What I've Been Doing

[My apologies in advance. My neighbor asked if I had any new blog posts up, since she hadn't seen one in a while. She hadn't missed one; the thoughts in this post have just been percolating for some time. I'm sharing even though I'm not sure this will be of interest or concern to everyone. I'll try to have something a little lighter-hearted next time.]

I've been a volunteer at my kids' elementary school for a long time. Though I made several mostly joking references last year to chucking my notebook at the first person who even hinted that they would take over as booster club president and then running far, far away, the truth is that I always knew that I would still be devoting a chunk of my time to helping at the school this year, in some capacity or another.

I started out innocently enough, back when Son #1 was in first grade, and I attended the first PTA meeting of the year, hugely pregnant with Son #3 and with one complaint on my mind. The previous year our school had started their first-ever appeal for direct donations, and the letter had stated that if you donated more than a certain amount, you would get a receipt for tax purposes. We had donated, and had never gotten our receipt. After the meeting I talked to the PTA president, mentioned to her my opinion that it made our organization look bad to not follow through on promises like that, and offered to send the thank-you letters in question if she had the information from the previous year.

I ended up not just sending those letters, but running that particular campaign for a few more years. I volunteered on the Box Tops for Education committee. I sent in recycled ink cartridges for the school for cash. I collected bottles and cans for my kids' classrooms to help pay for extra field trips and whatnot. (And yes, it felt like I spent an inordinate time either collecting or picking through items other people consider trash during this period. I have little pride when it comes to getting money for the school.) I served as the PTA's financial secretary for several years around the same time, counting up stacks of the grubbiest one-dollar-bills ever as I verified the totals for weekly pizza and popsicle sales prior to depositing the money in the bank. Our school started an annual festival to raise more desperately-needed money for enrichment programs, and I volunteered there, too.

This is me as a volunteer, only more glamorous.

Then Sons #1 and 2 got into the magnet at our school, which is on the same campus as the regular elementary school (the "home" school). Though I had shed a few minor duties, in addition to most of the above, I started helping with the booster club. The next year I took over as booster club president (giving up both the financial secretary post and the annual support fund chair to two separate, sane people); I had already become a festival co-chair the year before. I won't bore you with further details, but I've joked over the years about indentured servitude, and various people at the school have opined that I actually sleep in the nurse's office and that the festival storage shed is my office.

This year I may have retreated a bit from the fundraising strategizing, but I'm still around, volunteering in the  school office one morning and Son #3's classroom another morning. What I'm seeing, and what I've seen through all the years of trying to figure out every way possible to bring money into my kids' school, is a big reason why I had to take a step back.

Every year that my kids have been in school, our budget has taken a hit. The support fund was started because the school was losing funding. As our state budget woes have gone from bad to worse over the years, more funds have been whacked. Once we had math and literacy coaches to help struggling students--those went a while ago. We went from two librarians to one, to one half-time, to none. Our magnet coordinator has been half time for a few years. We lost our assistant principal altogether. Our assistant principal EIS (for special education) is now half time, splitting her time between two schools, with no chance to get to know the students for whom she administers IEPs. Our class sizes have gone up. And none of this even begins to hint at the turmoil that has been created by years of pink slips going out in the spring, to be rescinded later (or not). Teachers have retired as much to get out before things get worse as because they have genuinely reached the end of their career, and good teachers with just not quite enough experience have been forced out by layoffs. District office cuts have forced a reshuffling of administrators, meaning that on top of all our other losses, we've had a rapid turnover of principals over the last few years. We've lost days of instruction to furloughs.

As a parent, it is demoralizing to work hard all year to raise the money to give our kids weekly (!) P.E. lessons, a little art, a science lab, whatever, and then have the district whack another chunk out of the budget. I got exhausted trying to keep up morale (mine and others'), touting the importance of participating in the latest fundraiser to try to preserve the program of enrichment we already have when it began to feel like so much rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic. Yes, we have made things better, kept our school going and even reached for things we didn't have before in the midst of a steadily deepening budget crisis in our state, and I don't regret the time I have spent helping those efforts. But each year it has gotten harder to get up the energy to do it all over again when time and again we've gotten the legs cut out from under us by circumstances we don't have the power to change. My admiration for our teachers and staff and my fellow parents has grown as each year, despite the challenges, we all get up and do it all again, but each time with fewer resources and more demands.

The sensible response to having your fate in the hands of California's voters.

The problems with my sons' schools stem from California's budget and governmental woes, and those aren't going to be solved any time soon. In the meantime, we're looking at another round of cuts, mid-year this time, if Proposition 30 on the ballot doesn't pass, with more cuts to come in the years to come. A competing measure, Proposition 38, wouldn't automatically stop the cuts this year, but it would generate revenue for next year and the years beyond. We're beyond the point of cutting fat from the schools, well beyond the point of trimming dubious programs. If we want to get something from our educational system (by the crudest measure, higher test scores, and by a more sensible measure, an educated populace), we have to pay for it. There is no getting something for nothing.

I'm not feeling good about the citizens of this state having the backs of our students. It's easy to rail about higher taxes and grumble about how the state government is spending the money it already has, no matter how modest the increase proposed (to put Prop 30's terms in perspective, a quarter-cent sales tax increase is the equivalent of one penny for every four dollars you spend, and I don't think I know anyone personally who makes the requisite income--$250,000 annually as an individual or $500,000 as a couple--to even see the income tax increase). Most of the people casting a ballot don't have a child in school. From the outside, the schools probably look the same to them, maybe just a little dirtier because of all the cuts to our custodial staff, and a little shabbier due to the cuts to maintenance. Or maybe not, if the custodians work as hard as the ones at our school do.

We've reached the end of where personal efforts can make up for lack of resources, though. Too many years of being in crisis mode have burned out teachers, staff, and parents, and those brave faces are looking a little strained. It's time to stop pretending that we can get educational results at the top of national ranks when our per-pupil spending, teacher to student ratio, and a host of other measures are at the bottom of national averages. Nobody expects to get a Mercedes on a Kia budget when they are car shopping; can we please stop pretending that it is possible when we're talking about public education? California public schools need the voters of California to help us; we need to have the funds to keep going.

On November 7th, the day after the election, is my weekly volunteer day in Son #3's classroom. I'll still be there no matter what the outcome.

Oh, but by the way, I'm not above doing this, either. 

What Happens When You're Making Other Plans

Yesterday was the start of soccer season. Our plan for the day was to walk over to the park with all three boys, hang out for all of their games, and then head home for the afternoon. That part of the plan actually went off more or less as planned, with the caveat that we probably didn't take nearly enough water or shade-producing devices to make five hours in the sun and heat bearable. And in a classic spasm of Volunteer Tourette's, I volunteered to be team mom for Son #3's team, which means that I will shortly get to start coordinating snack schedules, determining whether or not the team wants to buy a banner to display at games (I personally hate them, as they are expensive and become trash at the end of the season), etc. I'm beginning to wonder if I need an intervention.

Realizing that we had an afternoon relatively free, we invited a friend and her two children to come and hang out. (Bonus: I have had five bags of clothes for her son sitting in the hall for weeks. She was grateful to get them and I was thrilled to have another 29.4 pounds of stuff out of the house!) We sent the kids outside to play in the sprinkler and settled down at the dining room table to chat. Suddenly the kids ran in to tell us that there was a baby squirrel in the yard. We all headed out, I personally thinking that they must be confused.

Well, they weren't. Behind the swing set, on the grass, was a tiny squirrel. He seemed to be moving rather slowly for a squirrel, and looked a bit unwell to me. (My first thought, after our morning out at the park, was dehydration.) I'm a giant softy for small furry critters, and I'd like to say that I immediately sprang into swift, purposeful action. I believe I actually blurted out something along the lines of, "Holy shit! I hope this thing doesn't die on my watch." I routinely kill houseplants, and the only reason our goldfish survives my haphazard tank-cleaning schedule is because it is a rat with fins. I knew nursing a sick baby squirrel would be way beyond my pay grade. However, even if I had been able to stomach the idea of doing nothing, that wasn't an option with four kids looking on.

He did not look like a happy camper.

First I made a clumsy attempt to get him into a shoebox, which simply made him retreat under the steps to the playhouse. I went back into the house, got some leather work gloves, and fished him out. We ultimately housed him in a cat carrier (after Son #2 and my husband brought out for my inspection any number of unsuitable homes). The kids rubbernecked for a while, then moved on. After all, at least for my kids, watching mom freak out and obsess over something is a more-or-less everyday occurrence.

Offering him some water soon after capture. Thick oversized gloves + squirrel = comedy of errors.

I have to digress a moment here to talk about the internet. My husband has always been an early adopter of technology, and way back in the '90s I used to give him all kinds of crap about how the internet was simply a morass of mind-bogglingly useless information. I have been eating crow on this subject since about 2001. In this particular instance, the internet proved staggeringly useful. My husband posted a picture of the squirrel on Facebook immediately, soliciting suggestions of what to do from his friends. Within minutes they were helping him contact an experienced squirrel rescuer. I Googled information on what to do, and found a recipe for a simple rehydration formula (water with a little salt and sugar), which our furry little friend guzzled from an oral syringe when I offered it to him. We found information on squirrel development, which led us to guess that he was probably weaned or close to it, based on the fact that he had a full coat of fur and open eyes.

He wasn't wild about being picked up with gloves, but he didn't mind the grub.

We followed the advice of the web sites and tried to locate the nest he might have fallen from, but mysteriously, the part of our yard where he appeared is not near any large trees. After I posted a picture on Facebook, another friend suggested that he may have been from a nest disturbed by tree trimming, which would explain the sticky clumps of what I guessed was tree sap in his fur, though that theory also didn't point us to any likely spots since I don't think any of the neighbors have had trees trimmed recently. At any rate, we didn't have any luck finding his mom. Luckily, the squirrel rescuer said she could come get him on Sunday morning, so we only had to keep him going overnight.

I was relatively laid back (for me) about caring for him. Which meant that I only:

• Ran to the pet store and bought $9 worth of puppy formula, which the squirrel refused to drink. (From the smell of it, I didn't blame him.)
• Hovered over the cat carrier all evening, shooing away a very curious Toothless, who could sense that there was something interesting of a rodent nature inside and insisted on sniffing the carrier from all angles.
• Rummaged in the garage for something softer than the rags I had initially put in the carrier with him, eventually coming up with a couple of old hooded baby towels.
• Dosed him regularly with the rehydration formula (which he did like) and fed him a strawberry, one half at a time. (If the squirrel rescuer hadn't cautioned us not to overfeed him, I probably would have been offering him something every fifteen minutes.)
• Put the carrier in our bathroom overnight, on top of a heating pad and under a towel for warmth, on the theory that having our guest safely away from the cats behind a closed door was the best plan, even if it meant I couldn't check his breathing every half an hour all night long.
• Got up once before dawn to give him another dose of fluids.

This morning our guest looked a bit perkier than he had before. He took some more fluids, gnawed a bit more strawberry, but mostly seemed interested in burrowing into the baby towel and going to sleep. We had the kids say goodbye to him before my husband took them to religious school, and I stayed home to await the squirrel rescuer. She showed up slightly before her predicted arrival time, and by 10 a.m. our house was once again squirrel-free.

Now that it's all over (from our end, anyway; the squirrel rescuer has promised to keep us posted on the squirrel's progress), I have to wonder what my kids' takeaway will be from all of this. For one thing, I'm sure that while they probably won't remember the details of their morning of soccer, they will probably remember "the day we found a baby squirrel in the yard" for a long time. I hope that they will learn from our example, and try to help sensibly when they see a problem that needs fixing (including taking smart precautions and calling in expert help when needed). Mostly, though, I'm sure that this will just confirm for them that getting things done and panicking are not necessarily mutually exclusive options. After all, their mom's a pro at it.

Sadly, the kids may have to look elsewhere for cool, calm, and collected role models.

A Week Stuck in Neutral

It's amazing how little I can get accomplished when I have a sick kid at home and no pressing deadlines.

Yeah, it's been that kind of week.

I'm not saying this because I'm proud of it--on the contrary, I'm a little horrified that it is Friday and I've made so little progress on my goals on any front. Here's my score for the week:

Garage 1, Jen 0: Though I've been in the house all week, I didn't exactly feel comfortable leaving Son #3 (age 5) to his own devices so I could go sift through the mess in the garage. I had been so hoping to make some visible progress before my parents got home from their long summer trip, since they have long despaired of seeing the floor of my garage ever again. (For the record, you can see parts of the floor now. Small parts.) They got home yesterday--so much for that ambition. The good news and the bad news are the same: the mess isn't going anywhere. It will have to wait until next week.

Laziness 1, Jen 0: Last week I was getting up regularly to walk a brisk 2 miles each morning before the boys went to school. This week the gravity in my bed has increased, or something. And of course once my husband (who has been a real mensch taking Sons #1 and 2 to school each morning so that I don't have to drag their petri dish little brother out any more than is absolutely necessary) is gone, my opportunity to nip out for a walk around the block is gone with him. By the end of the day, after the nightly homework wrangling and chauffeur duty to the kid activity du jour (soccer, soccer, and more soccer), I'm firmly caught in the gravity well of the couch. Again, next week, right?

House 1, Jen 0: You'd think that days of being entrenched at home would produce a whirlwind of domestic activity, right? Instead, I'm finding that the hours of staring at the same walls are producing a paralysis of action. In theory I have had enough time this week to really give this place a thorough scrubbing. In reality, the more I look, the more I see to do. Have the arms of the dining room chairs always looked that grubby? When did those fingerprints get all over the molding? And why on earth do the boys deposit their dirty socks everywhere but the %&*#@^* hamper? It doesn't help that whenever, for example, I start doing some dishes, Son #3 requests a sandwich, or juice, or that I switch the TV channel, or whatever.

It also doesn't help that I am the Least Motivated Housewife in the Universe. It's not that I don't like living in a clean house. I love living in a clean house. I just am not particularly enthusiastic about spending all my time in the process of actually, well, cleaning. The things I like to do include reading, knitting, getting up to speed on current events, watching good movies, etc.--all things that take time in their own right and are difficult to do while you are, for example, scrubbing toilets. The toilets need to be scrubbed, a clean toilet is a joy to have, and yet, I do not like scrubbing toilets. Add in the fact that housework in a house full of three boys has a certain rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic sense of futility about it, and I think I can be forgiven for my lack of alacrity in jumping to clean things I know will only stay clean as long as I can keep the kids out of the house.

I haven't been completely idle. Examples:

I spent some of the early part of the week putting together materials for a booster club fundraiser. However, I'm not feeling very satisfied with this work, since I have a couple of forms in waiting-for-approval limbo, and I can't do anything further until I get the stamp of approval from the office. I also baked muffins for last night's booster club meeting (with the invaluable help of my friend of battery disposal fame, who brought over 6 eggs when I realized I didn't have any), thus proving that my case of Volunteer Tourette's is by no means cured. (Volunteer Tourette's is a term that same friend coined to describe those of us at school who compulsively raise their hands to volunteer for everything, regardless of the state of their schedules or sanity. Mind you, she's just as bad as the rest of us.)

I took Son #3 to the doctor yesterday morning, on the theory that even though I was 100% sure that all he had was a virus, it wouldn't hurt to check (or to have a doctor's note when he goes back to school after four days out). One copay and a strep test later, and the doctor concluded...he has a virus. We are now past the fevers and into coughing and snot (lots of snot), and I'm reasonably certain he will be back in school on Monday.

I balanced the checkbook, and didn't even swear when it didn't come out right the first time.

And, yes, I started to pick at some of the housework. Our covered patio out back was just one broken appliance away from junkyard status, so I began sweeping and cleaning out there. I vacuumed a vast quantity of black cat hair off of the area rug in our bedroom (and no, I'm not sure why Toothless and Extra choose to play-fight there, unless it is because their fur contrasts nicely with the light-grey background of the rug). I didn't have the fortitude to do much about the continually renewing pile of junk mail, or the disturbing odor that wafted from the refrigerator the last time I opened it, but I suspect those aren't going anywhere. Their time will come.

Clearly I need to be catching up on my TV watching.

I'm not going to make stupid and likely false predictions about how next week is going to be better. First, I can't foresee the future, and second, the universe likes to send me stuff like swine flu and plumbing disasters when I start to get cocky about how nothing else could possibly go wrong. But now that Son #3 seems to be well enough to beat up on Son #2 about how much room he is taking up on the couch, his return to school is blessedly imminent. And with any luck a day or two of checking things off of my to-do list will snap me out of this funk. Right?

Rebooting

A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that." --Douglas Adams

Today marked the start of the second week of school. I can tell we're already getting into our usual school routine because Son #1 announced at 7:30 this morning that he had forgotten to tell me that he needed a composition notebook for his theater class. One of us, however, is learning from past incidents of this nature, as I had squirreled a few composition notebooks away for such an occasion. Crisis averted.

Unlike at the start of last school year, I don't feel completely overwhelmed yet. But I realized last Friday, at the end of a day that had been largely frittered away accomplishing not much of anything, that I'm at loose ends. After two years spent completely overcommitted and in panic mode, having a day with a moderate to-do list and a reasonable stretch of time to finish it in feels alien, and lacking an adrenaline kick to keep me moving, I've been less than productive.

So this morning I made myself a to-do list, and put on it everything I hoped to accomplish before I picked the boys up from school. However, I made a deliberate choice to finish MY to-do list items first. So first I went for a two-mile walk (and not just because it's been hotter than the hinges of hell in LA the last week or so), ran an overdue household errand, tended to my email correspondence (including revising and emailing school fundraising materials out for approval), and started gathering some stuff to take to Goodwill. Overall I felt much better about my productivity today, even though a completely crazy packed parking lot meant that I made the snap decision to try to make my donation tomorrow, rather than risk being late for pick-up.

I know that I am in the midst of a reboot. This is something that I'm very familiar with, since my dad was the in the army and we moved regularly; at times, frequently. Each time it would be new house, new neighborhood, new school, new friends, and in theory, new me. I say in theory because I don't think I changed all that much from place to place, and I always tended to find my niche in with the brainy/geeky set. However, starting over amongst a set of strangers did give me the opportunity to leave inconvenient parts of my past behind (for example, my classmates in seventh grade blessedly did not know me as that girl who had to wear headgear in sixth grade). It also made learning from my mistakes that much less painful, since in doing things differently the next time around, I often didn't have to face any of the same people who had witnessed me screwing up the first time.

It's a little different when you know your life is changing but you're still in the same place you've been for the last ten years, and where you're likely to be for the foreseeable future. I've got a kindergartener now, and though I'm walking him into the same elementary school that at least one of his brothers has been at for the last seven years, I'm spending all my time on the opposite side of the campus from my usual haunts for the last four years. Few moms I know already also have kindergarteners, and so I'm meeting many new people after years of basically hanging out with the same group of "usual suspects" (so-called because we joke that when any volunteer task needs to get done, we "round up the usual suspects").

Now, I'm not fooling anyone. I know that I won't be able to reinvent myself by hiding out among the newbies. My reputation as a compulsive volunteer isn't likely to vanish because (a) the school is still full of people who know me very well and who know, say, if they call me at a moment's notice I will probably go pick up a stack of flyers from the copy shop or help them hang up posters, and (b) the chances of me going a whole year without volunteering for something are no greater than my chances of winning Mega Millions and paying the school $100,000 to lose my phone number. Somewhere between doing nothing and volunteering so much that the staff makes jokes about me sleeping in the office is a happy medium where I volunteer, enjoy it, and feel like I'm really contributing without feeling resentful about the things I'm not doing for my family and myself, or about all the parents who obviously aren't contributing if I have so much ----ing volunteer work to do myself.

So the question is, how do I find that happy medium without disappointing the people (many of whom I count as friends) who expect more from me? I do have real obligations this year--Son #1's approaching bar mitzvah being chief among them--that make it impossible for me to work at the level I have been. I'm going to have to learn to say no and stick to it, to step aside rather than rushing in, and to accept that the new me may disappoint some of the folks who are used to the old me. However, the last two years have definitely been a learning experience (see above), and regardless of the consequences, this reboot is necessary if I don't want my husband to commit me.

And in the spirit of rebooting, I've decided that it is time to reboot the 1,000-Pound Project. This time, however, I'm giving it a secondary goal. Our ostensibly two-car garage has been so full of crap for over a year that it has been impossible to park even one car in it. The first goal, as before, is to get rid of 1,000 pounds of stuff from my house. The secondary goal is to be able to park my minivan in the garage again before the rainy season starts (so I can forgo the pleasure of having three boys track a gallon of water into the house through the front door on every rainy school day).

It may not qualify as instant gratification, but I suspect that in my quest to get rid of stuff I'm going to find a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick in the garage. For example, one of the artifacts I didn't quite get to drop off at Goodwill today was the high chair, and since the "baby" is now five and a half, I think it is safe to get rid of it. We'll see just how many walks down memory lane and humility lessons I get before I can pull the minivan in out of the rain.

And rebooted me? She'll undoubtedly be older, and hopefully wiser, than Jen 1.0.

Yes, some of us otherwise intelligent folks learn things this way.

Week One of School: Engulfed

The kids have been back to school for exactly five days now, and the sensation is a bit like the time I mistimed jumping up with a wave at the beach and instead of bobbing gracefully over the top, I got tumbled over backwards, ending up with a bathing suit full of sand and sinuses full of salt water. Despite my efforts to prepare over the summer I've made three trips to the office supply store in the last week alone, twice to get book covers because the first ones I got didn't fit son #1's textbooks. So far I can't get a feel for the shape of our weeks, and as a result I am reacting, just staying one step ahead of what absolutely positively must get done.

Son #1 started middle school last Wednesday. I'm trying to keep my own decidedly mixed feelings about middle school to myself so as not to influence his opinions, but I'm not sure I've got much of a poker face. The first day I went to pick him up I watched as enormous eighth graders poured down the front steps of the school. I tried to imagine my son, who is both short for his age and slender, navigating the halls amid this crowd. One girl sauntered by in a skin-tight getup that was only technically within the letter of the school uniform policy, reminding me once again why I'm glad my son is a geek who may take another year or seven to discover girls. Just when I was beginning to panic, wondering where he was, I spotted son #1 by the steps to the main entrance, cell phone out and beginning to text me, just as I had instructed him to do if he couldn't find me right away. Maybe if I can keep my own fears out of his way he'll be just fine.

Son #2 started fourth grade, which at our magnet elementary school is where they really ramp the homework policy into overdrive. Last night my son reacted to a heavier-than-usual homework load by deciding to see how little homework he could fit into the time available. (Which reminds me, I really need to get to the doctor and have my blood pressure checked.) My husband ended up on the hook to finish it with him after soccer practice, as I had to go to a board meeting of son #3's co-op preschool.

I love son #3's preschool, but the older I get the more I abhor meetings. Last year I attended four regular monthly meetings: elementary school PTA, magnet school booster club, elementary school fundraising carnival/bazaar event planning meeting, and the preschool meeting. I find it telling that the preschool meetings regularly clocked in at two-plus hours; since the population of the school is largely composed of first-time parents who haven't logged in hundreds of hours at volunteer meetings already, they are happy to sit and talk in circles for hours about the most mundane details of running a co-op nursery school. By contrast, the parents at the elementary school, especially those with fourth or fifth graders, often wonder aloud if we need to meet at all, and impatiently glance at the clock when a meeting is pushing the hour mark.

Theoretically this year I should be adding a fifth meeting--the middle school booster club--to my monthly list of meetings. I probably will, since parental guilt is a powerful motivating factor. However, I'll be the first to admit that I've exceed my mental bandwidth already. I have a pretty bad case of what a friend of mine calls "volunteer Tourette's" (defined as the irresistible compulsion to jump in and help out with any volunteer opportunity that presents itself, no matter how maxed out you are), and I know that if I show up to a meeting I'll walk out having taken on some new task, no big deal, I'll just give up sleep for a month or so to get it done.

So what does this all mean? I'm afraid that it means that the efforts I have made toward carving any kind of space of calm and sanity in my life, or to making progress in dealing with the backlog of junk cluttering my house, are about to be swept away in the relentless tide of the new school year. I really don't want to spend another year the way I did last year, treating each event (personal or school) as the next hurdle to be crossed on the way to the finish line. It's a great way to turn your existence into a perpetual to-do list, but a lousy way to enjoy life. Do I have an answer for how to avoid that? Not yet. But the first step is recognizing that you have a problem, right?