Start Your Engines

School is Starting; Rookie Parents Prepare to Do Battle

You are headed into 12 years of education hell

I will fight through my parenting PTSD because of the number of rookie parents I see. I don’t want them to make the same mistakes I made and get scarred for life. Therapy could not help me.

When your children transition to full-time school, there is much danger for you. The risk is for your mental and physical stability. Once you have been through your first school year, you know what is coming, but that first year is a bitch. First grade will make or break you and set the standards for the rest of your child’s educational career. I almost didn’t survive. I am sharing my hard-won knowledge to help others succeed in the transition. There are two major danger zones. Let’s take them one at a time.

School supplies

You want your child to do well in school, so you will buy the teacher-supplied school supply list. Watch yourself here. Buying everything on the child’s list could cost you $30,000 or $40,000, putting you into debt for years. The teacher also has a “wish list” of things they want the parents to provide. My spouse and I provided five pallets of tissue paper to the first-grade class besides the individual supplies for our child. The first graders would not run short of tissue to wipe their snotty little noses.

Did I warn you to shop early for the supplies? If you mess around and cannot acquire the exact light purple dinosaur backpack with a matching water bottle and your child must have a dark purple dinosaur backpack with the matching water bottle, there will be hell to pay. Every school day, your child will be teased by the other children, and she expects you to do something about it. But you do not have and cannot find the light purple backpack, can you? You are an abject failure as a parent in your child’s eyes.

I once drove deep into Ku KLUX Klan territory because Billy Bob’s School Supplies and Barbeque restaurant was the only place with the prescribed pencil box. I was afraid of the klan, but I was more fearful of what would happen if my daughter was the only one without the correct pencil box. Billy Bob knew not to look me in the eye when I walked over and grabbed a pencil box. I was not the first mom to buy a pencil box, leave a fifty, and bolt back to their car. The pencil box was mine. Wait a minute, let me put this pen down. I’m getting hot, sweaty, and distraught just remembering those days.

Lunch

If you take your child to the store, letting the child pick all the tasty items for their lunch, you might believe you are in good shape. I mean, you purchased all the things they love to eat, but you would be wrong.

When those individually tasty items are put together as lunch for the child, those items in the lunch box interact and are now recognized as trash. Your child’s favorite snacks are just snacks until they are in the same place. Look closely, and see them for what they are: evil, pure sugar, carbohydrates, and fat not to be eaten at school. Children will not eat the lovingly packed lunch but will bring it back home untouched, having not eaten a thing at lunchtime. Your child sat in class with their stomach growling for three hours and their lunch stuffed in their backpack.

My husband and I once got a complimentary Thanksgiving basket from our children’s Christian school because they thought we were struggling. Why did they believe that two electrical engineers with full-time jobs could not afford to feed their families? I’m not sure, but it might have something to do with our daughter going to school in November in a tank top dress with sandals–-don’t ask — while eating the free school lunch for those who could not afford to bring lunch. We lived in the northeast United States. Well, my child, with plenty of winter clothing in her closet, who was being packed with delicious, nutritious lunches every day, would not eat the provided food, preferring to eat with her friend in the free lunch line every single day.

She would give her lunch to little boys each morning so that she could truthfully say no when asked if she had a homemade lunch. I tried to explain this to the school on the phone, but I ended up going to the school. They sat me in the principal’s office as a miscreant parent too lazy to fix lunch for their child until we brought my daughter in and found out what was happening to her lunch. At that point, I turned into a parent too worthless to understand their child’s needs.

I am not sorry to be the one to tell you, but it does not get better. Each school year will present you with supply and lunch challenges, with each grade becoming more and more complicated. In another post, I will go into other things all you rookies need, but right now, I’m going to take a Xanax and lie down. My PTSD just kicked in. Someone just popped open Lunchable, and I am this close to losing it. Till next time.

More from Toni Crowe

Join Medium with my referral link. Free members can only read three free articles per month. Join as a member for $5 per month, then you can read all the articles on Medium without limitation, including me.