And now that school is back in session and I managed to not kill myself or my children or any of the small furry animals that reside here, it is time for me to fully panic about the damn Cake Walk which I volunteered to organize and run, again, for the third time. I’m not complaining (yet). I’m sure the PTO president in her infinite wisdom saw no issue with scheduling the school’s 50th Anniversary Party and Fundraising Bash for the week following Spring Break because apparently she’s never been away on vacation and can’t imagine why all the usual volunteers and involved mothers – just back from Florida – would be more consumed by the need to pick up the dog from the kennel and complete fifteen loads of beach towel laundry and catch up on 72 hours of e-mails than bake, frost and decorate a cake in the likeness of a pair of sandals or a dragon or a Barbie castle to donate to this year’s Cake Walk. So far I have ten responses to my Cake Walk flier. Last year we had 70 cakes donated and still ran out of cakey prizes a full half-hour before the close of the event.

Perhaps I should have chosen a color other than acid yellow for my flier paper. But Staples was having a sale. I thought the vibrant, ghastly hue of stomach bile would at the very least garner some attention and would save me four whole dollars over the calmer melon sherbet option. “A penny wise, a pound foolish,” as Ben Franklin might say when faced with making copy paper decisions for the local elementary school fundraiser.

So we’ll have ten cakes and three hours of event time which means we can allow approximately three winners per hour. That’s a winner every twenty minutes which amounts to a lot of walking around in circles to the up-tempo strains of Billboard Top Forty while waiting for me to draw the winning number from a hat. I have searched the MP3 archives for a worthy play list and was feeling good about my selections: Sexy Back by Justin, Touch My Body by Mariah, I Wanna Have Your Babies by Natasha Bedingfield and, of course, Beautiful by Snoop Dogg that is until MBH pointed out that I wasn’t MC-ing White Party on South Beach but rather a grade school version of musical chairs with cake. He thought some of the lyrics a bit inappropriate for the intended audience, taking special issue with the following chorus from Beautiful:

When I see my baby boo, shit, I get foolish
Smack a nigga that tries to pursue it (Oh-hooo!)
Homeboy, she taken, just move it
I asked you nicely, don’t make the Dogg lose it
We just blow ‘dro and keep the flow movin’
In a ‘64, me and baby boo cruisin’ (Oh-hooo!)
Body rag interior blue, and
Have them hydralics squeakin’ when we screwin’
Now she’s yellin’, hollerin’ out Snoop, and
Hootin’, hollerin’; hollerin’, hootin’ (Oh-hooo!)
Black and beautiful, you the one I’m choosin’
Hair long and black and curly like you’re Cuban
Keep groovin’, that’s what we doin’
And we gon’ be together until your moms move in… (Oh-hooo!)

I stand by my original selections and continue to insist that we can’t coddle our children forever. But in order to be accommodating and pleasantly suburban I have agreed to tame it up, and add some filler tunes like Queen’s We Will Rock You and Bust a Move.

That should make it acceptably white cake (with low fat cream cheese icing) for all those grade-school-parent-haters, don’t ya think?

JUST? THAT’S ALL? Interesting word choice.

I’m not sure how he manages blase and flippant when talking about drafting ANOTHER brilliant and concise short essay that best represents me, a better one than the first time around (the flippancy and the need for better are implied. But I figure if I can’t do better than last time why bother? Apparently, my last attempt wasn’t good enough). And then there’s the task of twirling off three new short stories before the March deadline. It’s not that I haven’t been writing since last Spring, it’s just that I’ve been working on a novel and the fair admissions staff at this particular university discourage applicants from submitting long fiction. A fact I probably should have considered long before mid-January.

And with American Idol starting up again this week, I feel quite like one of the hopeful contestants that follows Randy and Simon and Paula from audition stop to audition stop though she is ridiculed and rejected at every location. She enters the room with her number pinned to her chest, sure that the audition in Seattle will be different from the one in Tampa, convinced that this time her talent will be heard and appreciated. She can see their name in lights. So alluring is the notion of someone important finally taking her seriously, that she is blind to one important fact – she is only marginally talented. In the pursuit of her dream she has become an earnest but laughable fool who has presented herself, once again, as a glutton for punishment.

The whole nation groans along with the three judges each and every time she throws her name in the ring. It’s just too painful to watch. The audience covers their eyes and holds their breath just waiting for the audition to be over, for her to finish her pitchy tune and be booted from the room; resolved to return to next year’s auditions with a new hair do and some kick-ass cowboy boots because she has convinced herself that it must have been the outfit.

I figure if I am resigned to the ridicule, if I fully expect rejection and just plain forget to go to the mailbox for all of April and May, then I just might survive the painful period of waiting. Unlike American Idol, the process of rejection from this esteemed Master’s program is a long one. Just long enough to allow all hopeful applicants to fully fashion the image of their acceptance, to imagine themselves attending titillating writing classes with accomplished professors before lowering the boom of denial.

As an adult, who is expected to have plans and goals and something always on the horizon, it’s so incredibly hard – the not knowing. So I’ll pretend I know already and just do it, fashion a personal essay that is passable and professional and maybe just the thing that moves them this time around. I’ll slip a few chapters of Habeas Corpus in the mail, ignoring the warning to avoid long fiction, I’ll shove it all in a manila envelope, not the fancy black leather binder of last year. It’s the equivalent of showing up to the American Idol auditions in a bathrobe. It’s the proof that I’m crazy jaded and not too worried about collecting another rejection letter. It is liberating to act as if I don’t want it that badly. It’s fuck if I care. It’s a lie.

I issued the usual bits of wisdom. “This is not a punishment but a privilege. All things in life worth doing require effort. You should be flattered and proud and as pleased as I your father and I are.” A little bit of O must have died each time I issued a simple platitude. It was so parental, so categorically Mom-ish of me. And, of course, my attempts at coercion, fell on deaf ears, rolling right off the obstinate back side of a child laying face down on the family room carpet.

So, as I am want to do, I dug in to some anger – inspired to rage by the possibility that I had birthed a child completely disinclined to give a damn.

How could you be so lazy? So reluctant to accept that you are capable, so unwilling to strive for above average? Rise to the occasion. Grasp opportunity by the horns and excel, God damn it. It was a tirade of army sergeant proportions. With strong undertones of “Be all you can be.”

For all this bluster and blather, all this jangling of frustration, I almost missed the hushed whisper from the muffled mouth of my eight year old as he gnawed at his shirt sleeves and cried great gushes down the front of his pajamas. It was quiet but sudden and floated there between us for a moment. He said, “They made a mistake in picking me, Mom. I’m not good at anything.”

Those two sentences immediately diffused the Mom-bomb that was seconds from exploding.

I want to say I gathered him in my arms and told him he was good enough and smart enough and that no one made even the tiniest mistake thinking him so. But he had slid so far away, had dug so deep into catatonic shut down, that all my efforts to nurture and adore were rebuffed. He lay rigid on the floor as I tried to smother him with parental affection.

So I climbed the stairs, heavy with defeat, and locked myself in the bathroom for a good cry. A rare moment of jagged breaths and puffing eyes. A self indulgent pause in which I let snot run down my face, collecting in a point at the tip of my chin. There in the confines of our dingy 1960’s bathroom with the mildew and the rust ring around the sink, I gave in a little to the fact that my wants and my needs are so different than those of my children. I embraced the fear and the reluctance and the fragile self-esteem of my one and only son and let it go, all this expectation that I had hung on the hope that my kids will be exactly what I had been.

Today I feel a little bit closer to okay with the people that they are.

While the school administration protects itself from pushy and overly ambitious parents like myself by keeping the enrichment program sort of off radar, I have sniffed it out, have seen past the smoke and mirrors and know it exists. While I can’t quite wrap my mind around the parameters by which these children are selected to participate, I do know that a reading specialist descends upon each classroom several times a week and collects her three or four advanced students to follow her out of the room and down to her reading workshop where they congregate and glow like the chosen.

I am assuming these top tier children are the most accelerated readers and writers in their class. But that’s just a guess as I have not been cleared for de-briefing. Only the parents of the chosen children are given information about language arts enrichment. The rest of us, the parents of the average, are left to wonder and lament and gnash our ordinary teeth.

When I mentioned that I was amazed by our children’s lack of exceptionalness, My Better Half responded with a tired resignation, “Oh, I’m not surprised. They’re gifted, IQ wise, but we didn’t hold them back and all their peers are a year older. They’ll never be able to compete with them.” And I gasped, it all became so crystal clear. He’s absolutely right, not only are my kids young for their class, both having had the misfortune of being born in the summer, but their rule abiding and traditional parents pushed them along, having them start Kindergarten at the legally sanctioned time rather than red-shirting them in preschool. While I knew that many of the children in O and G’s class are a full year or more older than they are, it didn’t occur to me that this might affect how they are percieved by the teaching staff. Aren’t they professionals trained to recognize that 8 year olds cannot be compared to kids who are 9 1/2; and 6 year olds aren’t going to read as well as their 7 1/2 and 8 year old classmates? Aren’t gifted programs supposed to operate on IQ so that age is irrelevant.

I also thought, rather naively, that red-shirted children were held back for a good reason, failure to show Kindergarten readiness being the sole and primary criteria. However, having done some research on the subject and having had my eyes opened by My Better Half, I now realize that perfectly capable and well adjusted children are held back by parents who wish to give them an academic advantage. Instead of letting the chips fall where they may and placing their children of school age in their appropriate class, parents see the additional year of preschool as insurance that there otherwise average children will rise to the top of the class based on age advantage alone.

While I know this advantage will diminish as the children grow and develop and the significant differences in capability sort of fade away as the brain matures, right now, in grade school, the additional year makes all the difference.

So while O and G might be the top students in a class of six and eight year olds respectively, they can’t compete with the children in their classrooms that are already seven and nine by the start of the school year. They just can’t do it.

And feeling frustrated and angry, I can see how the Kindergarten arms race began. I am regretting our decision to send them forth into the world, never having seen any reason to keep them back. Apparently, I should have complied and based my decision on the fact that everyone else was doing it.

According to Steve Sailer who coined the phrase ‘Kindergarten arms race’ back in 2000, about 10% of all preschoolers were being red-shirted at that time. He also suggested that the rate would double by decade. Having done some basic math, using the projections established in the 2000 study, this would means that today, in 2007, about 15% of the kids in grade school have been held back a year. 15% are at a distinct advantage. I suspect that 15% were not struggling or mal-adjusted or unprepared when leaving preschool. It’s just that their parents recognized early that red-shirting their child in a school system of upper middle-class, white students would be their ticket into the language arts enrichment program. Once selected for advanced work, these children are more likely to be recognized as gifted or exceptional in the years to come.

Those of us that believe that Kindergarten starts when you’re five unless there are learning disabilities or emotional problems, the dummies that believe that someone’s got to be the youngest, send our well adjusted and competent kids off to school on time and in doing so, unwittingly set them up to be at an academic disadvantage for much of their school lives.

I will finish my rant by saying that O, who turned 8 in June, has a boy in class who will be turning 10 during the school year. Now I’m off to phone the reading specialist and ask her pointed questions about her contribution to the Kindergarten Arms Race.

Few of us ever take the time to thank the people that have made a difference in our lives. We assume they know their worth when, in fact, a letter like the one I am about to share is the reward all teachers dream of and few receive.

Here’s an excerpt:

Dear Mrs. W,

I am a teacher of visually impaired children and one of my students is learning braille as she suffers a progressive eye condition…Working with her has brought back fond memories of you.
Forty six years ago I was in your second grade class. I struggled with reading and you were not only my favorite teacher but a God Send. Out of the goodness of your heart and because of your genuine concern for my future, you tutored me after school. The way you worked with me did not make me feel like a ‘dumbie,’ but made me feel very special. I thought it was a treat to dust the erasers and wash your chalkboard and I remember you used my silhouette for a spelling bulletin board. You, without a doubt, had the greatest impact on my foundation for literacy and for that I am eternally grateful. I award you Top Teacher of My Life!

With Sincere Gratitude,
S.C.

The fact that this woman took the time to write such a moving letter to an old lady makes me weepy with the justice and the beauty of it. I have shared the note with a friend who has just gone back to work as a third grade teacher in the inner city. Her job is exhausting and difficult. She struggles daily, wondering if leaving her own children everyday to help these needy kids is worth the sacrifice. I wish for her a letter like this when she turns 85. Her work is necessary and important. She will be the Top Teacher of Many Lives. Let’s hope that someday one of these kids will take the time to write her a letter of thanks.

As for Spider Mama and mini-me – they are all gone. GONE I say. Not a single spider is left hanging in the now tattered and forgotten web in my east bedroom window. There are tons of bugs still stuck in the awkward, splayed poses of the vanquished but there is no spider left to eat them. Rather than think of the spider-absence as a sure sign of arachnoid demise, I prefer to think of it as a temporary loss. Those spiders packed it up and went to Bonita Springs for the Winter. They’ll be back, come April, with the robins and the tulips and the sweet smell of new grass.

*****

There’s been a nice and unexpected development in the bus situation and I’m left feeling reassured that there are some kind kids still left on the planet. I did a little reconnaissance yesterday. And hired a fifth grader to do my snooping. I have an acquaintance whose son rides the bus with O and G. He’s a quiet kid, a well-behaved eleven year old who is rarely in trouble. I asked this child’s mother if she had heard any bus-tales from her mild son. She had heard nothing but promised to ask him about the bus on his return from school.

She called last night to say she’d spoken with her son and he had validated O’s cry of foul. According to quiet-boy there are two or three kids who give my O a really hard time. This child not only felt concerned about how O was being treated, he felt sympathetic enough to offer to be O’s seat partner on the bus. There is safety in numbers. There is safety among the green vinyl seats of school bus hell when a big fifth grader offers to watch your back. Needless to say, O and I are thrilled and thankful and anxious to see how this new alliance changes the dynamic on Bus 7.

*****

While I’m talking about dynamics, I’ve gotta share the interesting news that was presented to me last night. (Yes, it was a very busy phone night at the Madmarriage household). I was chatting with my friend and mother of another student in O’s class, (okay, I was complaining about the trials and tribulations of being a room parent and she was patiently listening), when she broke in to tell me about the true drama at hand in classroom 137. According to my friend, there has been a great to-do surrounding a the new kid, I’ll call him Justin. Apparently Justin has a penchant for developing long and violently disturbing stories during journal time. His tales of animal dismemberment and bloody conflicts have frightened some of his classmates. The mothers of the frightened classmates have launched a full offensive designed to remove Justin from the class and the school. Phone calls home to Justin’s parents have not been returned. Child services may be called in to do a home visit. A witch hunt, perhaps justified, perhaps not, has been launched. There are angry mothers demanding that this Justin-kid be burned at the stake.

I feel sort of sorry for Justin, clearly there are issues at hand. And I feel deeply sorry for the teacher, Mr. S, who must soldier through the brouhaha and sort fact from fiction all while trying to reach Justin’s disinterested parents and dodging the expert advance of mothers with inflamed imaginations who, if left to their own devices, would have Justin hog tied and roasted on a spit.

I am confused by my own reactions to the news about Justin. After all, I had a perfectly normal conversation with Justin’s mother just yesterday about the upcoming class Halloween party. She didn’t strike me as negligent or pathological. She did mention that they had just moved. Perhaps, in the relocation process, her voice mail was broken and phone calls from the school were lost rather than ignored. I’m inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt and I guess I’m naive, but I have a very hard time believing that a parent would purposely ignore phone calls from their own child’s teacher. The idea of deliberate neglect is just so hard for me to fathom.

But while I’m feeling all kinds of progressive and accepting, I’m also wrestling with my inner neurotic. After all, there have been more than 50 school shootings since 1997, Columbine (the mother of all school disasters) and Paducah and Jonesboro and Va. Tech and Cleveland, all jangling at my nerves, making me feel edgy and irrational and fiercely protective.

This Justin-thing is a tough one as it is really none of my business until, well, it is. And it will only become my business once my O is directly effected, violently or otherwise. So I soothe myself with the facts. All but one of the notorious school shootings were perpetrated by children twelve years old or older. There is only Mount Township, Michigan to remind us that even six and seven year olds can die at the hands of their peers.

Amid all this worrying, my e-mails to the parents of Room 137 about candy corn relays and spider web cookies and Monster Mash Freeze Dance must seem incredibly discordant and unbelievable. But, really, eight year old children and their parents should be concerned with pumpkin table clothes and how many jelly beans are in the Halloween jelly bean jar. Morbid thoughts of potential grade school violence are just not normal.

Each year, this parenting thing gets a little more complicated. The answers to difficult questions become more elusive and obtuse as my children grow older and spend their days swimming up stream, in a river of peers and perverts and juvenile delinquents. What a world. What a world.

Undoubtedly this will be a delicate confrontation. One that will require my most expert attempts at deflecting hostility with ample amounts of self deprecation and plenty of observations about the horrific behavior of my own children from time to time. This almost always works, the old: I’m-a-terrible-parent-too-and can’t believe my-own-maladjusted-children-haven’t-made-little-girls-cry-and-younger-boys-weep type of approach.

This is a particularly uncomfortable role for me. I can still remember the time my mother dragged me by the ear over to Becky Rhetman’s house and made me apologize for teasing her on the bus. (She did wet her pants. It was fourth grade when wetting one’s pants is social suicide, but, still, I was made to grovel.) I know first hand the scolding and the reprimand and the possible halt on allowance that Max and Brian will experience after my visit. I do not envy them the fall-out of my purposeful knock.

And, knowing the ins and outs of fourth grade bus shenanigans, I have made it abundantly clear to O and G that my going to Max and Brian’s house could spark a veritable teasing shit-storm. That instead of the intended result, my visit could launch a retaliation that may include increased harassment, merciless taunting and a lifetime of well launched spit-balls. They seem willing to make the gamble.

So I steel myself for the confrontation and hope that I’m doing the right thing. Damn this parenting thing is hard.

I was so blown away and disarmed by her level of preparedness that I forgot to wonder how the hell she knew in advance what I was going to complain about. Her odd and exacting foresight didn’t strike me until after I had left the room. Coincidence or supernatural powers stemming from Wicca spells or extensive knowledge of the occult? Your guess is as good as mine.

Witch or no witch, it would appear that this woman is a professional. No stranger to high maintenance parents. I suspect this wasn’t the first time a family has complained about her unyielding nature.

According to Mrs. C, “First grade is a time of great transition. Children are expected to be responsible for the belongings and their actions. For many children this takes some getting used to.” She delivered this wisdom with solemn gravitas. She is woman not used to contradiction.

She mentioned that the school has an Adjustment Counselor on staff…”Uhmmm, let me stop you there, Mrs. C. Are you calling my G maladjusted? Because I could go on and on about just how well-adjusted my daughter is when allowed to urinate and scratch as needed. Adjustment Counselor Madhustment Scrounselor. Absolutely no way. How ’bout being a friend to these kids, Mrs. C? How ’bout making the children who spend seven hours a day, five days a week in your classroom, feel taken care of and loved? How ’bout looking out for their overall best interests, emotional as well as educational? Because, really, first grade may be about responsibility and transitions but its also about childhood. Children respond to positive energy. Children are happy when encouraged by enthusiasm. It’s the carrot versus the stick. IT’S FIRST GRADE!!!!!”

I, too, am a woman not used to contradiction.

So, having voiced our opinions on first graders, we now agree that while their is a need for responsibility and compliance, an appropriate amount of affection and kind words are similarly crucial to a successful school year. And we’ve come up with a solution. We are going to be a team. Me and Mrs. C together, against the world. We will appear a united front. Hoping to convince G that if I think Mrs. C is okay then Mrs. C must not be all that bad. In return for my sponsorship, Mrs. C has agreed to dole out daily pats on the back and glimmers of encouragement while looking the other way when a child does not perform Criss Cross Applesauce to the best of her ability, every single time. There will also be frequent but designated times to scratch an itch, blow a nose and urinate.

On Friday afternoon, G came home enthused and relieved and gave her day a thumbs up. And I thought, “Wow, Mrs. C has executed the plan perfectly.” Careful to do my part, I said, “See, Mrs. C isn’t so bad. Is she?” And G replied. “I spent the day with the school nurse. I had a stomach ache,” flashing me a smile, as if to say, how ’bout that for a strategy?

Upon returning home I spoke with G about her classroom and thanked her for the sweet note she left me:
Dear Mom
I Hope you hav fun
Ples loke at colr grap and the mesigh and my decke
Love, G
PS. good Lake

And, while I tucked her into bed and placed a kiss on her forehead, I said, “Your teacher doesn’t seem all that bad. She actually seemed kind of nice.”
And G responded, “That’s because you didn’t ask to use the bathroom.”

From the mouths of babes!