Back To School Week: Confessions Of A Former Class Parent

Here’s how I got talked into being class parent last year. I got strong-armed at the first PTA meeting of the school year. Well, maybe that’s not fair. I don’t know that the mother who convinced me to sign up as class parent was really all that aggressive. But I do know that I walked into that PTA meeting armed only with a plan to eat some cookies and then get back home to watch Friday Night Lights on Netflix and yet I left promising to compile a class list within the next 24 hours and to start thinking about the Winter Carnival art auction project and wondering what exactly I had gotten myself into.

And I realized that I do the same thing almost every school year. I volunteer for projects or committees that will eat up a ton of time and usually involve badgering other parents for donations of money and energy. And money.

I hate asking other parents for money.

But I’ve always felt that someone has to do it and I’ve been fortunate enough to have the time to spare. Ever since my kids started elementary school, I have been lucky enough to work part-time and have managed to coordinate my schedule so that I can attend every school performance, all the field trips and visits to the neighborhood library, and each in-class presentation and holiday party.

I won’t lie. It’s been exhausting. And sometimes, like at this past year’s visit to the Queens County Farm as I sat bouncing around on the school bus throughout the 40-minute ride, I wondered if maybe I should be a little, well, less involved. That seems obvious, and, of course, no one was forcing me to be Supermom. I mean, I’m not a perfectionist in any other area of my life. I could count how many times I made my bed in the last month on one hand — on one finger of one hand ”” but being a super-involved class parent felt like something I was obligated to do. After all, I had the time. And my kids knew that I had the time. They wanted me to be with them and, most of the time, it was what I wanted too.

All of that changed this summer though. I had barely made any summer plans with the kids. We were going to have one of those unscheduled summers full of long, lazy days, aimless walks in the park, bike rides to the beach. I was looking forward to it and so were they.

And then I got a job. I got a job that I really wanted. A job that I knew would be an amazing thing for our whole family. And it was full-time. Immediately, the summer changed. A babysitter was found and camp was booked. It has been a huge adjustment for all of us, not the least because of the guilt that I’ve started to experience as the school year approaches.

There won’t be class-parenting this year. I won’t have the close connection to my children’s classrooms. I won’t be able to go on most field trips or visits to the library. Last year, as all of the parents were giving the teachers end of the year gifts, my son’s teacher actually gave me a gift. This year, I will probably only see the teachers at parent-teacher conferences.

This new reality is hard to adjust to, but I’m trying. There’s guilt. Which, well, isn’t there always? As a mother it seems like I can’t do anything without feeling like I could be doing it better. It’s been hard to explain to my kids that I won’t be in their school as much as I used to be. And it’s been hard to reconcile within myself that while there is definitely guilt involved, I also feel a sense of freedom. Even though there are a hundred little things that I will miss by not being in my kids’ school so much, I am going to have a whole new appreciation for the stories they tell me at dinner time and the rare field trip that I will get to go on.

And, really, to be totally honest, there were plenty of times when I didn’t feel like being on those field trips at all. There were the times when the only other parent coming was someone who I didn’t get along with, so I would sit on the bus trying to make conversation with a woman who would rather stare resolutely out the window than talk to me. Ouch. And there were all the kids who sneezed all over me and the juice boxes that got squirted on my shoes and the tangy smell of someone vomiting in his lap after the school bus hit one too many potholes.

This year, I’m looking forward to not having to deal with any of that messiness. It’s going to be somewhat of a relief to look on the class website and see all the grinning 8-year-old faces gathered in front of the Museum of Natural History and not have that colored by having been there, stressed out for the duration of the trip for fear of losing one of the kids in the squid and the whale exhibit. I’m just going to get to enjoy things from a distance, and I have to say that this is a huge relief.

After all, how many times does one woman need to go to the Staten Island Historical Society? I’m going to say four. I think my time there is done.

You can reach this post’s author, Kristin Iversen, on twitter.

(photo: archidea/ Shutterstock)