Not My Job

As a stay-at-home, my job description is fuzzy at best. My husband cooks a little on weekends but for the most part it's my job. Homework time is my domain. Instrument practice, ferrying to lessons - mostly me. Feeding the preschool mind - me. I know that cleaning is my job but I rarely get to that one. Laundry - my life sentence.

In the midst of this I'm also volunteering, practicing my own arts, keeping up with world events, and trying to get myself healthy. I never get to it all in one day but in a good week I hit all the marks at least once. Balance is elusive: I bounce briskly from one activity to the next, all the while wishing I could float gently instead. Just as I find myself holding steady, something comes along to knock me off my beam. Tonight was one of those nights.

Peanut is a bright enough child that she was placed in an accelerated program this year. She's never had to work hard before so this year has been a shock. She's a dramatic child with a history of histrionics. When she feels her world is off-kilter, she flips out. My job is to right her keel and get her sailing smoothly again. I have my own dramatic tendencies so I've got to be in a good state when working with her. I calm myself. Together we calm her. We talk through the hard emotions and help her understand her world. We look at the problem she's facing and find strategies to solve. Finally, she can go back to her homework - hopefully without anymore meltdowns. It's been getting better lately, though. I thought we were through the worst of it.

Today, we had another messy fit. Turns out her teacher gave her math homework that she had no concept how to do. We looked through the math journal for evidence that the work had been taught at some point but no. Instead we found months worth of incomplete and incorrect school work. This journal is supposed to live at school so we never see it. It's astoundingly bad. Our little math genius does not have a clue what she's supposed to do with this journal. It's a mess of scribbled notes and badly glued worksheets. Our curious kid who loves to learn is now convinced that she's not good enough. Bad teaching has killed her curiosity.

So now, in addition to the bathrooms that need to be scrubbed and the mounds of laundry I could lose my preschooler in, I have a new title: I am now a math teacher. To be fair, I do have a degree in education, with a significant chunk focused on teaching math. And my brilliant physicist hubby will play an admirable role as co-teacher, but he has to go earn our money so there's only so much teaching time for him. Peanut is going to be ok. She's got parents who love her and who have the skills to make up for the appalling teaching her school has provided. The point is, it's not my job. If this is the way it has to be, the school could at least do a little laundry for me. It's only fair.