There's an article in the Post this morning about the life of a harried room mother at the end of the school year, and the to-do list of this particular room mother is truly formidable: fill water balloons for Field Day; hand-stitch 18 home-made storybooks together for first-grade "authors' tea;" plan end-of-year party; buy gift for Teacher Appreciation Day; buy gift for Bus Driver Appreciation Day; costume child in medieval garb and send "medieval" food for 12 to school tomorrow....
Some of this is real. I told a childless friend about having to come up with the deed to our house in order to register my child for kindergarten, and she e-mailed back: "Do you live on the same planet as me??" Nope. I live on Planet Mom. Getting the kids signed up for summer camp, registered for after-care for next fall, filling out medical history forms--all that took me roughly a solid day's work. Maybe two. Stretched out over two or three weeks, as these tasks tend to be, will drive a model of mental health to the brink, and I am not a model of mental health.
But how much of this is froufrou? How about, instead of running around buying perfume for the teacher at the end of the year, we actually PAY the teacher a better salary, and she can buy her own damn perfume? Do those first-graders actually need hand-stitched copies of their "books"? I think not. If we had Field Day when I was a kid, it certainly didn't feature a rock-climbing wall. As for end-of-year parties, I think maybe we had cupcakes. If there was more, if some poor room mother (and it might have been my mother) went to more trouble than that, it was sure wasted on me. I vaguely recall a Hawaiian luau in fifth grade for which my mother made a paper maiche pig--it was actually one of her greatest achievements, she even made a fake apple to go in the pig's mouth--but I'm pretty sure I would have been fine without it.
How much of this vast busy-ness is actually necessary? How much is actually for the kids, and how much is for us--to assauge some kind of inappropriate guilt, to compensate for some societal neglect (i.e. abysmal teacher salaries), to just....fill up the time?