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| Well, everyone should get to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe at least once, right? Right? |
While I am still on vacation, it reaches out through email and taps me to make sure I know that Rowan has to go to high school registration August 10. The attached eighteen page registration packet is included. Soccer is starting! Plan on sending Devin to Dallas this year for a tournament. Tap, tap, tap. My shoulder is bruised.
Doctor's appointments. Hair cuts. School supplies.
We have to buy them clothes, you know.
How will we pay for them?
Close your eyes and focus on your love for those boys. The money just comes into your wallet. It works every year. I bet we can even send Devin to Dallas.
School fees. When did it start costing so much money for them to attend public school?
August is when our bank account is turned on its side and we must drain the last of it into our hope for our children.
Surely they can do without skate shoes. Buy them $15 sneakers.
No, no. They must have skate shoes. These are on sale. I remember being twelve, fifteen. I remember painfully. I will not light them up like misfit june bugs and send them out into a bustle of black beetles. It is not their fault. They were born into a family with a beat-up sedan, surrounded by broken things being mended. They were promised love.
Love has given them martial arts lessons. It has put them into competitive soccer. It has purchased them new shoes with money that might have been saved to replace a car, so there is never a new car.
I can see them growing away now, golden in the light of the world as it catches their hair. They will leave my home full of vegetables instead of Ramen, each wearing one hoodie with the right name brand. I can only hope they will have been taught that they can work hard enough to earn a black belt or win a tournament, to earn a scholarship, to feed a family. They will leave me, I think, with a car in need of repair, a house full of patched holes and shoes I should have replaced two years ago.
But August is when I remember that it doesn't matter. I write each check. I hug each child and know that I am building the future.
I panic every year at this same time.. and notoriously, September is the hardest month for us financially - even over December. But we always make it through and the kids go off to school with their new tennies, outfits and backpacks. And I sit here with a cramped hand from writing out all those checks.
ReplyDeleteYes, the cramped hand. I had almost forgotten. I hate that, but I don't mind it quite as much as the checks held for three months and then cashed suddenly in December once you've stopped keeping track.
DeleteAs we cancelled satellite TV yesterday, I said 'there's piano lessons'. You do what ou have to do, and make it work.
ReplyDeleteExactly. Sometimes by smoke and mirrors.
DeleteI am amazed at the cost and fees in public school nowdays. My parents had 6 of us, and mom stayed home to raise us and dad went out to the office. I know we didn't do outside sports or anything as it was "expensive" but now just going to school is. The list of "supplies" is just astonishing to me. But, you find a way.
ReplyDeleteMine are all fairly self-supporting at this point--even my daughter who is 18 but still at home covers most of her expenses. I still get tense when I see those back-to-school displays though. I'm hoping it will eventually pass.
ReplyDelete