Having a Mom Meltdown
Tonight I cried.
I shouldn’t have. It’s been a fantastic week, at least work-wise. I pulled a huge rabbit out of a hat and should have been resting on my laurels with a glass of bubbly, contemplating my glorious future with an exhilarated (but exhausted) team around me…
So why did I burst into tears? (Especially when I’m not big on crying. I avoid it when I can. My eyes go all piggy and red and it makes me look really not-put-together and also leaves me feeling lousy for days).
Some things get your eyes leaking and the voice wobbling, and tonight was one of those times. I was riding high on my journey home from my last assignment after an amazing week, thinking about how the future was looking rosy (and lucrative), when my daughter’s schoolteacher called my cell-phone and interrupted my reverie:
”Your daughter has failed to submit a major assignment on time; she tells us that it is because her excessive household duties prevent her from being able to perform her homework tasks effectively. She tells us that you are absent from the home so she can’t talk to you about it. We are concerned about you as a parent and your daughter’s performance because this is an important exam year…”
This triggered a core mom meltdown. Sobs, in fact.
You get used to being the blameworthy one when you’re juggling all the time – everyone can cite you as the reason they haven’t done their part. You aren’t allowed to cite anyone but yourself when it comes to your own difficulties, however.
In my defense, my teenage daughter has one duty at home. She has to put two aged horses out into a field every morning. It takes less than five minutes because we live in the country and the field is twenty yards from the stable. In the evening, she has to clean out this stable and give them fresh water and feed, which takes approximately twenty minutes. This is the limit of Cinderella’s duties.
It doesn’t stop her from playing computer games, watching TV, going on Bebo, Facebook, MySpace or whatever else she does in her spare time. But when she hasn’t handed in an assignment on time, it’s all my fault – because according to her she has onerous family duties and “I’m not there to talk about it.” Her teachers seize this excuse with relish.
We’re obviously a problem family, because first of all we have four children, so I’m clearly a bit of an extreme personality. I’m not there when the teacher wants to talk to me, which of course is only during school hours, which tends to be when I’m working hardest and perhaps not in contact.
Teachers don’t see it that way. I’m an unavailable parent, out of touch, uncaring, uncommitted. They make their feelings very apparent. Mine don’t seem to come into the equation.
So I cried. Because I don’t have the answer to this one. Anyone with suggestions, I’m all ears.
My mother was a mother and a teacher. She used to told me this story as a true one and while I don´t believe is true, I would love someone to make it become true…
“A schoolteacher sends the kid home with a note for her parents. She is concern about the kid failing and as far as she knows it may be related to what seems is going on at home. Her note makes a point about it.
The mother answer´s was short and clear:
I promise not to believe what my kid says about you and the school if you promise not to believe everything my kid says about you and the school”
I know. It sounds like a joke, but if you think about it, it is not really….
San,
Thanks for that – it is indeed a wise story, and one I have taken to heart. There is upside to the above situation: Cinderella is now very contrite, I suspect largely due to having been caught out exaggerating her home situation so outrageously – and I didn’t need to say a word.
Her siblings were furious with her for a)making up stories about her home life and b) exposing the family to censure by teachers. She’s been told by them in no uncertain terms that it was a rotten trick to play.
..And the ponies are flourishing in her apologetic regime…
Hi Jane,
From the other side – not too long ago I remember being back in high school, and while my mother didn’t work, I was fully responsible for making sure I did my chores, and my assignments, and much like San said, she had that agreement with my teachers to take everything with a grain of salt.
That being said, by time you have kids who are teenagers, there is more than a measure of responsibility on their part to take ownership of their work. You shouldn’t feel bad that you’re focused on your career – when I hit high school, my mother started focusing on her volunteering activity, and I’d have been horrified if one of my teachers sent her a note like that.
Some teachers get out of hand, and are perhaps are a little out of touch with the realities of today where, more often than not, both parents work in intense jobs. Don’t let it slow you down, not at all.