You Can't Always Get What You Want

"Hit refresh, Mom."

"Nothing yet", I reply.

"What is taking so long for them to tell me?", #1 whines.

No, my eldest and I are not waiting for her college acceptance emails, we are waiting for her teacher assignment for the upcoming school year, which will be posted on her page on the school website.  In my day, it was scrawled, in cursive, by your current teacher, on your final report card, which you immediately ripped out of the the actual paper envelope the minute you got outside of school.  My children also asked me if we used chalk and slates.

This new system, is somewhat better than the old one.  In previous years, the administration posted the class lists on the doors of the school at a specific date and time in August.  Parents and children paced, wringing their hands, like Scarlett O'Hara sitting in that buggy down by the depot waiting for the dispatch list of dead and wounded soldiers.  "They're up!!!", someone would shout, and like Pork, the harassed house slave, I wound elbow my way through the throng of mothers, who were taking pictures of the list with their iphones, so I could the scratch down my kids' assignments and bring them back raggedy scraps of paper with the cherished news.

With the school webiste, I may not come home with claw marks or be in danger of being trampled to death, but I also do not have an opportunity, once the crowd clears, to go back up to the doors with te girls to check out who else is in their class.  No, this year, only being given their own assignments, I then got the pleasure of emailing, calling and texting the mothers of all their pals to see who was in their class. One would think I was a Hollywood agent as my phone pinged with responses for the next two hours.

And did I tell you all of this was happening during our vacation?  During one of our two precious last weeks of summer?  When I am trying me best to forget the start of school is looms darkly on the horizon? Yeah, awesome.

My girls have perpetually bad luck when it comes to class assignments.  Not their teachers, they have been lovely, but which of their friends winds up in class with them.  I guess they get that from their parents.  After being accepted to an almost two hundred year old college, which boasted lovely stone dormitories with non-working fireplaces in some of the dorm rooms right on the main quad, H and I both wound up in what can only be described as the low-income housing of our campus -bleak stone towers sectioned into rooms with as much character as prison cells, a quater of a mile from the main campus.  And our luck with roommates was just as bad.  Instead of the few girls I knew from the Chemistry Department pre-events (real partiers, that crowd), I was paired with a soccer-playing Barbie doll with a cheerleader's personality.  Although sweet, she already had her soccer crew from the three weeks she had already been on campus, so I was essentially vestigial to her social existence.  H faired no better, being given a single room.  While this did come in handy for us romantically speaking, it's not so handy when you're looking for someone to go to the dining hall with.

So I was not surprised, once the information was posted, that #1 was not placed in the same class with the majority of her close pals.  In fact, 80% of #1's gang was in class together. Normally, I am not much of a helicopter parent, but this is the one time of the year I can hear the thwack, thwack of my rotors as I worry about who is and who is not in class with my kids.  Apparently,  I am not alone.  In fact, this weird system of disseminating information began as a result of too many parental complaints. If they let us know so close to the start of school, we don't have as much time to complain and try to get what we want.  The school administrators thought they had side-stepped a problem with time management and Justin Bieber-level crowd control at the school doors, only to now be faced with a grassroots movement demanding release of the class lists in their entirety.

I agree with this gripe, to some degree, since it would've been way less aggravating and eliminated all that emailing and texting.  Also, if you do have a bullying situation on your hands, that you previously addressed with the principal, you want to be sure that same kid isn't sitting next to yours on the reading rug again this year.  But for me and most of parents, with the run of the mill, I-hope-my-kid-is-in-the-same-class-as-her-BFF bullshit concerns, we all need to calm the hell down. My oldest was not at all phased by the fact she only had one member of her crew in her class, so why was I annoyed?  Do I think 5th grade is one big, birthday party?  No, she's going to be working her ass off learning about Colonial America and continuing to hate decimals.  Unlike me, she learned last year lack of proximity during school hours will not kill her friendships, but perhaps, she might forge some new ones.  Or perhaps this teacher is one who will have sone huge effect on her learning.  This scenario gives us as parents an opportunity to teach our children about making lemons out of lemonade, or for the not queer, dealing with a sucky situation and trying to make it not suck.

This is all very easy to type, but not having control over who your child spends the vast majority of their waking hours with is difficult when you have been in control of almost every aspest of their lives thus far.  But I think the takeaway is, you never know what serendipitous events can result from an initial disappointment.  Take my marriage and the existence of my children for instance.  I'd say that's better than having had a wicked cool suite in which to hang my "Just Hang In There!" poster.

To quote the Rolling Stones, "You cant always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need".