A Game of Chess

My kids, boys in particular, like chess. Having never played this game I thought it would be wise to learn so that I could enjoy it (read be tortured with it) with my kids. They have joined the chess club in past years although no one wants to play competitively in tournaments, they just enjoy playing and aren't too bad at it. Which means better than me.

I knew that something had to change for my second grade son when I came home one day and everyone in the house was unhappy. They had been to music lessons where there is one of those giant chess sets outside. In a fit of rage, he had kicked the pieces all over the board, kicked his sitter where it counts, and melted down right there on the chess board. Not entirely normal behavior for him and sort of a clear sign of kid-level-distress. If it were a movie you'd think "oh please - this is an insanely obvious metaphor for needing a new strategy". But, alas, it is my life and it's no movie.

Hearing the tale of chess horror I began to watch more closely. I saw new outbursts of crying, a sharp disdain for reading, a boredom with learning. I saw his siblings recoil when he approached with one of those angry Charlie Brown clouds above his head. I felt the subtle vibe that something pretty deeply disturbing was in the works. Call me a genius but somehow I can see a few plays in advance at this point in the parenting game.

Looking into his school day, there was lots that I didn't want to see, but when you're playing chess you really can't ignore what's happening on the other side of the board, can you? I wasn't in love with the bullying that he seemed to deal with - from kids, from the cafeteria monitors with bullhorns... Even though I didn't want to see it, he hadn't made any friends. And while his brother and sister skip around with joy, he mopes. He starts pushing his most beloved baby sister one day and that's pretty much the end of my patience.

So began the real game of chess. I'd like to call it, in retrospect, "The Fool Who Thought She Could Make Sense of the System - a Losing Game of Chess" but that name is too long and I'm too worn out from playing to come up with something better. My journey involved a game of strategically placed phone calls and e-mails. About 25 of them. To the teacher. To the school counselor. To the "instructional specialist". To the "leadership specialist" (??!!). Finally and most persistently, to the school principal.

I used all kinds of moves that I've learned from other players - like throwing out the evil word "bullying" and "superintendant" but, in the end, I am an amature. My kids are even better than me at chess, remember? I was fighting hard but every move I'd hear "check", "check", "check". If you've ever played a bad game of chess you know that sometimes you can run for quite some time away from an inevitable checkmate. In fact, you can run for a long time under the illusion that you are avoiding that checkmate. And that, my friends, would be me.

Please pause and recall that I have a real life job. OK. Back to the story.

So I stood and waited for the principal in the hallway after school one day. She happens to be super sweet and she gave me a big hug and asked how my daughter was enjoying her school. When I said there were problems with my boy, she seemed surprised and quickly set up a meeting. I had a week to prepare my game. My game was a full page of written commentary and a 14 point illustration of the preceding paragraph.

We sat down and set up the board. I took it out my game strategy. She took out a thick file. As I started talking, I realized that I didn't need my elaborate strategies and I put them away. She was shocked, concerned and conceded in the game up front. She stared at me, mouth hanging open in horror at each successive story that I shared. I could swear that a tear was shed.

The victory had no sweetness. I was there to ask for a classroom change. And, as I later learned, there are rules and governing bodies and regulations far beyond my simple game of beginner chess. My pawn was barely beginning to play. The school is full of love and acceptance but the system... well, that's a whole other game. No class changes are permitted.

Period. Checkmate. For them.

My New Do

I have underinvested in myself over these last ten years that I could categorize as misshapen baby bearing days. I have invested in my kids and my career but not so much in myself. And I decided one day at the beginning of the school year that it was high time to celebrate my disinterest in my outward appearance. I got a new hair stylist named Michael from a guy giving out coupons at the Pier One one day. I who once bought make-up at the chanel counter am getting coupons from guys at a wicker shop. I went to try him out.

"I'd like to cut all my hair off and let it be grey- it will be much easier and I just need to face the facts - I need simple" I emphatically request of my new friend Michael.

Quickly and without a second thought, Michael looks sort of condescendingly at me and replies "honey, you don't know me and I don't know you but know this... That plan isn't going to work for me. You are too young. No way.".

And this is how I ended up spending 600 dollars and 5 hours on hair that cost under a hundred for the entire year preceding. I was bored and soon to be very poor but the hair, it mud be said, was gorgeous. Strangers say so and that's how I know it must be true.

New hair on head, I am emboldened and my will to solve my fabulous second childs misery is strong. No one with hair like this lets their kid be bullied by their peers and teachers, after all. His teacher doesn't control her classroom well. It is loud and chaotic. The teacher yells at the kids constantly but without impact. She dishes out random points for acts of excessive wonderfulness that only a precious few seem capable of achieving. There are no kids he knows in this class - not a single child from the previous year. This could all be fine if my son wasn't completely a mess of a 7 year old boy every day. So basically it's not fine.

And so I set up a conference. A rule of thumb... If you need a conference on the second week of school things aren't going to go well. Maybe not a universal truth but I'd put a pack of Bublicious on it that it's more true than not.

I take it one step beyond setting up a conference, I actually proceed to leave work in the middle of the day and attend the meeting that I had planned. Actually I spent some of the prior evening printing and putting sticky notes on the printouts in an attempt to explain my child and the environment in which he would thrive. The teacher took all of the papers I had prepared and printed and circled and dotted and sticky noted carefully depicting how yelling and chaos impact my auditorially sensitive son. She looked at me with horror as she shared that she had trouble managing the class, there were lots of behavioral issues and that, perhaps, she should have been an accountant.

And I felt then like I was back in the salon asking for grey short hair and leaving with tri-toned million dollar flat ironed extra long hair. This class would not be like any before it. This year was not to be calm and peaceful as I had so desperately hoped.

At the end of our conversation the teacher, in her second year of post-undergrad teaching which, according to my calculations makes her very youthful, thanks me for coming. She tells me two things in that moment of departure that I shall not soon forget. Two things that I carry in my heart to this day. First, that she doesn't want me to to ever go to see he principal without seeing her first. Second, that she'd like me to know that most single mothers of four look like hell but that I look great - especially my hair.

The Joy of Gardening

Did I mentioned that we moved over the summer? From a rental house to my own sweet little house in an amazingly central location. I searched for reasonably priced houses in our very expensive, small school district and the one I found is truly great for us. I begged borrowed and came darn close to stealing to buy this little house but its mine and im proud of it and we are all loving living in it.

At this house I have three small outdoor areas, probably 30 feet squared each. When I moved in these areas were covered in some wilting variatal of grass. Now, 5 months later the grasses has moved on to other (greener) pastures and dirt, just plain old dirt has taken it's place. I got a gardener to come and plant some veggies in a side pot to bring on some lush. That investment has yielded five narly looking dead plants and one sweet red pepper that was so gorgeous it got placed in with our toy food and rotted there.

The theme here may be that I'm not a gardener. In fact, I am so not a gardener that I actually have decided to intentionally grow weeds on those mini-plots of land because weeds like to grow and are simple to keep green. I am calling it alternative ground cover but it's weeds. And I plan to fill the vegetable bed with rocks and call it zen. The gardener that I hired to pretty things up around here doesn't ever come around anymore - I think that my lack of ability to keep any of her creations alive may have been a turnoff.

But our public school has a rooftop garden that they keep fresh with composted peanut butter sandwiches from kids lunches and that is cool. Because maybe my kids could figure out how to grow something and cultivate that skill in the back yard - I will take any help that I can get. Over the summer I volunteered to water this garden and now, during the year, the kids tend to it on a rotational basis - each class every other week.

So tending the garden is off-routine. Well, one day it was garden time and my older sons class wasn't aware of it. Someone came to get them in a hurried fashion and they all lined up and rushed up to the rooftop. The frazzled teacher who's primary advantage is her love of my hair trailing (in my imagination since I wasn't there) behind in a harried fashion.

At 4pm that fateful Friday I received a note from Frazzled Franny saying that, unfortunately, when they left for the garden, my son had been in the restroom. And it was not until their return that she discovered his absence. This was discovered not because she looked around and found him missing upstairs, rather because the class returned all fresh and sun beaten and sitting at his place, tears in eyes, he looked at the teacher and said "where were you guys"?

I'm, as mentioned, a black thumbed person. I can grow people but not plants. I'm a decent pet nurturer but water, prune and tend as I may, I have never met any success at growing plants. Growing up we had massive potting areas in our front room - four of them so large that there were aisles between them. So large, in fact, that the living room that they occupied barely had room to contain it's brown and white striped sofa. I remember being fascinated with these plants, even watering them once in a while.

Growing kids is sort of like growing anything really. When you are responsible for them, you sort of have to, well, remember them. Plants and people seem to feel sad when they are neglected and left in the bathroom. And, sadly, this day of the garden-bathroom incident was as much an indicator of things to come as the slightly wilted grass at my new house was.

Nurturing plants is simple but there are bugs, rainfall, destructo-dogs, all sorts of obstacles that a skilled gardener should avoid. So too with a skilled teacher or professional of any sort. Avoid the pitfalls, water the lawn and count your kids often. But I'm clearly neither teacher nor gardener so what do I know?

Bublicious

Have I ever told you about the bubble gum dream? Well, it's a recurring dream from my childhood that was probably actually about sugar repression but is now about something else entirely. The gum that I always wanted somewhere between 4th and 7th grade was Bublicious - watermelon flavor to be specific. The word bublicious was written in flowing curly letters that looked like the promise of an unparalleled chewing experience. And if you know me you know that I heart the gum. If gum were cigarettes I'd have lung cancer guaranteed.

So in this dream, I somehow got a pack of bublicious watermelon. I treasured it. I kept it safe. And I even played with the unopened pack, tempting myself with an occasional whiff of the faux melon scent. One day I left out that pack of gum on my bright green carpet (that part is real - the carpet was green!) and was on my rainbow colored bed alternately reading a book, dozing off or or investigating how the rainbow wallpaper matched at the seams (which it miraculously did). I was a kid, people, no drugs involved.

Back in the dream, my father walks into my room. He always wore shoes in the house and I never have worn shoes in the house. Somehow his shoe soles clicked on the carpet. He walked in to talk to me about something unknown and as he approached - you guessed it - he stepped smack dab on the pack of gum. And I have never forgiven him. I woke up in the morning hysterical crying (I know, over gum - what a baby). And then I had the dream again and again - that should be your hint that the dream is less about crushing gum and more about a fear of crushed dreams, just a guess.

And now, a year after the exciting sunset of sparkymom, I enter this recurring dream with the same sense of trepidation. It can end well, as it did last school year, but it is not likely to end cheaply. When one pack of bublicious is stepped on another must be purchased.

If you don't feel like reading the rest of the entries herein let me catch you up. 3 of my 4 kids went to my dream school. I got divorced and thereby too poor to keep sending them so moved into a school district where a new dreamy public school that was much freer was being built. I overcame many irrational fears of a notoriously poor state schooling system including an imaginary prohibition on the wearing of crocs, my kids shoe of choice, and a fake ban on hugging, my kids activity of choice. I discovered some coping mechanisms for my more rational fears - I took report cards in stride and did rote homework encouragingly. I even came to discover that the structure of the public system was immensely beneficial to one of my kids in particular. In, what I believed but one short year ago to be the end, two of the kids thrived and had a great year, one was a sad mess and she went back to private school.

Now it is year two. I happily skip into my room (thats the school year if you are metaphorically challenged) and am playing with my bublicious. I anticipate a great year. Each of the four kids are thrilled with their schools and jazzed up for the school year. Well, there are occasional (read: bi-weekly) protests that the eldest getting to go to private school isn't fair, but the ol "life isn't fair" seems to work in quickly dismissing this protest.

The private school starts a couple of weeks later than the public and that is when my dads snapping soles stride into the room and the pit in my stomach rises - "he's going to step on my juicy gum". This means that I realize with a sinking and yucky feeling that all is not as well as I had hoped.

As we leave our daughter in a huge classroom occupying half a floor of a beautiful turn of the century mansion, her dad looks at me and says, a note of panic in his usually confident voice, "we can never let the boys see what we do for her - they can never see her classroom. They are right. It's not fair."

Did I mention that in the dream my father refuses to replace the gum he has destroyed and he says "well, you left the gum on the floor - you shouldn't have gotten yourself into that situation".