I Refuse To Help With School Projects Because That’s My Husband’s Job

I’m the day-to-day homework helping parent, except when it comes to math. But present my kids with a diorama to be completed or a literature project or a science fair presentation and I’ll be over here, quietly sipping my coffee and paging through a magazine because Mama don’t do that. My husband spent the majority of his weekend at the office with the kids completing various school projects, and I did NOTHING.

How did I manage this? I have NO idea! I am lucky lucky lucky! I do not help sculpt pandas out of clay, I don’t record the findings of seedlings and how they grow after being exposed to soda and I do not edit three minute long commercials for book reports.

Granted, the bulk of these assignments fall on my kids. We are never going to be the parents who do the work for them and usher them into school holding perfect presentations and meticulously art-directed book reports. The volcanos will always be a little bit-lopsided. But the person making sure the work is done and that spellcheck is used and materials are purchased – the helper in these circumstances is always my husband.

I don’t know how this ended up happening, it’s just one of those trade-offs that parents seem to make when they are co-parenting effectively. I will never ask my husband to braid my daughter’s hair. He is not going to be the one filling out piles of paperwork and permission slips. He’s not the guy frosting cupcakes for the bake sale. But he’s the one who helped my daughter create a three-minute video for a school project this weekend and all I had to do was watch the final result and give them both high-fives.

I’m going to bake my man a pie, a lemon meringue pie that no one else likes and is his favorite. I’m going to fix him an extra nice cocktail and let him watch Top Gear all night and remind him again how totally thankful I am that I never have to cite resources and haul ass to the public library and find perfect little plastic bamboo trees for the clay panda. I love being a mom, I love helping my kids do stuff, but when it comes to turning a shoebox into a diorama, I am all too happy my husband has made this his parenting job.

Along with chauffeuring my kid to choir practices and releasing any spiders in our home into the wild. Make that two pies.

(Image: getty Images)