The Bitter Homeschooler

…today’s message would read:

“It’s a signature, people! Not blood! I wrote the letter for ya, already! Do the right thing and SIGN IT! If homeschooling becomes illegal in Sweden and you DIDN’T sign, you’re going to feel guilty for the rest of your life! This isn’t a complicated issue! There aren’t two sides to it! It’s good guys and bad guys! Period! Homeschooling is going to become freakin’ ILLEGAL! Children will cry! Sign the danged letter, already!”

And then I’d get mad all over again, since that’s way too many characters for Twitter and I’d have to rewrite it, like, twenty times.

http://www.madeditor.com/2010/05/sign-your-name-and-help-swedens.html

“When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.”

Translated into Modernese: The secular homeschooling community won’t take ten minutes to send an email that might help some families keep their legal right to homeschool, but they’ll spend a freakin’ hour on Facebook playing Farmville (“Ooh, I need a new cow — won’t someone send me one?”).

It’s a wonder I haven’t started just randomly slapping people already.

Maybe tomorrow.

(This is a piece I wrote several years ago for the late, lamented Metropole Magazine. I wrote it at the end of that year’s Daylight Saving Time, so in a way it’s not exactly timely; but I got so bitter about DST that I figured I might as well post it now, just so everyone can know how I feel. Because that’s what you’ve been waiting and hoping for, right?)

So I thought I’d got through that awful dark time okay, with nary a rant or a groan. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t try to tell me that the end of Daylight Saving Time isn’t your favorite holiday, too. I always celebrate by sleeping late without guilt. (I sleep late pretty much every other day of the year, but I get all angsty about it and can’t enjoy myself properly.) I was congratulating myself on having survived yet another summer of wrong-clockiness without any help from drugs — thinking that I must have finally, God help us all, mellowed or matured or something — when my plumber called and ruined it for me.

He wanted to know what time he could come by and put in a new toilet tank in one of our apartments, since the old one spent too much time muttering ominously to itself and was no longer welcome. “I’ll be gone all morning,” I said. “Can we do it late this afternoon?”

“No way.”

“Since when?” Late afternoon was generally his favorite time for a quick job, and if that sounds naughty let me hasten to assure the reader that I am a happily married woman who has taken only the faintest passing notice of the fact that the contractor I often call in the course of managing a cranky building bears a serious resemblance to a young Mel Gibson, with Mel suffering from the comparison. Plus all his helpers are hunky young U.K. fellows with terrific haircuts and big strong capable hands. And no, you may not have his number. I have a hard enough time getting him when I need him as it is.

Plus he’s apparently a crybaby mama’s boy who’s afraid of the dark. “I can’t start any jobs past four any more,” he said now. “It’s too hard to work out of a truck now that daylight saving time’s started.”

Started? Started? Is this what we’ve come to? Have we grown so accustomed to changing our clocks on command that we now consider letting them reflect true noon sick and wrong, some sort of aberration?

News flash to all plumbers and anyone else interested and listening: THIS IS THE REAL THING. WE’RE BACK TO NORMAL NOW. What just passed was nothing but a summer fling — fun if you enjoy that kind of thing, but nothing to plan your life and future around.

No one believes me, of course. Everyone looks at me like I’m some kind of imbecile when I start talking like this. But it’s true, damn it! Daylight Saving Time is weird! It’s stupid and pointless and, speaking as a representative of a small but ferocious minority, criminally cruel to the night people of the world. And we vote, okay? When we can manage to get up that early, anyway. If these idiots would just open the polls at eight at night instead of closing them, we’d get a lot more of the representation we need.

I digress. The point is — well, what is the point? What is the point of all this changing clocks back and forth? Do the non-parents of the world have any idea what a drag it is trying to acclimate your kid to a new time when you have a hard enough time getting him up in the morning as it is? Have the citizens of the planet in general noticed what fun it is to watch the autumn days get shorter and shorter and BAM! suddenly they’re really short and, with no prior warning, no gradual leading up to it, you’ve got a five o’clock curfew because it’s just too damned dark to play outside after that?

Which leads us to another point I don’t understand. What were those MacArthur grant recipients thinking of when they decided to mess with summer days, instead of winter?

It has been explained to me that it’s a matter of conserving power. It has not been explained to my satisfaction. We have how many hours of daylight in the summer? Fifteen, sixteen? What’s the point of shuffling them all over the map? Messing with winter, now, that I could see. But leave summer alone. It’s hard enough to get our kids to bed without their righteous complaints that it’s still light out.

In an effort to understand the mass hysteria that possesses our population every year, I looked up daylight saving on the web and found a site that had some wonderful information. Trouble is, most of it sucked. Like, get this: “A 1976 survey of 2.7 million citizens in New South Wales found 68% liked daylight saving.”

Oh, please. First of all, if you have to go that far back, just forget it. Admit defeat and get on with your life.

Second, you’re asking people in New South Wales? I mean absolutely no disrespect to our friends down under or wherever the hell they are, but I’d be willing to bet that the citizens of New South Wales don’t think that their opinion should be taken as any big whoop even in New South Wales, let alone that it should somehow stand as emblematic for the entire thinking world.

And liked daylight saving? That’s a little strong, don’t you think? Am I supposed to believe they said that in so many words, or did they just mean that fiddling with the clock a couple of times a year wasn’t as bad as, say, finding a dead rat on your porch before breakfast?

This web site went on to claim that daylight saving is also life saving, thanks to improved visibility and drivers having less of an excuse to plow down innocent pedestrians and then claim they couldn’t see them. Fine. What I want to know is, and I mean this almost seriously, did anybody do any study of what happens to pedestrians after daylight saving time goes away? Party’s over, kids. Eat asphalt.

But my biggest complaint is still my initial one. Daylight saving time leads people to live in a false paradise of long, lingering days. Change it back to normal and they don’t just shrug and say, “Oh, well, that’s winter for you.” No, they start griping about daylight saving time. Which they should do — but when it begins, not when it ends! Figure it out, folks! This is real life! It’s cold and harsh and nasty! That nine p.m. sunshine thing was just pretend! Deal with it!

And then tell my damned plumber to get his lazy butt over here and fixed the damned toilet, already.

I just brought the latest issue of the magazine home, so now I have to mail it out. There are six loads of laundry waiting to be done. I haven’t gone in and wiped out any developing cultures in my bathroom for far too long. The lizard needs a sunbath. I’m working on two books: one fiction, one nonfiction. I want to go to the library. I need to go to the post office. I am determined to have a serious workout. It’s pushup day (every other day is), and I’m hoping, in the spirit of the Olympics, to hit a personal best (current personal best: none o’ your beeswax).

Plus there’s an almost untouched pan of brownies with my name on it in the kitchen.

So of course the phone rang with the caller ID of someone who hasn’t contacted me in years, with whom I have an iffy relationship (if it can be called that).

I’m not opposed to having some contact with her per se, though I’d like to work a bit on the timing. And I’m really not set against someone being concerned about me.

I am a little anti-stupidity, especially since there’s less of an excuse for it than ever in this age of information.

Look, it’s sweet of you to worry. Really. But for hell’s sake, before you call to warn me about the tsunami heading my way and urge me to leave town (especially on a brownie/pushup day), could you do a tiny bit of research? You must have been connected in some way to some electronic source of information to have heard about my alleged peril when you live whole states away from me.

Couldn’t you have gone that extra mile, dug around for five seconds the way I just did, and found out that the tsunami currently imperiling me is expected to be three feet high?

Even if that scary wall of water were ten times that tall, I’m really not in any danger.

I don’t expect you to remember the entire half-mile you have to walk from my apartment in order to get to all those stairs you have to climb down in order to safely cross the Pacific Coast Highway in order to get to the beach parking lot which is easily a quarter mile from any water even at high tide. It would be nice if you remembered some of it, but it’s been a while since you’ve been on the coast and memory does blur.

The official emergency gathering place for earthquake and tsunami victims is the elementary school two blocks from my apartment. Granted, it’s two blocks inland. Maybe those are the blocks that will really count. I don’t know. I’m just saying, I’m not sure city officials who hope to be reelected would have designated that spot if they’d thought we should all bring our galoshes, just in case

But this is trivial. This is funny/touching territory, and I’m fine with that.

Where I morph into uncharted bitterness territory is when I hear in a phone message  that my “whole family” is “really worried” about me.

My whole family? Really.

My former family cut me off a decade and a half ago, when I mentioned in a phone call that I’d like to talk about some things that had been bothering me for a while. “Oh, you should really get that off your chest some time,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “I have to go now.” And she hung up.

The woman was my mother, and she never called me back. Not ever. She’s always been terrified of hearing anything unpleasant, so she decided it was easier to start answering “Five” when people ask how many kids she has.

Nor has she expressed any interest in my welfare since, or acknowledged the birth of my child or the success of my writing.

News flash, caller: My “whole family” is here with me right now. The people who were related to me until a decade and a half ago are a lot farther away than the four hundred miles currently separating us.

Actually, that’s not true. My family is currently out visiting the rest of my family — the family I was lucky enough to marry into. The people who make me so happy by loving me and exasperating me in ordinary, silly, human ways. I love having someone I can sigh and smile and say, “Oh, Mom” to, like the teenager I always wanted to be, the one who’s a little rebellious but secretly thankful for those stuffy people who care about her so much.

I love being able to click my tongue about my niece’s latest antics, and then reminding my husband to buy a lot of Girl Scout cookies from her when he goes out for a visit.

I have a mom and a stepmom, a dad and a stepdad, a sister and a brother and a niece and a nephew.

I email them articles I think they’d like, and think about them when I read the book reviews or the New Yorker. (I think my mom started subscribing so I’d stop reading her ten-page essays in one sitting. She’s way too nice to say so, though.)

These are the people who know and care who and how I am. They worry about my stupid endometriosis, and probably click their tongues about my on-again-off-again relationship with doctors. (Dad, I’m fine. Really. I’m taking care of myself. I can even do pushups!) They let me drone on and on about my favorite authors — thank goodness Jane Austen is a favorite of my mother-in-law’s, too, or she’d be eligible for pre-death sainthood by now. And I can’t wait to tell my s-i-l about my latest Austen projects. (Mary, remember when we read Sense and Sensibility together? I still think about you every time I get to the part about Margaret not being able to stop running down the hill.)

My whole family, my real family, is worried about me — or would be, if there were anything to worry about. But as it happens, they know I’m fine. I’ve already talked to them.

The imposters can either stop trying to get credit they haven’t earned or start acting like the relations they used to be.

And now I have to go. There’s a tsunami due to go “sploosh” about a mile away. I’ll try to hear it over the brownies with which I’ll be consoling myself.

I know, I know. It’s been pretty quiet around here.

But I’m still worried about being too bitter. I mean, I am too bitter. No worries there. I’m just worried about turning people off. I can get pretty hotheaded.

Here’s one I shouldn’t be able to blow too badly. My book came out. Bitter/Sweet: The Bitter Homeschooler’s Chocolate Cookbook.

That stuck-up Mad Editor is being all possessive about it, but it’s mine.

The printer promised it’d be ready this morning. I should have been worried by how hard he sighed as he agreed to that, but I decided that words are more important than noisy air.

It’s home safe and sound, but I was right to be worried.

Here’s a rundown on my glamorous life for the past 24 hours.

6:45 last night: Come home with son from visiting friends. Feel fine. Feel great. Greet husband cheerfully. Announce intention of preparing dinner after discreet visit to powder room

6:47 pm: Double over in said powder room under sudden onslaught of pain and pressure because my reproductive system loves me and chooses odd ways of expressing itself.

6:49 pm: Respond with highly inappropriate language to anxious questions from family regarding recent vocalizations issuing from yours truly. Finish with a request for the sweatpants that hang very, very loosely around BH’s waist.

6:50 pm: Stagger into bedroom, fall onto bed and alternate sprawling and doubling up. Announce intention of directing from bed as husband and son prepare previously mentioned dinner. Demand own share in said meal, and that right quickly, as pain and pressure have (sadly) done nothing to diminish appetite.

6:51 pm: Son asks in endearing voice if there is anything he can do to diminish my pain. Finds heating pad upon request. Is told to please turn said pad all the way up to a heat that will fry chicken. Said son asks if I’m “sure” this is a good idea.

6:51 – 6:55: More salty language from BH.

6:56: Brief but heartfelt lecture delivered by BH’s husband on wisdom of questioning any request made by BH at such a time.

6:57 – 7:15 pm: Husband and son make dinner, interrupted only by requests from BH for water, blanket, another blanket, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a handkerchief, and a willingness to discuss the pursuit of swift and certain death should pain and pressure decide to take up permanent abode in BH.

7:16 – 7:30 pm: BH consumes dinner in bed. Pain and pressure seem to be tapering off under combined pressure of heating pad, intemperate language, and veggie nachos.

7:31 pm: Assure son that am quite “up to” bedtime story, if he’ll just give me a minute. Am offended by his doubting look.

7:37 pm: Conk out.

10:30 pm: Resurface briefly. Castigate self for bad mommyness in missing bedtime story. Am consoled slightly by sound of dishes being washed (presumably by husband). Conk out again.

1:37 am: Wake again, this time long enough to remove bra. Prove beyond shadow of doubt that it’s topologically possible to do so without removing shirt.

2:14 am: Wake again. Wonder if will now be up all night. Entertain possibility of getting up and getting some work done in unaccustomed peace and quiet.

6:30 am: Wake again. Hear husband in shower. Realize that, in the words of C.S. Lewis, I have nearly “slept the clock round.”

7:30 am: Wake again. Can tell by (lack of) sound in apartment that husband has left for work and son is either still asleep or playing very, very quietly. Tell self sternly that this is quite enough and is time to get up.

7:35 am: No, really.

7:42 am: Seriously. Told printers I would arrive at 10:00 am to pick up book.

7:45 am: Plus must make pot of veggie chili for homeschooling potluck and craft fair.

7:53 am: Also double batch of brownies to give away in small luscious squares as publicity for new book, which I intend to attempt to sell at craft fair.

7:55 am: Address complaints from self of feeling rather “ooky” by explaining to self that ookiness tends to be relieved by sitting up, getting up, and moving around.

7:56 am: Inform self that she is not the boss of me, and that I refuse to get out of bed until ookiness goes away.

8:06 am: Give up. Roll out of bed, grumbling. Stagger down hall only to find son sleeping in particularly cute fashion next to most recent stuffed animal acquisition. Decide to go back to bed so as not to ruin the adorableness of it all.

8:06:15 am: Son opens eyes and smiles angelically, thus ruining any prospect of my returning to bed.

8:13 – 9:00 am: Prepare tea, nourishing breakfast, and double batch of brownies in kitchen roughly the size of a beach towel. Congratulate self on rock god status as slide pans of luscious brownies into oven.

9:03 am: Glance at unused measuring cup on counter. Realize that have neglected to include flour in preparation of brownies. Remove brownie pans from oven (remembering just in time to put on oven mitts) and stir flour into batter.

9:22 am: Remove brownies from oven. Pray to Shiva, Flying Spaghetti Monster, and anyone else who may be listening that adding flour so late in the game doesn’t inflict lasting damage on innocent brownies.

9:23 – 10:40 am: Eat breakfast, make chili, use intemperate language in arguments with son over which musical instrument he should practice in the time remaining before we have to leave (he wants piano, because he likes it best; I insist on violin, because it’s the most tiring and he’ll groan if he has to do it when we get home), print out more erratum sheets for current issue of magazine, put lots and lots of current and back issues of magazine in bags to take to craft fair, ransack house for dollar bills and quarters to take to craft fair, worry over wobbly-looking brownies, help son make signs for his adorable creations for craft fair, decide against taking shower in interest of saving time, wash face, brood bitterly over fact that men look “distinguished” and women look “old,” find keys, find sunglasses, find son, say tearful goodbye to stoic lizard (whose sunbath has been cut short by our early departure), scream at son to hurry, leave.

11:06 am: Try not to scream at printer, who has not yet started printing order he received from me on Saturday. SATURDAY. Hate self for not having called first to confirm that order has been completed.

11:07 am: Answer printer’s questions about page order and back cover copy. Negotiate with him to return in forty-five minutes to pick up whatever copies he has finished.

11:15 am: Arrive at park for craft fair. Son effortlessly snags space at table for adorable creations. Decide against setting up shop next to him, as would also be next to the minister’s wife and children, who have been known to make comments publicly about “that stupid evolution stuff.” Hate self for wimpiness. Hate self for bringing back issues with Darwin’s name splashed all over the cover. Hate self for moral cowardice.

11:17 am – 12:00 noon: Find table at safe distance from all things ministery. Check watch every 47 seconds until can safely return to printer for book.

12:02 – 12:17 pm: Leave son and merchandise in the care of trusted friends. Return to printers.

12:18 pm: Try not to scream at printer, who has not yet finished printing even one copy of book. Am calmed down by female employee, who is apparently only person working in shop who understands that printers stay in business by printing things. Am persuaded to wait for copies rather than going on rampage through strip mall in which printer’s shop is located.

12:30 pm: Return triumphantly to craft fair with books. Publicize this fact by screaming “FREE BROWNIES!” at intervals and indicating that recipe for said brownies can be found in book on page in book indicated by subtle hot pink Post-It note.

12:31 – 3:30 pm: Give away brownies. Do roughly $75 worth of book-and-magazine business. Call it a day. Go home feeling wealthy but allergy-ridden. Wonder irritably why parks have to be so grassy and full of nature.

So. The book’s home. Buy it. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.