Once upon a time, when I took my last college class, I had a dream that my days of doing homework were gone forever. Sure, a decade later I still have nightmares about forgetting to go to class for an entire semester or procrastinating a huge paper until the last minute, but I get to wake up and remember that I have no deadlines and no looming report cards. Sort of. Because if you are a parent you probably already know what I relearned- having kids means you are signing up to do it all over again, this time with more guilt. This is because like potty training, sleep training, and playing Settlers of Catan, children are like small wild rodents with none of the basic human instincts or skills you feel they should already know, and it’s a long, messy and insanity inducing process to teach them. The ultimate goal, of course, is that by college they can do their homework by themselves so you don’t get sucked into the grandchildren’s education and all you have to do is make yourself available for short interviews about growing up with VHS tapes and dialup internet. (You’ll never be free of attending Christmas sing-alongs with terrible parking. Some consequences of producing offspring are permanent, so choose wisely.)

It starts in kindergarten when your child comes home with a neon colored flyer instructing you how to make a true to life replica of the African Savannah using cardboard, superglue, glitter and live squirrels. This is when you realize that in retribution for never escaping the world of fart jokes, snotty half crayons and Friday spelling tests, you child’s teacher has made it their personal mission to make sure you never do either. You now have two choices: you can let your kid make their own dang diorama and show up to the fair full of elegant, perfectly sculpted rainforests and sand swept deserts with a paper shanty house with pencil scrawls vaguely resembling cats on the walls, or you can make a budget, hit up your local craft store, and devote two days of your life to building a bat cave while your kindergartener sits next to you eating popsicles and offering constructive criticism like “That bat should be a vampire with fangs that sings the Monster Mash! Why can’t you make that one a singing vampire Mommy? Fred’s Mommy made his chameleon change colors and eat real flies! Can you call Fred’s Mommy?”

You tell yourself it will get better as they get older because they will be able to do their own homework. This is a foolish dream. The teachers dream up better, more complicated work, and your kids dream up better, more complicated reasons they can’t do it. On an unrelated note, I have a very through and convincing proposal on why we should punish criminals by making them sit at kitchen tables watching kids attempt to finish math worksheets before they can go out to play. No bathroom breaks or snacks, but if they want they can watch the child eat snacks. If they show any sign of being bored or not paying attention, the child will critique their parenting skills and they earn the privilege of also listening to that child read and/or complain about reading for twenty minutes. It’s a scare’em straight program that I believe can single-handedly end crime in America in 30 days or one fractions unit, whichever takes longer to get through.

I’m fairly early in my second career as a student. I’ve gotten confidant in first grade read-a-thons and second grade math facts, but then they throw fourth grade wax figure museums or fifth grade state reports at me and once again, I’m trying to make a diaper box into an igloo or you-tubing how to run an alpaca farm after I’ve sent my kids to bed because if they tell me on more time that Abraham Lincoln’s hat was NOT rectangle, it was round, I might go take my college diploma and light it on fire on the school playground. They say college doesn’t actually prepare you for a real job, and I’m starting to agree with them. If listening to my professors read Hop on Pop ten times in a row after making green eggs and ham had been a general requirement for a bachelor’s I would have been much more confident as an adult. I guess I can always go back to school for a third time and become a college professor to right these wrongs. At least there won’t be any turkeys I have to disguise so they don’t get eaten at Thanksgiving in grad school, right? Right.