The only thing more annoying than the reality that summer 2013 has come to a close are those annoying back-to-school commercials on television. I loathe the depiction of the goofy parents with stone-faced children in tow, who are bribed to smile with educational paraphernalia by a mother who looks jacked up on energy drinks and fiber muffins. These commercials do not represent my peer demographic.
My teenager asked me the other day, “why do these mothers all look so happy to get rid of their kids? That’s mean, isn’t it?” Sure. “It’s like totally insulting,” I said (‘cause I’m cool like that).
For once we agreed, sort of. Perhaps it is mean to wish your kids would get their dirty feet of your sofa and stop eating your stash of gluten-free snacks. But for me, I was more focused on the ridiculous appearance of these hyper mothers – and occasionally fathers (yeah right, because that happens) – shopping for a huge list of school supplies.
First off, my mommy pals don’t wear mom jeans. Let’s just get that straight. Moms today are fashionable women, and if we’re shopping, we aren’t doing so with glee unless the purchases are for us. Got it? You want to see us high on credit adrenaline? Watch us at an outlet mall. But shopping for school supplies is right up there with trying on bathing suits: I’m going to pay a lot and not feel sexy about it.
And happy as I am to send my children back to the cruel world of routines, rules and recess, I do so with recycled backpacks, chewed up pencils from last year and the reality that nobody really needs a three-hole punch. They just don’t. I don’t buy in to the must-have school supply lists. Every household has a container full of used pencil crayons, safety scissors and gooey glue sticks somewhere, yet parents have subscribed to this notion that we have to provide our kids with brand new items. Here we are preaching recycling and environmental stewardship, but not leading by example. Nobody will die if the pencil crayon is half used already.
Lunch bags did have to be purchased in our house though, since someone left theirs stuffed in a bag inside a closet until mid-July. For weeks I wandered through the house asking, ”Does anyone smell that? It smells like there is something dead in this room.” The Carpenter would then insist that the children shower, (always blame the children or the dog) which would have the kids erupt in an anti-hygiene protest, but never solved the original issue. Eventually, I found it. The offender’s punishment was to clean out the lunch bag, one green fuzzy piece of ooze-dripping bacteria at a time. Lesson learned.
For most of July the Carpenter and I believed our children were vampires, lurking through the house at odd hours of the night, terrified of sunlight and housework by day. In August, they transformed into zombies, attracted only to the glow of their iPods and that beautiful white light of the refrigerator. Instead of brains, they murmured “Mind Craft,” (whatever the heck that is), and devoured every food group in the fridge.
I look forward to the ring of next Tuesday morning’s alarm and the bliss that we all know as routine.