Is it rewarding? Yes. It is a pain in the neck? Yes. Is it the most thankless job in the universe? You bet it is; even God would say so. Just recall the e-mail joke in which Adam & Eve compare notes: "No way! We have forbidden fruit? Cool!" (You can almost see the Almighty rolling his eyes at this exchange, plotting to strike the serpent with a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky for letting Eve in on that secret!) This weekend I'll be seeing all of my children, and one of them may be fortunate to survive the encounter unscathed. The youngest is swimming in a regional championship competition; the oldest is returning from his spring break jaunt to NYC, the second oldest is coaching at said swimming contest.
As for child #3...
Right now I'm looking forward (with trepidation) to witnessing the "wailing & gnashing of teeth" my husband is so fond of watching when one of our offspring is doing poorly in school entirely because they haven't done assignments & turned them in on time. Daughter dearest, the social butterfly, has said she "pulled up her grade" in Algebra, which, actually, she did. To her eternal dismay, however, her weekend is going to include a great deal OF Algebra (supervised by the parent who HATES math & struggled with Algebra herself) because this so-called improvement was from a 52 to a 64. STILL an F at her high school, though yes, the score IS higher. While she didn't lie, neither did she give her best effort to the cause, which I intend to resolve this final weekend before report cards are sent home. If all goes as I hope, she'll be kowtowing before her 22 year old brother, the math god Civil Engineering major, who is likely to be a FAR better Algebra instructor than I.
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