…curriculum, nauseam
“Dad are you even listening?”
“Sure, I’m just taking notes.”
“Eeehhh, really, you can do both?”
Yup, become that guy.
In school I hardly took notes. I loved watching the girls taking encyclopedic scribblings with multicolor markers. Loved even more waltzing into exams and pulling scores superior to theirs.
Macho intellectual. Now, I’m a ma/pa…in a perpetual struggle to balance my testes with the needs of child rearing.
So I take notes at curriculum night while his teacher describes the schedule and my kids’ future lessons.
More important I guess than my own education was to me.
“Dad, can you like even read what you’ve written?”
He’s peering over my hieroglyphics with a dubious frown .
“Sure.”
As a kid, I trained myself to write in the ugliest hand possible. Precisely so no one but me could figure it out. Half self-contempt, half shyness, half arrogance….and if you don’t think that three halves make a whole, you haven’t lived in my brain.
Writing, reading, thinking were my refuge from the annihilation of being born to my mother. The less she knew about me, the more I lived.
And now that she’s gone, I miss her. Now who do I hide from?
“Dad?” When Noah whispers he’s even louder than usual.
I look over at his teacher at the front of the class discussing the patterns and diagrams they’ll learn this semester. He’s pretending not to have heard.
Pretending. Used to do that a lot too.When I wasn’t hiding I was pretending. Now when I try, it gives me ‘nauseum’.
“Dad???”
Must give my kid a bit of ‘auriculum’. I lean down to him.
“That’s Amanda. She’s hot, huh? She’s sooo hot.”
Pretending and hiding was my curriculum.
Certainly not my kid’s.
Progress?