Karma
April 22, 2020
Karma is a very real thing. No matter what your religious or spiritual affiliation, the one tenant that truly seems to exist is karma. What goes around comes around, as they say. The hell I put my parents through is returning to me ten fold this very week.
For the next two weeks, I am caretaker to 3 children under the age of 12. Thanks to rampant global disease, these children are not at school being manned by the human saints known as teachers. They are currently being taught at home by frazzled adults ready to sell them for a bottle of hand sanitizer.
For the students, this should be a pretty sweet turn of events. All of the 8-3 boredom alleviated and replaced with a go-at-your-own-pace system that includes access to your own bathroom and snacks on demand. Doesn’t this seem like a great opportunity to blow through the assigned school work and then queue up a Netflix marathon? Absolutely. But these kids don’t get it. 6 math problems deteriorate into an hour’s worth of whining, neck snapping, and wailing, “We don’t have to turn this in!” Oh honey, no. You have come to the wrong place, I wrote this book.
I was the queen of laziness when it came to school assignments; I did not care, nor did I see the point. I wasn’t a child jerk. I sat attentively in class, took notes, and listened to my teachers. I did this for the prescribed 8 hours a day. And the 8 block was all I was prepared to give. By the 3 PM bell, I was done. Finito. No further problem-solving, book report writing, or project completing would occur.
I used a litany of excuses to further my cause to my parents:
There is no homework
I did my homework at school
It isn’t due until next week
It’s optional
We don’t have to turn it in
My parents were the kind of parents who, if you scored 100 on a test, wanted to know why you didn’t score 105. Did you miss the bonus? They sat on me every day, and every day I apathetically dismissed all school work that was to be completed at home. I did, however, gain a doctorate in bullshit. My parents were not interested in my BS artistry; they were interested in the high honor roll. But by my count no one from our class who made a career living on the high honor roll is currently running Google. Not a one. But my talent for BS has taken me to the far corners of the globe. Fact.
But I digress. The trauma I inflicted upon my parents is now flying back at me from a sassy disgruntled 10-year-old in blue terry cloth shorts. This morning as I read over her online assignments, I riddled out that her cries of “I don’t understand” can easily be translated into “Imma just skip this crap.” The problem is she’s talking to the Bill Gates of school f*** off. My excuses were way more convincing and my delivery of far greater dramatic quality. I set her to task with several pages of math problems that were, in fact, not assigned. She howled, “That’s not in the packet!” I simply smiled and said, “It is now.”
She hates me and that makes me feel good, as though my presence here is justified. If she were thrilled about extra math pages and eating broccoli, I’d be phoning a shrink. But she’s fuming and that’s as it should be. I will parent the snot out of her. Just now I sat down and created 2 English tests. Boom! New and unscheduled tests dropping out of thin air. But before you criticize, this is a child who looked me in the eye this morning and told me that her teacher had, “wroten it in a email.” Wow. We have a long way to go, if we have yet to arrive at the word ‘written.’ We will need more broccoli over here.
I called my Dad to share my current struggle and issue a formal apology for my childhood behavior. The apology was not accepted. He said simply, “Karma,” and hung up.
These kids need to go back to school. They need structure and I need cleanliness and silence. I have been through high school school, college, and multiple career positions. I now need yoga, a bag of tacos, and a wroten list of affirmations to make it through the day.