’s what I tell myself when I make art. I’ve done all those things because they bring me joy. I don’t have to prove myself to anyone. I don’t have to win any contests or demonstrate excellence. I can just do it.
And yet. And yet when you see your kid doing a thing, especially a sport, you want them to be great at it. Right? That’s not just me, right? Even if it’s against all odds and you yourself were never good at a sport and none of it matters at all. It’s like this pernicious little voice in your head, that hopes your kid scores, wins, achieves, masters whatever it is. Even though in your heart you know it doesn’t matter. You know all the ways that doing an activity is good for your kid, whether or not they ever win or score.
Niki is on a soccer team. Most kids around here who play soccer start in kindergarten. So Niki is a bit late to the game, and it turns out the boys on his team take soccer a lot more seriously than the girls on Zoe’s elementary school team did. You can tell these kids all watch soccer with their dads from the way they yell on the field and their goal celebrations. To put it diplomatically, not all of Niki’s teammates have been patient with the fact that Niki is more of a beginner than they are. An enthusiastic beginner. A fast runner. Also an anxious player who has been known to crack their knuckles a lot while playing and sometimes hop toward ball instead of running. The main point here is I want Niki to enjoy being on the team. I don’t want the other kids belittling them. And of course if they were a little more skilled, the teammates would probably have less to say. But that’s not the point, right? They’re having fun, they’re exercising, they’re practicing teamwork. And they like watching soccer with their dad too.
So we go to regattas, we go to soccer games, we drive to practices, we wash a lot of gear, we make a lot of snacks and refill a lot of water bottles. And always we tell them how much we loved watching them do their thing, and how proud we are of how hard they’ve worked. And how we’re glad they had fun. That’s all we can do.
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Because I have questions. So many questions. They are eating away at the inside of my brain.
For example:
- Why is my 9th grader going to learn Tchouckball this year? Have you ever heard of Tchoukball? Is it fun?
- How is it possible that a person who was incarcerated for 30 years has been sober for only the past 14 years. How do you get access to alcohol or drugs when you’re in prison?
- Why does my 3rd grader weave back and forth when walking down a sidewalk with us? Why does he pace in circles sometimes?
- Who invented those indentations on the side of highways and how did they make them and who decides which roads have them and which ones don’t?
- How does someone decide the best way to honor their deceased loved one is by naming an overpass or bridge after them?
- Why do some people consistently reply all when they only need to reply to the sender of the email?
- If companies can make a product with just five ingredients, or with all natural ingredients, why don’t they just change their recipe instead of offering one version with chemicals or additives and another version that’s healthier? Why wouldn’t you just sell the healthier one instead so it’s easier for everyone to buy?
- Why can’t all the stores put all your coupons electronically on your shopper card?
- Why would anyone think that being mean to someone will change their behavior?
- How much of one’s day must be spent resetting passwords? Why?
I am seeking actual answers to these questions. Please reply.
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This morning I woke up at 7 with a migraine that felt like it was threatening to kill me. I rarely wake up with migraines–they typically descend on me in the afternoon or evening. It’s one thing when you have momentum from the day that enables you to push through pain, but when you wake up with that kind of pain it seems impossible to get going. So after seeing Zoe off and giving Randy instructions about getting Zeke ready and delivered to school (typically my job) I took my meds and went back to bed. I let my good friends with whom I had a long-awaited breakfast date know that I couldn’t make it. I am always reluctant to take one of my pills because my insurance company has decided I am only allowed to have four migraines per month and they will not give me any more pills. In the past my neurologist has helped me work around that, but we’re in between visits. Anyway…
During my migraine nap I had three disturbing dreams. In the first one I found shards of plastic hair clips in my bed and hundreds of small, shiny rocks. Then we won a food truck at an auction but we had no idea how to operate it or even drive it out of the gym where we received it. Finally I was running away from my parents and ended up swimming fully clothed in a pond filled with rubber ducks. Somehow it seems insulting to have bad dreams when my head is already splitting open. I deserve a break, right?
Once I got up–headache free–I had to drive to a client’s office to pick up a laptop to use in my work with them. On the way, just a few blocks from my house, and fortunately just a few blocks from a gas station, I ran out of gas. I had been playing chicken with the little orange light for a couple days, always thinking I would get gas on my next trip, until I lost. Luckily Randy was working from home today so I called him to ask him to bring our gas can to me. We have a gas can only because of the last time I ran out of gas, a couple years ago. He came quickly and we noticed there was still some gas in the can, but we couldn’t remember how to open the can. I recalled that the last time this happened we struggled for ages until I opened it, but of course I couldn’t recall how. So I walked down to the gas station to ask for help.
When I went into the gas station lobby, the friendly woman behind the counter took the gas can and brought it into the garage for one of the mechanics to unfasten it because neither of us could. While she was in the garage, I watched the large TV hanging on the wall. The tv was showing images of old paintings of crucified Christ. There was no narration or context, just a lot of bleeding Jesuses. Pop music (maybe Bruno Mars?) was playing over the speakers. I’m pretty sure it was not coming from the TV. The gas station clerk returned and showed me that part of the nozzle pulled out of itself in order to pour the gas. She sold me $4.50 worth of gas and I went out and pumped it into the can. Next to me was a station wagon whose trunk was open, revealing a large pile of car parts. Like they had fallen off or out of the car and been stored in the trunk. Then I noticed on top of the car was strapped what seemed to be a bumper or a grill, although neither of those seemed missing from this car. Then in the front seat I saw a man who was working on the dashboard, although the dashboard wasn’t there. The whole inside front of the car had been stripped down. I could not imagine how this car had been partially disassembled but was still operational or why the guy was sitting there working on reassembly.
After I walked back to the car–which Randy was guarding–with the gas, I attempted to replicated the gas station clerk’s easy open of the nozzle and could not. We were sitting on the sidewalk and I was silently hoping someone would stop and offer to help. When someone did, I was surprised to see a short, stout, gray-haired woman. She suggested that we push down on the spout instead of trying to pull it up. Lo and behold, it worked! So I poured the two gallons into the gas tank while trying to stay out of the way of cars whizzing by. After we made sure the car started again, Randy went home and I drove to the gas station to fill up the rest of the way. As I was pulling out of the gas station, I saw the woman who had stopped to help us across the street, walking back toward the direction she had come from. She saw me too and smiled and waved and gave me a thumbs up. I laughed out loud. You never know who’s going to be of assistance and when.
I got home just in time to log into my 1pm meeting which had been pushed to 1:30 for my benefit, and kept my sound off while scarfing down the original chicken sandwich from Burger King I had picked up on the way home. I was relieved that both the colleagues with whom I was meeting also had their cameras off so I could work and eat and collect myself in privacy.
The moment the meeting was over I hustled to throw snacks in a box and collect some clothes for Zoe to change into for crew. Apparently I took a shirt from her pajama drawer, but it looked like a regular t-shirt to me. I managed to find her and one of her crew mates and hustled across two bridges to deliver them to the Anacostia Boathouse. Again it was fortunate that Randy was home because it quickly became clear I wouldn’t make it home in time to pick up Zeke from school, so Zoe texted Randy the QR code required to liberate Zeke. I forgot to tell Randy which door he should go to in order to pick up Zeke, but he was eventually directed to the right place, and they were back home by the time I got back home. Hopefully the father of Zoe’s crew mate is picking the girls up right now and delivering Zoe home, as I am at Zeke’s martial arts class. And Zeke’s back to school night is in 30 minutes.
And Zeke is testing for a stripe now. He’s been waiting to test for a while. I’m surprised they let him tonight since I just saw him staring at the classmate sitting next to him like he was trying to cast a spell instead of looking at what was happening in the center of the mat. But maybe the instructors were busy looking at what was happening instead of watching Zeke being weird. We’ll see what happens.
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When you’re a writer who earns a living telling other people’s stories, it can be challenging to find time to write your own. And when there is a lot happening that you are compelled to write, and you don’t sit down to do it, a dangerous bottleneck of thoughts builds up in your brain, which becomes so crowded that it’s hard for any single idea to push through the crowd. Then when one persistent little guy makes it out (like that lucky sperm in those books about sex ed you read as a kid!), you start to write that paragraph and approximately 30 seconds later you wonder if it’s the most important one to write because all those others are trying to muscle their way through as well. And you question what important even means, and who you are writing for, and what everything means, and then you get distracted by Facebook and text messages and checking your credit score and organizing your art supplies and thinking about ordering more art supplies even though you’re running out of room to store the ones you already have. And so on.
Adulting is freaking exhausting. And adulting combined with parenting–especially when parenting during, say, the first week back to school after an 18-month pandemic-induced hiatus–is just too much. This week involved calling several doctors and driving to myself and the kids to five health and medical appointments (everything’s fine, just taking care of things that had been pushed off during the summer) and picking up prescriptions. And making lunches for school which I haven’t had to do since 2019. And filling out a million forms. You get the idea. And none of these things is too much by itself, but on top of the actual work I do for my job, and trying to communicate with my friends and family–all of whom are having their own intense adulting weeks–is a lot. I was talking with someone today who said that the past 18 months was like running a marathon, but instead of having time now to recover, we have another whole marathon ahead of us. News flash! The pandemic isn’t over yet! The world is still on fire! She said that we should just walk this marathon. Since sitting it out is not an option.
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When people talk about having “all the feels,” does that include feelings like grumpy, disappointed, jealous, and agitated? My sense is that “all the feels” usually means “bittersweet” or “proud, yet wistful,” or something else that ends up leaning more toward the side of heartwarming and nostalgic rather than annoyed and overwhelmed. Maybe that’s just me.
Today was Zoe’s graduation from middle school. Except “graduation” here means, they showed everyone’s name on the screen, along with their photo, or if their photo wasn’t available, the Yellowjacket school mascot. A couple kids read poems they had written and the principal shared some “words of wisdom.” (Clearly I’m really feeling the air quotes today). Zoe watched this “ceremony” on her laptop, in her bed (where she has done most of her classes this year) as shared by her 7th grade teacher. Randy and Zeke and I watched downstairs. We quietly cheered for the handful of kids who we recognized. When Zoe’s name came up we cheered louder and I went upstairs to give her a hug. She was nonplussed. She is now a rising high school freshman and she is still, as usual, in her pajamas in the middle of the afternoon. And I don’t blame her. She and her classmates missed out on the 8th grade dance, Kings Dominion trip, picnic, and of course a real life graduation ceremony. She never even met most of her teachers in person. She’s only been to school a handful of times to take standardized tests or to pick up supplies. Tomorrow she will go to pick up a t-shirt and a certificate. Anticlimactic is an understatement.
I keep trying to hype high school, and as Zoe will be fully vaccinated in less than a week, she will be able to enjoy as normal a summer as is possible in a country that is still unevenly recovering from a pandemic. She’s looking forward to the beach, and returning to sleepaway camp, and getting to see friends in person at school. But she still won’t get back what was lost this year. Yesterday we were at the pediatrician for her annual checkup. When the doctor asked about Zoe’s sleep habits and when she goes to bed, I just laughed. The doctor said she’s gotten that reaction from all the other parents of teenagers this year. Pretty much everything Zoe reported sounded pretty typical, the doctor said. Which I guess makes me a feel a little better, a reminder that I’m not the only parent who has struggled every day for the past 18 months trying to figure out how to keep their kids engaged while also cutting them an appropriate amount of slack. Of course I know I’m not the only one, because I have friends and they have all had similar if not identical struggles this year. But in the moment, it’s easy to think you’re the only one who doesn’t have a clue what to do, because at any moment the pressure is only on you to figure it out.
Meanwhile, this week I have also been trying to get my client work done. At the beginning of the school year, when we decided to homeschool Zeke for second grade, my husband asked if it would be too much for me to be Zeke’s teacher while also running my business. I said, “probably, but I feel like that’s what we have to do.” Now at the end of the school year I can confidently say, “absolutely, it was too much to do,” but I still feel like it was what we had to do. Hopefully Zeke learned something. None of my clients have fired me yet, so I guess I managed ok, although I know I could’ve stayed more on top of my work. When you’re homeschooling, you have to provide some sort of evidence at the end of the year that your kid learned something. This can be a portfolio evaluated by a qualified professional, or a standardized test. As much as I do not like standardized tests, I chose that option because it was a lot simpler. Since Zeke was in second grade, I gave him the second grade test in late April, when we had pretty much finished everything I planned to do and both of us were running out of steam. He did great. Then this week I learned that you’re supposed to give your kid the test for the grade they’re entering, not the one they finished. This is totally counterintuitive to me, but I wanted to do the right thing, so I ordered the 3rd grade test and gave it to him. The test is online. When I tried to access the scores, it kept telling me sections of the test were incomplete. Apparently Zeke raced through several sections (it’s a long test) so he could play Xbox sooner. So we sat down together and I watched him answer all the additional questions. This included the reading comprehension section. One of the reading passages was extremely confusing, even to me. So in the end his reading comprehension score was not great. In fact, it was much lower than his score in April. I emailed all the test results to the principal, who shared my confusion about why you would give the 3rd grade test to a second grader, but she assured me that she would put him in class with the right teacher who will presumably see that he reads well when they hear him read.
When I submitted Zeke’s test results to the school system, the person in charge of home instruction students wrote back and asked if Zeke would be continuing home instruction next year. I replied that no, I had already enrolled Zeke at his old elementary school for third grade. She responded, “how wonderful for your son!” I chose to interpret that as her pleasure that things would be back to normal for him, not her relief that he would not be forced to do homeschool with me for another year.
The rest of the time I’ve just been trying to balance Zeke’s screen time with other activities that he can do without me, reminding myself over and over that he starts camp next week and will be intellectually stimulated, have the chance to make friends, and run around outside. Since he hasn’t had to get up and get dressed at a particular time on a regular basis since last March, this also feels like the first week of school for him, even though it’s summer. To that end, I’ve been trying to buy him new sneakers. He has complained for a while that his are uncomfortable, so I assumed he had outgrown them. I’ve bought his last few pair of shoes without getting him measured because the only children’s shoe store I know about is 40 minutes away. We were all set to go there on Tuesday, when I discovered they are closed on Tuesday. We went to the mall, against my better judgement. Three different people in three different stores measured his feet and got three different sizes. We didn’t buy any shoes.
When Zoe and I set out for the pediatrician yesterday, we discovered our van had a flat tire. One $22 Lyft later, we made it to the doctor. I didn’t have time to deal with the tire until last night. At 9:30, the AAA driver arrived, and had me drive my van up the ramp of his tow truck. It felt like being on an amusement park ride but much scarier because you’re in your own car. He towed us up the street to the service station, and then had me back the van off the truck! A friend of mine lives in the apartment building behind the gas station, so I alerted her to come to her window and watch. Apparently she waved but I couldn’t see because I was trying not to drive my car off the side of a truck.
Thankfully, today the van is fixed. They changed the oil and replaced the wiper blades, and the total repair cost was less than I’ve ever paid for a car repair, so that’s something. I should have the words “silver linings” tattooed on my arm. But not in air quotes.
You Ask a Lot of Questions 