By Richard Black of The Unfit Father
My daughter has been in kindergarten for a just few months, and I’ve already spent an inordinate amount of time helping her with her homework. I should probably clarify that by “inordinate,” I mean about 14 hours. That might not seem like a huge amount, but I’ve got a lot to do these days now that Darcy is in school, like eradicating pantry moths from my home and taking on lice.
The entire time I was in school, from kindergarten to my senior year, I estimate that my parents spent about six hours in totality “helping” me with my homework. My mother was the first to take up the challenge. Around first grade she sacrificed two grueling hours of her life in an attempt to help me understand the nuances of subtraction, a feat I still wrestle with to this very day.
Addition was never a problem. I could count on my fingers and toes if I were posed with the question, “What is four plus five?” But subtraction was an entirely different matter altogether. If I had nine apples and Suzy took four, I didn’t focus so much on how many apples I had left but why Suzy would want four apples in the first place. What in the hell was she going to do with four apples? Did she have a fetish? Was she a hoarder? Did she jam them in her keister? I quickly concluded that I was not a fan of subtraction or Suzy and her ilk. My grade in mathematics went from a B — or so — to a D, at which point my mother intervened and drilled me with flash cards until I “learned” how to subtract (entirely by rote memory).
For the rest of my term in school, my parents spent a sum total of four hours “assisting” me with my homework. It doesn’t sound like much, but that’s because it was a simpler time when kids were expected to fail much more often — and our parents were usually too drunk to provide us with any meaningful help anyway. Most of that time was spent nagging instead of helping: Did you do your homework? You need to do your homework. If I’ve had seven martinis on an empty stomach, do you still need to do your homework?
Around freshman year in high school my grades in geometry did an imitation of Keith Moon diving into a pool. (If you’re too young to know what that means, then Google it. I promise it’s funny and in poor taste.) My father was the unfortunate soul who chose to intervene, and we began the most frustrating and embarrassing three hours of my life. For propriety’s sake and the last shreds of my dignity, I’ll forgo detailing the event, but suffice it to say that by the time midnight rolled around, we both realized that the odds of me understanding even the most simple tenants of geometry were on par with those of my father teaching lemmings to speak Farsi. It was a humbling moment for both of us — and one we’ve never spoken of since.
It should come as no surprise that I await the moment, probably around second grade, when Darcy concludes that she understands the fundamentals of subtraction better than her old man with trepidation, if not outright fear. I tend to view the nuances of mathematics the way churchgoers believe in a higher power. I’m sure it’s there, but that’s about as far as my understanding goes.
Fortunately for my sake, mathematics in kindergarten is on a level I can get. It usually involves counting or sorting dried beans, or paperclips, or paperclips that have beans strung through them. I’m not really sure what the purpose is but, as I’ve mentioned, I’m not all that good with maths (or, apparently, “the grammars”).
And it turns out that math is the easy part! You see, occasionally Darcy comes home with a project that entails a more lengthy investment of time on both our parts. Think days instead of hours. (The last was a paper mock-up of a balloon in eight sections, each of which required a response to questions like, “What is your favorite celebrity?” or “If you could tell the world anything, what would you say?”)
These are all great questions but somewhat challenging when it comes to the mind of a five-year-old. If you’re looking for a reason to start drinking or smoking, then I heartily recommend you try to explain the concept of “celebrity” to a kindergartner.
“Daddy what does famous mean?”
“Well it’s someone that a lot of people know.”
“Anna likes Jesus.”
“Like Jesus Christ or that Latino boy in your class?”
“Anna says he makes people into zombies. I like zombies. Is Jesus famous?”
“Uhhhhh. Sure. Do you want me to write down ‘Jesus’?”
“I like Elsa, too.”
“Then let’s go with that.”
Darcy dutifully wrote down the name “Elsa” and, in my well-intentioned idiocy, I decided to look through a few hundred magazines for Elsa, Anna or anything even remotely associated with the movie “Frozen.” After three hours, I found nothing — not even a dirty snow pile or a melting glacier. I turned to Google and, in a moment of desperation, searched for “Frozen Elsa.” I cannot stress this enough: Do not ever, ever, ever enter the words Frozen and Elsa into a search engine without engaging the safe search feature.
Fortunately, Darcy wasn’t around for the unusual and, um, remarkably disturbing barrage of images I witnessed. Unfortunately, the things I have seen cannot be unseen.
I really enjoy helping my daughter with her homework, and by “really,” I mean “only after I’ve had a bottle of cough syrup.” The truth is that I’d rather jump up and down on my balls than spend three hours prodding/helping/doing Darcy’s homework. I love my daughter, but by the time she’s done a full day in kindergarten and hit the playground in lieu of eating lunch, she’s a crabby, crying, hungry mess. Coaxing my daughter to do anything other than nag me for a snack or to watch TV in the afternoon is a task of Herculean proportions.
Once she’s older with children of her own, I hope my daughter empathizes with my plight. With any luck, she won’t have to read the large section of my memoirs I’ve devoted to the difficulties I’ve undergone for her sake. At that point, I’ll probably be suffering from dementia and living with her full time just to return the favor.
This post originally appeared on The Unfit Father.
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ABOUT RICHARD BLACK
Richard Black is a remarkably attractive, remarkably disease-free man in his forties. Unfortunately he’s also married. Prior to his life as a stay-at-home-father Richard spent more than a decade performing various public relations and marketing functions for a number of financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter, Richard enjoys writing the occasional thoughtful post on his blog The Unfit Father and subjecting the public to his…unique take of fatherhood on a more regular basis. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project and the Anthology “It’s Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth. Follow along on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.