I think I must be doing this wrong. Somewhere along the line, I missed out on some essential child-rearing information; maybe I lost the manual…
Okay, okay. But if there had been a manual, I would have lost it.
Every day, my seriously awesome and adorable children come home from school and I pull up their daily school report thingy. It tells us what grades they got on what and if there are any missing assignments still outstanding.
And this is when I start to feel twitchy.
‘Why is this still showing as missing?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the teacher forgot to enter it in?’
‘REALLY?’
‘Er. I don’t think I turned it in’
Frustration starts to set in.
‘This one is STILL missing?!? It’s from March!’
‘I finished that. But I don’t remember if I turned it in either.’
At some point in this process, I become completely amazed that I haven’t pulled all of my hair out. Or thrown something. Which only happened once, scared the bejezus out of both myself and the kid, and left me with an underlying guilt concerning books and how they’re not known for their flying ability.
It’s also at this point that I begin to feel that somewhere, somehow, I have failed to teach these kids how to be successful in school, which in turn will lead to their failure at adult life, and that in twenty years, I’ll find them living in a van down by the river.
I guess I assumed that if MC and I always made school a priority, that the kids would too. Not the case, as I’m finding out. But maybe that’s okay… no, really!
Because it makes me have to look at my kids as a whole and not just the reflection of their grades, I have found some really amazing qualities that I might not have noticed otherwise.
Also, I might just be saying that to make myself feel better about this situation.
How do you feel when your kids don’t perform to your expectations? Or perhaps this only happens to my kids…
(sigh)
