Sometimes this job is so hard. I’m nuts about my children. So nuts I have trouble getting them in trouble when they don’t do what they’re supposed to. I always feel sorry for them, but I know I have to be tough and all that. For instance, my daughter must have come down this morning, realized she forgot to do the dishes last night… what does she do? Brings me coffee in bed. heh heh Pretty damned good coffee, too. You have to admire her effort there, but she still left a chore unfinished.
I’m not that strict with the chore thing. I know my kids think I am, but I’m not. They tell me they have friends who don’t have any chores and I say they have friends who are going to grow up without knowing how to do anything. That’s sad. Teaching responsibility is a huge part of our job.
But the issue bugging me today is school absence policies. I don’t keep my children home unless there is fever or they just feel too bad to be any good at school. But I will not send them to school sick. I won’t.
My son has a cold and has run a fever off and on throughout the last weekend, Monday and even a bit yesterday. He hasn’t felt well. Sore throat and that horrible, barking cough. When he doesn’t jump around, it’s pretty obvious he feels bad.
So last night, he was jumping around and we knew he was better. This morning he gets up and starts crying because he feels bad. The loving mommy part of me is saying keep him home one more day, but she can also tell that he’ll perk up after he’s been awake a little bit. He hasn’t had a fever in nearly 24 hours, so he needs to go to school. He’s missed two days this week and he gets behind in reading fast.
The thing is, the teachers get so upset when kids miss school. But then they get even more upset if you send them to school sick. This is one time where that whole “damned if you do…” thing really comes into play. I expect they’ll call me to come get him soon. In the meantime, I agonize over whether I made the right decision by sending him when he still isn’t up to usual.
Yesterday, I was on the phone with my daughter’s math teacher and she brought up the two or three days my daughter missed last fall. She said that with the kind of math kids are doing nowadays, they fall behind fast. Kids are doing senior type math in the seventh and eighth grade. Seriously, this stuff is hard!
Which brings me to the other point. (Didn’t think I had one, did you?) Have you all noticed the difference in the way kids are being taught today? The math my daughter is doing is something I did years later. She’s constantly miserable with the struggle to keep up. My son is in the third grade and his reading goals are so high, it’s a constant struggle to keep them up and that turns reading from pleasure to chore. He’s been reading the book, Holes, and enjoying it (well more than usual– he doesn’t enjoy reading) but it’s a long book and is taking him too long– so his AR scores get behind. He’ll have to read a bunch of little silly books to bring it up.
I’m a natural reader. I started reading a book a day on purpose around second grade. Reading was my favorite thing to do. Neither of my kids really enjoy it. This year is the first time I’ve seen my daughter reading for pleasure and that’s because she discovered Meg Cabot. Meg, I love you!
By the time I was my daughter’s age, I had been reading adult books for three years. (I was a young, old person– I had read every book my parents owned by then. I even read The Only Living Witness about Ted Bundy when I was twelve. That was a big, freaking mistake… )
In fact, my daughter saw me laughing while reading Undead and Unwed by MaryJanice Davidson so she has been begging me to let her read it. I’d bypassed racy by her age and here I am hesitating over letting her read it. I keep remembering that scene on the roof with the intern. Do I want to explain that? Who am I kidding? She’s fourteen! She knows all about that stuff already! But do I really want her reading such a sexy book yet? So, now I have another worry–am I being overprotective with the book thing?
My daughter is usually pretty responsible. Yeah, the dishes thing happens once in a while, but she doesn’t like her freedom restricted, so she keeps things together pretty well. Even with the chore thing, she still thinks I’m the coolest mom ever– and so do her friends. (bg– I think this has something to do with me being a rocker still ) If she doesn’t want to do something, she has no trouble telling her friends no. Even they’ve told me this. She doesn’t like really scary movies so at a slumber party last weekend, she watched a different movie in another room. She’s pretty strong willed. That’s a good thing. She has this lovely adult wit that I’m enjoying like crazy. She and I watch rated R movies together, so why am I hesitating?
I wonder if it’s because I grew up too fast. I did. I was so adult in highschool that when we moved to North Carolina, I couldn’t make any friends. Turned out none of the kids believed I was a kid– they had decided I was a narc. I walked around that school for six months without making friends.
Maybe I need to reread Undead and Unwed again. Maybe it isn’t as “adult” as I remember. Maybe it’s time for me to let her grow up a bit more.
See? It’s the parental decision stuff that makes this hard. But I will say, the perks of having two wonderful, loving and smart kids makes everything worthwhile.
I listened for my son’s coughing the last couple of nights which translates into little sleep. Can you tell? (g)