Getting an Education

When family comes to town, keeping up with your own life gets a little problematic. You want to put the rest of the world on pause so that you can focus on your guests, but unfortunately, the earth abjectly refuses to stop spinning. Case in point, the Fairview Elementary 2009 Back To School Night. It was scheduled for August 20, which was not only during my sister's visit, but also at a time when Monte would be in Arizona helping my sister's husband drive their two cars back to Missouri.

You wouldn't think Monte's absence from BTSN would matter much. I mean, after all, I didn't have to take Peyton, so each absence balances out the other, right? And I had prepared in advance. I filled out all the forms. I pre-ordered my school supplies from the school itself--no fighting the retail crowds on August 19 for this mom. But once I got there and cheerfully produced my paper work, it turned out each school age son had to have additional paper work filled out and turned in to their new teacher. Once I got to the room, new forms I had never seen before had to be carefully considered and completed, and the easy peasy school supplies, which again, were pre-ordered from the school itself back in May, had to be tracked down and placed in desks.

Big deal, right? Wrong. It suddenly became apparent Monte is not just a Peyton carrier at these kinds of events. He also fields questions from the audience while I concentrate on the information I'm providing. Mason and Stephen both had things they urgently needed to say to me at all times, which meant I couldn't really focus on meeting the teacher or her pesky forms. Confusion growing all around me, I finished the forms, grabbed the school supplies, dumped them out of the box into the desk and struggled to insure I had done enough of what I was supposed to do for the state to accept the children I ejected from my vehicle come Monday morning. I then fled the scene.

The first clue that I am not together as a single parent came Monday when the boys came home. Stephen said, "Mom, my desk was empty." I said, "What do you mean your desk was empty?" He said, "The school supplies weren't there." I called and left a voice message for his teacher, but it was pretty half hearted. After all, these are boys that call to me complaining they can't find their shirt or their backpack or their right foot, only to have me walk over and point out that the object in question is eighteen inches from their left foot. Surely the supplies were there. I put them there. Heck, I dumped them with extreme force there.

They weren't there. Naturally Stephen hadn't told his teacher, and I guess in all the craziness of the first few days of school she hadn't gotten my voice mail--so when I asked her about it she was completely baffled. After realizing that in my haste I didn't stop to label any of the supplies, we admitted that even with a crack CSI team and several days of leg work we were never going to know what happened to them. At the heart of the matter was the inescapable fact that Stephen still needed his stuff. So I resolved to go out after dinner and get him everything he needed. Again.

Remember the ten plagues in the bible? Famine, locusts, frogs, flies, and so on. There was a little known 11th one--the school supply availability plague. We had to go to four different stores in order to get glue, scissors, erasers, pencils, crayons, markers, notebooks, a pencil case, post it notes and plastic folders. Four stores. Wal-mart was out of erasers, but they had plastic folders. Target didn't have folders made of any material, but they did have post it notes. Nobody had pencil cases. We had to settle for a plastic box of approximately the same dimensions at Michael's, which by the way is the only place in town you can get those otherwise ubiquitous pink erasers on the second day of school. Oh, and you also have to crawl over cranky last minute college students and their frazzled parents just to get the stuff. At one point, Monte had to go around to the back of an aisle and reach over the top just to get to the plastic folders that were being blocked by an angry mother daughter team bent on denying access to anything that might hold paper.

I can't decide if I was overly dependent on my preparedness or underestimated the distractions my sons can be or if, baby, we just got robbed. I have learned one thing though. If I have to do another BTSN on my own, then it really will be on my own, because all the boys will be duct taped to chairs in my basement.