True Confessions

Discalimer:  My kids have really, really good teachers, and we love them.  We are thankfu they are getting a great education!

Hello, my name is Circe and I suffer from HIFR.  Homework-Induced Fits of Rage.  I try to control my condition, and I do OK from September to about the first of May.  That's when the pressure gets to me and I fall off the wagon.  I had been managing my HIFR with frozen yogurt, dark chocolate and hyper-vigilance;  making sure all the homework was done at all times and thinking of it as a helpful way to keep up on what my kids were learning in school.  In theory, I want my children to be highly educated.  In practice, well, I'm kinda tired and the kids have been working hard all day and I just want to get them to bed and watch American Idol.
As hard as I try to control my HIFR, this week finally got to me.  I think it started with Golda's Rube Goldberg machine.  I walked in from teaching at 9:30 PM and instead of the kitchen being dark and clean, it was a brightly lit hive of activity involving cups, bowls, funnels, marbles, string, Turkish puppets, boxes and books.  Thanks HEAVENS Aunt Michelle was helping Golda because I took one look at the instructions and felt like my actual brain might be on fire.  Something like "your apparatus must include a pulley, lever, wedge, wheel...."  AAAAAAA!!!!!  What's a wedge?  I thought it was a salad.   A pulley?  At 10:00 at night?  How?  Why?  Michelle, Golda, Ruby and Jakey are geniuses.  Crisis averted.

Unfortunately, more homework was on the horizon.  Araceli's class is preparing for testing, so she got a bunch of work she had missed last Friday, plus her regular homework packets in math and English, plus more test preparation.  And a book report!  You're not going to believe me, but it was 27 pages!  And Freestone, in addition to practice sheets for addition and subtraction facts and his two regular packets, had a moon phases book where he's supposed to track the phases of the moon each night for 28 nights.  Yeah, how about if instead of that, Freestone brings the PS3 to school and helps all of his classmates get to the next level of Lego Harry Potter.  That's something that is useful in real life.  We'll talk about the phases of the moon sometime in the distant future when I'm OK with Freestone being up and doing homework when the moon is out.

But I digress.  Araceli's homework is what put me over the edge.  I could analyze the elements that came together to create the perfect storm.  Warm, sunny weather, ballet, cello, Ari recovering from a nasty cold, a slow walk home from Activity Day, a mother in the midst of a little obsession with polygamy stories...Before we knew it, it was Thursday night at 8:30 and Ari was sitting at the kitchen counter working diligently on page two of her twenty-seven pages of homework, due the next day.  I tried to use my breathing techniques.  I tried envisioning a safe place, a tropical beach, a world with no worksheets, but my hypothalmus took over.  I reached across the counter, snatched the packets and ripped them in half.  I said, "There.  Now you don't have to do your homework.  Let's get you to bed, ya cute little thing!"

Ari screamed.  It was an Edvard Munch moment.  She was horrified.  Apoplexic.  We're talking panic attack.  Geez, I thought I was helping!  (The HIFR distorts my reality.  What can I say?)  After talking Ari down off the ceiling and reassuring her that she could tell her teacher that her mom ripped up her homework, she gratefully went to bed.

I got a message from Ari the next morning.  Tiny little voice:  "Hi Mom.  This is Ari.  Mr. Keck was really mad that you ripped up my homework.  Can you bring it to the school?  Love you.  Bye."  I would have, I really would have, but I didn't have any tape.  Xanthe had used it all for her homework.