If There’s One Thing That Will Drive Me to Drink…

If there’s one thing that will drive me to drink, it’s going to be my son’s homework. Seriously.  No one told me I’d have to do homework ALL OVER AGAIN as a parent.  Why did no one tell me this?  There should be some kind of warning label or something!

Have you ever tried helping a child with their homework, specifically, a child with ADHD? It’s a lot like those e-cards you may have seen that say, “If I had a dollar for every time I got distracted, I wish I had some ice cream.”  Yes.  It’s exactly like that…..

Me: Noah, what homework do you have tonight?

N: I don’t know.

Me: Noah, come on, you were at school today right?  What did your teachers give you to do?

N: What are we having for dinner?

Me: Noah.  Homework.  What do you have? Can you check your planner please…

N: Okay.  (Picks up his back pack, opens the zipper, finds a bouncy ball…)

Me:  Noah!  Dude…check your planner please.

N: Oh yeah… (Bounces ball as high as he can, his head moving up and down with the movement of the ball as he unzips a different pocket of the back pack and reaches in for the planner, never taking his eyes off the bouncing ball)

Eventually, we look at the planner together and he sits at the desk to start his homework.

Me: Okay, what are we starting first?

N: Math

Me: So you’re working on rounding decimals?

N: I don’t know (looking at his finger nails, picking up a pencil, tapping his foot)

Me: Noah…can you focus please? (Alright, I realize this is a ridiculous request of him – perhaps even cruel)

N: Huh?

Me: Sigh. Noah, first problem, round the following number to the tenth place: 4.125

N: 6

Me: What? No.  Where did you get 6?

N: Oh, I was looking at the wrong problem.  Which one are we on?

Me: Number one. Dude.  Number. One.

N: Oh. Yeah. (Laughs, scratching head) Moe, how was your day puppy? (Petting our dog)

Me: No-Ah…pay…attention please…round the following number to the tenth place, 4.125

N: Oh, 4.1 – duh. (Starts humming)

Me: Okay. Next problem.  Round this number to the leading digit… (I’m thinking I don’t even remember what a ‘leading digit’ is).  Does this make me stupid? Or old? Or both? Did we have ‘leading digits’ when I went to school?)

N: Can I have a piece of Halloween candy for dessert?

Me: Maybe, but we need to have dinner first, after we finish your homework, now…please round this to the leading digit.

N: Oh, Mom….I’m so sorry, I caught my new hat in my locker door today and when I tried to pull it out, it ripped the stitching out.

Me: Did you open the door to your locker first, before trying to pull your hat out?

N: Oh. No.  Oops.  That’s probably what caused it to rip, huh?

Me: Yes Noah.  That is probably what caused it to rip.

Deep breath.  All I want to do is scream.  And finish this homework.  And drink wine. And I have to feed the dog, wait – did I switch the laundry? I think it’s supposed to be nice out tomorrow, I think I’ll do all my Christmas planters.  Oh crap, I forgot to schedule the carpet cleaners, but I got the dry cleaning picked up. What am I making for dinner? UGH! We need to finish this homework, I want to watch Scandal!

Huh.  Wonder where he gets his ADHD from.  Weird.

In any case, my whole point of this post is I hate doing homework.  And that’s not really the whole sentence, not really my whole thought.  Because if I say my whole thought out loud, then I feel bad.  Really bad.  Because the whole thought is really:

I hate doing homework with my son when he can’t focus.  Which is most of the time.  Because it takes forever.  And I have to constantly be on his case to focus.  And it’s stressful.  And it wears me out.  And the longer he takes to do his homework, the less time I have for me.  To do what I want.  Like watch Scandal.  Or The Voice.  Or Parenthood.  Or….write.  And I’m tired.  And I should have patience, and I should like doing homework with my son, because that’s what good parents do.  Good parents like doing everything with their kids. And great parents see rainbows and unicorns and hear angels singing while they help their kids with their homework because they LOVE IT SO MUCH.  So I suck and now all I want to do is drink even more wine, eat five Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, eat a carrot (or two) to balance out the Reese’s (cuz that’s logical and really works).

Now if you know me really well, you know that I always talk about opening bottles of wine and drinking them, but I never actually do.  Instead I just drink caffeine free Diet Coke, because I’m too lazy to actually open the bottle of wine and in reality, I probably have an underlying fear of what it would look like to others if I opened a bottle of wine, to drink by myself.

Oops…I wondered off topic again.  ANYHOO…..the whole point of this post was really to blow off steam, because this homework business really does get the best of me.  If anything tests my patience, it is when I help my son with his homework.  I think there should be a support group for parents helping their kids with homework.  We could call it Parents Openly Opposed to Homework (P.O.O.H.).

And we could serve wine.  What do you think?