Dear Children,

Let me start by saying I love you to pieces. I have loved you since I carried you in my body for nine months and suffered great pain pushing you out and spent the first years of your life in a sleepless haze giving you my every moment. But we’ve reached an impasse. I have failed you. There are certain skills in life your parents are expected to teach you. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to put your elbows on the table?” “Didn’t you mother ever teach you to say please?” “Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to lick turtles?”

(Come to think of it, it’s pretty much your mother’s job to teach you all the basic rules of life, and and Dad is getting off scot-free. This is a conversation for another time but I might need to take a minute to go demand your father bear responsibility to teach you not to eat out of the garbage.)

Anyway, back to us. I have failed you. I haven’t taught you to close a door or throw away wrappers or turn off the lights or leave the water main valve alone. I thought I taught you. I tried. But I must have missed a class in Mother’s Rules 101 and I didn’t learn the magic trick to getting important information into your brains, and now I have ruined you. Irreversibly probably, because no one learns anything after age 10, it’s in a scientific study somewhere.

So, in light of this evaluation of my job performance, I feel like there’s only one thing to do. I must resign as the person who teaches you important stuff. Don’t worry, we can still see each other. I enjoy our time together making blanket forts and putting too much chocolate syrup on our ice cream. But I think when it coms to teaching you how to use a vacuum or scrub a toilet, it’s time to back off and let you all fly free, Lord of the Flies style. The house is your domain. I’ll build a sound proof shed in the backyard and come in on Friday’s for pizza night. Tell Dad I’m sorry but at least he has his office and if he brings some new books he can visit me in my shed. Then go crazy unraveling the toilet paper and scattering your shoes on all the horizontal surfaces we own. I leave you in the capable hands of Netflix and Easy Mac. Please drop some crackers on the floor sometimes for the baby.

Don’t blame yourselves, it’s not your fault. After years of fighting entropy we all know this is for the best, even inevitable. I feel badly that people will judge you and ask if your mother ever taught you to wear matching socks, but you look them in the eye, you stay proud, and you tell them with confidence, “No. No she didn’t.” (You had that confidence when you told the pediatrician about the time I let you ride to school without your seatbelt on, and the time you told Grandma how I lost my cool and dumped the box of cereal, so I am hoping that in this on small area, maybe I taught you something that prepared you for life. I shall let that be a comforting thought as I sit here in my shed eating donut holes and wondering if it’s too late to sneak in and save a couple board games from being stuffed down the vents.)

Love, Mom