June 22, 2006

Mom’s end of year school year stress?... Fuggedaboutit!

Well, parents, high-fives all around. We’ve done it—we’ve gotten our children through another 180 days of instruction. And during the last 30 days of it, let’s admit that the kids weren’t the only ones doing a NASA countdown to a lazy, less structured summer.

Ah, yes… sleeping in, cannonball entrances into the swimming pool, the incessant bickering between siblings with far too much time on their hands.

We’ve survived the first week of it—can we send them back to their teachers now? Kidding, of course. Because just two weeks ago I was one of those crazy-eyed women on the blacktop who looked like she raised her hand one time too many at a PTA meeting. It all boiled down to one sentence, really: “Uh, okay. I’ll ch-ch-chair the school variety show.” Parenthetically, I also considered adding: “…the event that takes place during the last two weeks of school when even the do-it-all, diehard volunteer parents have hit their altruistic instincts over the head with a hammer.”

Many of the parents ended up helping out, as they always do, though I now sport a few mallet-shaped divots on the back of my head. Can you blame them? With the end-of-the-year this-and-that, we’ve all been tapped out by visits to Raging Waters, Golfland, the class swim party and the end-of-the season baseball BBQ.

We’ve also oohed and ahhed at Open House, praised paintings and sculptures that weren’t intended to be abstract at the annual Art Show, and clapped our hands sore over the vast array of “talent” at the variety show. We taught kids to clean clothes on washboards on Colonial Day, despite the five-load back-up for the Maytag at home. And we took a day off work for Gold Rush Day to help the kids pan for pyrite when we could have earned a few more nuggets of our own to pay down the mortgage. Then finally, with gratefulness in our hearts, we emptied our pockets to keep our coaches and teachers caffeinated by Starbucks until 2007, and then personalized it all with a heartfelt note of thanks.

And we’re done for the next 63 days.

Summer-- the two-month gestation period for a complete return to sanity. It’s the season that brings us the same type of amnesia we experienced after childbirth. Without this memory-deleting ailment, how else could we carry eight pounds of helplessness inside our womb, birth it, keep it alive and thriving at the expense of our own well-being and go back and do it all again? Yet we start all over just so our first-born can learn the lesson of sharing both his toys and the limelight. This parallel is the only way to explain how we allow the craziness to re-enter our lives every September. Apparently, that which keeps the human race alive also keeps our volunteer pools from going stagnant.

Like many of you, I attend Back-to-School Night with my hands invisibly tied behind my back, telling myself someone else will take on the organizational roles. I’ll just be a worker bee. And the next thing I know, I’ve snapped the gossamer threads holding me back, and I start buzzing around like some wannabe Queen Bee. My friends are no better. I giggle as I recall their annual “I’m done” speeches, just to watch them dive in again the next year.

By September it will all sound exciting again. It always does. So we’ll shuttle the kids to soccer, football or cheer practice. We’ll help run the school silent auction, take pledges for the Walk-a-Thon and work a shift at the Art & Wine Festival while juggling homework, special projects and a little detail called “dinner.”

It’s what we do. We jump in again with both feet tucked and our arms curled around them because moms, just like the kids of summer, might as well approach life with a big splash. Until September rolls around again, however, pass me an ice-cold tumbler full of something refreshing while I float my cares away on this raft.

Shana McLean Moore lives in Almaden Valley and is the co-author of “Femail: A Comic Collision in Cyberspace” and the author of “Caffeinated Ponderings on Life, Laughter & Lattes.” For more information visit Moore’s Web site at www.caffeinatedponderings.com.