People I Want to Punch in the Throat (14 page)

Gomer had made some scraggly-looking clothes from scraps of paper and ribbon. His pirate looked like he’d barely survived a shipwreck.

“He’s got an eye patch, too!” Gomer said proudly, pointing out the wonky patch that was almost as big as the doll’s head.

I thought it looked pretty good for a five-year-old and blunt scissors. That’s when I noticed that he had wielded those blunt scissors with wild abandon and cut off one of his doll’s legs, gluing on a Popsicle stick in its place to make a peg leg.

“Gomer, you cut off his leg?” I asked, worried. I wasn’t sure he was supposed to take it to such extremes.

“Of course I did. It’s Pirate Gomer!
Arrrgh!
You can’t be a pirate with both legs,” he explained.

“I guess so, but I would think you would want to make Pirate Gomer look a little bit like the
real
Gomer. The real Gomer doesn’t have a peg leg.”

“No, I wanted to make him like a pirate. My teacher said we could do whatever we wanted. That’s why I gave him tattoos, too,” Gomer said, pointing out the tiny skull-and-crossbones tattoos that covered the body.

Standing back and looking at Gomer’s pirate, I got a little nervous. Nowadays the news is filled with stories of kids being sent home because they chewed their peanut butter and jelly sandwich into the shape of a gun or they menaced a teacher. What would the teacher think of Gomer’s heavily tattooed, one-legged pirate brandishing a tinfoil sword?

I glanced at the clock. It was way past dinnertime, and I had a mess to clean up before we could even sit down to eat. If I didn’t get dinner on the table shortly, my whole nighttime routine would be thrown off, and
I
don’t do well when
my
nighttime routine doesn’t go according to plan. I had a full DVR of shows to watch and that wasn’t going to get done if I didn’t get these kids fed and in bed. I decided I didn’t have time to help Gomer redo his pirate. I figured the instructions never said he couldn’t
be a pirate. If the school thought it was a violent choice, I’d deal with the repercussions at that point, because right then I was too exhausted to worry.

In the morning, Gomer carefully packed Pirate Gomer into his folder and proudly brought him to school. I waited with bated breath all day for the phone to ring and to hear the teacher say, “Um, hi, Gomer’s mom? Yeah, we have a situation with Gomer and his pirate. Do you have some time to talk?” But the phone call never came. When Gomer came home he told us that his teacher loved everyone’s gingerbread dolls.

A few weeks later the Hubs and I were up at the school for parent-teacher conferences. We arrived a little early, and the teacher was still meeting with the family before us. We passed the time by walking up and down the hallways looking at the kids’ work. We got to a bulletin board full of gingerbread dolls.

“Hey, look, it’s the gingerbread dolls,” the Hubs said.

I looked at the bulletin board he was pointing to. The dolls looked really good. “I don’t think that’s the kindergarten’s board,” I said.

“You don’t?”

“No. Look how great those look. They’ve got to be older kids.” We kept walking closer.

The Hubs got there first. “I don’t know. Isn’t that Pirate Gomer up there at the top?” he asked.

I looked carefully. He was right. There was Pirate Gomer in all his wrinkled glory, right under the brightly colored header at the top of the bulletin board that said
KINDERGARTEN GINGERBREAD PEOPLE
.

“That
is
his,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s weird. These look so good. I would have never guessed that was the kindergarten’s board.”

I took a closer look at the gingerbread people surrounding Gomer’s dilapidated marauder.

Arrrgh you fucking kidding me?
I thought.

My kid’s doll looked like it was the only one actually made by a five-year-old. The doll next to him wore a miniature Kansas University cheerleading costume cut and sewn from fabric. Another doll was a ballerina with a tulle tutu and a sequined bodice and neatly braided yarn hair. A doctor in a tiny white lab coat with a minuscule badge clipped to his lapel gazed at me through itty-bitty wire-rimmed glasses. One child’s smiling, laminated face was cut into a perfect circle and glued expertly on the head of his cowboy gingerbread doll, complete with fringed chaps and tiny pistol. (So much for me worrying Gomer’s doll was too violent; you couldn’t even tell the mangled piece of foil on the pirate’s belt was a sword, but there was no mistaking the cowboy’s pistol.) Every doll I looked at had a perfectly drawn face. No one had a slash for a mouth and a missing nose like Gomer’s, and everyone except his had two legs.

I felt my blood pressure rise.
The hell these dolls were made by five-year-olds!

It was so obvious that the moms and dads sent the kids out to play and then created these mini-masterpieces. At that point I was so torn. On one hand, I wanted my kid’s doll to look good, too (and I could have made that little pirate rock), but on the other hand, did I really want to start doing Gomer’s homework for him at age five? What kind of parenting is that?

Why would a parent do that? Was it a laziness thing? Were the parents watching the clock and thinking,
Oh crap, it’s going to take her an hour to do it and I don’t have time to supervise this, but I could knock it out in fifteen minutes, so I’m just going to do
it. Shove over, Aighmey, it’s Mommy’s turn
. Or was it a perfectionist thing? I could just imagine the overachieving mother sitting there thinking,
Oh God! I can’t keep watching him glue his buttons in such a messy line—they must be orderly! Put down the glue and move away slowly, Calvyn!

No way am I ever going to do my kid’s homework. I did my homework time, thank you very much, and the
hell
I’m going to do that again. Besides, I’m way too lazy to actually do his homework. And what do you do when you’ve got more than one kid? Who has time for that crap when I’ve got a new season of
Survivor
to watch?

Call me crazy, but I like to see what sort of stuff my kids can create. I feel like this is what they’re supposed to be learning. Sure, it’s frustrating to sit there and watch Gomer cut off the leg of his doll or cover its body in tattoos, but it’s his doll and he’s supposed to be doing it the way he wants to.

So while I was able to hold on to this perspective for a while, I hit a roadblock when Gomer was in third grade. It was about an hour before bedtime when Gomer came to see me, visibly upset. “What’s the matter, Gomer?” I asked.

“I forgot to do something,” he said.

“Okay, well, you’ve still got some time before bed. What did you forget to do?” I asked, thinking it was a permission slip he needed me to sign or brushing his teeth.

“I have a research paper due tomorrow.”

“A what?” I asked.

“A research paper. It’s our first one.”

“I’m confused,” I said, not really confused. “Why am I just hearing about this now?”

“ ’Cause it’s due tomorrow.”

“I get that. But when was it assigned? I doubt it was today.”

“Ohhh. Yeah. No, she told us on Friday that it was due Wednesday.”

“So you had the whole entire weekend to work on this and yet you decided to wait until Tuesday night to tell me?”

“I didn’t think it would take that long,” Gomer whined. “Plus, I had soccer.” I guess those two hours of soccer really ate into his research paper time over those two full days off from school.

“Gomer, the whole reason she gave you so many days to do it is because research papers take a lot of time.”

Gomer looked like he was going to cry. “There’s more,” he said.

I sighed. “What else, Gomer?”

“I forgot the book that we’re supposed to use for the research part.”

Before I could yell, “Are you freaking kidding me?” I had a flashback of my mother yelling at my ten- or eleven-year-old self. She’d just returned from back-to-school night where the teacher had said something about how the parents must be tired of helping with the huge research paper everyone was working on, but luckily it was due the next day and life could get back to normal. My mother watched in horror as everyone around her nodded their heads and she realized she had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I had never once mentioned a looming research paper. Not because I didn’t need any help, but because I’d completely forgotten about it. Shit. Of all the qualities Gomer could inherit from me he got my uncontrollable cowlicks and my ability to space out about important shit.

I knew yelling at him wasn’t going to help. I couldn’t let him fail. I might be an underachiever, but I refused to pass that quality on to him as well! I was going to have to help him.

This was the first time he’d ever had to do a research report, and he didn’t know where to begin. We worked through the instructions together. He had to find out facts about three different cities and write a letter home telling his parents about traveling to these cities by train. Since he forgot his book, we had to enlist the help of the Internet (thank God I didn’t have to put on pants, go to the library, and try to master the Dewey Decimal System again). He found his facts and started writing his report. Even with Google and high-speed Internet it seemed to take an eternity for him to find the facts he wanted to use. “Mom, what’s more interesting? The fact that New York City is home to over eight million rats or the fact that New York City used to be the capital of the United States?” I wanted to yell,
Stop looking at pictures of giant rats and do your work!
In the end he decided to go with capital of the United States, but that was only after reviewing all of the known data on New York City rats. Ewww.

The final instruction was to either handwrite your report super-duper neatly in ink or type it. Gomer had never typed a report before and the idea intrigued him. I suggested he write it all on paper first to get his thoughts in order and then type from the paper.

Once he had his notes scribbled on a scrap of paper he was ready to type. I looked at the clock. It was fifteen minutes before bedtime. Remember what I said earlier about messing with my bedtime routine?
Downton Abbey
was calling me from my DVR and I was starting to get twitchy. “Gomer, do you even know how to type?” I asked him.

“Yes. We’re learning to touch-type. I can type twenty-five words per minute,” he said proudly.

“Uh-huh,” I said, weighing my options. If he didn’t type it, he would still have to rewrite his report neatly with ink, and the
chances of him screwing up a word here or there and having to start over were high. At least on a computer he could backspace and fix it. I decided to let him type.

When you can type 90 WPM, it is excruciating to sit and watch your child hunt and peck. It was all I could do to not rip the laptop from his hands and whip out his report in three minutes flat. I had to leave the room. “Let me know when you’re done, Gomer, and I’ll proof it for you,” I said.

An hour and a half later he found me, and he was in tears. “What’s the matter, Gomer?” I asked, a bit alarmed.

“It’s only half a page!” he wailed.

“Okay, so what?”

“The instructions say it must be one page long!” he said, waving the paper in my face.

“Okay, so now we edit and fluff a bit,” I told him.

“What does that mean?” he sniffed.

I took the laptop from him. We were an hour past bedtime and I couldn’t wait five minutes for him to find the damn
g
key. “You dictate, I’ll edit,” I said.

The first thing I did was double-space the page, because everyone knows “one page” means “one page double-spaced.”

“There,” I told him. “That helped. Now we need to expand your paragraphs some more. What else can you tell me about Washington, D.C., that you haven’t already told me?”

He thought for a minute and then gave me a random fact about Washington that I’ve already forgotten, because I’m not the one being tested on this shit.

We worked like that for about fifteen minutes and got his report to the required length.

The next morning as he placed his report carefully into his folder he said, “My teacher is going to love this report!”

“Yup, I think she’ll like it,” I said, helping Adolpha get on her coat.

“I’m so lucky I have a mom who is a writer. She writes the best reports!”

Adolpha and I both stopped what we were doing and stared at him. “You did Gomer’s homework?” Adolpha gasped.

“No!” I exclaimed. “Gomer, I didn’t write your report. You did!”

“Not really, Mom. I only wrote half of it and you wrote the other half. The fluffy stuff,” he said.

“Not true, Gomer! I just typed and helped you think of some ideas, that’s all. The words aren’t mine, they’re yours.”

“Mom, I can’t lie to my teacher. You wrote half of my report.”

“Gomer! You can’t tell your teacher that I wrote it,” I said.

“You
did
do Gomer’s homework,” Adolpha wailed. “You never do my homework!”

I was becoming flustered. “Adolpha, stop it. I didn’t do Gomer’s homework!” I turned to Gomer. “
You
wrote that report—writing is not typing.
You
did the research and
you
found the facts you wanted to use. You then spent an hour and a half typing it. When it was time to edit it—and by the way, all writers need someone to edit them—I read through it and found the holes you needed to fill. I pointed them out to you and you found more details to add. All I did was type the edits for you because you suck at typing and I couldn’t stand to watch you type any longer. You are good at many things, but typing is not one of them. I don’t know who’s telling you that you can type twenty-five words a minute, but they’re lying to you.”

“I don’t know what you’re worried about. My teacher says she likes to read what you write. She’s going to be excited to read your report.” He turned and walked out the door.

Shit. He was going to throw me under the bus with his teacher, and I didn’t even deserve it. The worst part was that I’d be taking a fall for a report that sucked. I mean, honestly, if I had really written that report, it would be outstanding and I would have totally gone with the rat angle. Eight million rats in New York City alone? And what about Washington, D.C.? It would be too easy to write something like, “Rats may be a problem for New York City, but they are the scourge of our great nation’s capital. Some are four-legged, but the worst are the two-legged ones.” Tell me that’s not good stuff right there!