Single Mom at Work
with Karli Larson
The transition from stay-at-home mom to divorced-and-working-full-time mom can be challenging, and sometimes very lonely. Throw in a few cats, an ancient dog and one very brave boyfriend, and life gets downright crazy. Join me as I talk through my thoughts and struggles, my miscalculations and my triumphs. We're in this together, you and I.
When I'm not writing here you can find me over at work on the TisBest Philanthropy blog.
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I’d have to rank report cards near the top of my Stuff That’s Fun About Parenting list. I love getting their report cards. I devour them in private with a heady and completely insufferable mix of:
a) Yeah, I could have told you that. The child is AWESOME.
b) She did what?!? I know, right?!? The child is AWESOME.
c) A 2? No way, she was robbed. The child is AWESOME.
d) This child must have a terrific mother. The child is AWESOME.
The girls and I make a date out of it. We snuggle up in one or the other’s bed, and we read our favorite parts aloud. This time around, for instance, H’s teacher declared that H’s “gentle and quiet leadership” was an asset to the class.
“GENTLE AND QUIET?” yelled S. We all fell over laughing, especially H, who toppled off the bed, cackling. “Gentle” and “quiet” are not words that accurately reflect her at-home personality, but it makes for good reading, for sure.
This is funny stuff, after all: the difference between public and private persona. The report cards, every few months, are a good reason to discuss this. We chat about why we might behave differently at school. We have great discussions about how complex we human beings are, what we like in ourselves, what we are surprised others see in us, what we’d prefer they didn’t see.
Report card chats here are the beginning of the girls’ understanding of a Walt Whitman quote I love so much: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
We ARE large. We DO contain multitudes, every one of us. I think it’s a beautiful and freeing thing for kids to learn, early on. I also encourage them to tell me what they agree with in their progress reports, and what they don’t, and why. I remember doing the same thing with my parents. I liked the open dialogue.
But I found this very interesting: H asked her fellow second-graders if they’d received their report cards, and most of the kids, she said, knew nothing about them, let alone what the feedback was. I wondered if this could be true, if there’s been a shift in thinking about discussing report cards with children, for fear of making learning too much about graded progress.
So I’ve been dying to ask you: What’s the report card ritual at your home? How much discussion about grades or progress reports feels right to you and your family?
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I always saw my report cards. I don’t know that we had such insightful conversations about them though. They were just a thing to be anxious about (before) and feel relief over (after, usually.)
I took a summer language course this year and found myself getting just as ramped up for my Haitian Creole exams as I’d been for my neuroscience exams in college. I found some other kindred spirits*, all of us agonizing over whether we had remembered the word for pain correctly or whether we had used the correct article in question 5. I was surprised to realize I felt disappointed when the corrected exams were handed back without an actual grade. Good for you for making the report card about something more than the numbers for your girls.
*The angsty ones had all been to grad school, many in the health professions. They conditioned us well, I suppose. Or badly, depending on your perspective.
Sara | January 21st, 2012 at 9:04 pm
At our house, each parent sits down with each report-carded child to look over the whole thing. Then the children switch parents, and the other parent looks over the whole thing. But that may change this year, when we have four children getting report cards.
Swistle | January 21st, 2012 at 9:29 pm
I related to this post because this dichotomy of public and personal never ends, especially in this era of Facebook, YouTube, and blogging. How many conversations do you hear online about “authenticity” and whether or not people are the same online and offline? It is a good lesson to learn that we can be slightly different in different environments, even if we are the same person within. I love that Whitman line, too.
Neil | January 22nd, 2012 at 2:16 pm