Lost in transit

square cog in a round wheel

The kid went back to school this month. This is cause for a flurry of panicked shopping. The teachers give the students the list of "things to buy for next year" in June, but September seems so far off then, and so for three years in a row we wound up at the only store that's open on Sunday, battling past elbows to get the last 30 centimeter ruler or whatever. The school shopping was not as last minute as usual this year, and I thought things would therefore be better, but they were pretty much the same. I always want to find perfect things, a colorful bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils and a backpack that will finally enable a level of organization that means he can go a full week without losing the locker keys, lunch card, or homework assignment...but so far no luck.

I think partly this is because the schools here require what I consider ridiculous things. These ridiculous requirements prevent me from being able to choose items that I would consider sensible. For example, all notebooks must be covered in plastic. I understand covering books against wear and tear, but this is the equivalent of covering a magazine. The notebooks are thin, slippery, plastic-coated things; the plastic is also thin and slippery, and not ever quite the right size. You can either reconcile yourself to too-large covers that the notebooks will fall out of, or you can cut them down to size and then try to get them to stay put. The project is too much for a nine-year-old, so I undertake it full of purpose and plans, but I always I wind up with bits of plastic stuck in my hair, glue on my fingers, and a level of irritation comparable to that induced by long airline flights. All that shoving of one-size objects into other-size spaces. This takes hours, and at the end of it I have no energy left for hunting the perfect backpack. "Listen," I say, "the one from last year is fine."

Which it probably is. I think another part of the problem with going back to school is that he is not going "back" to a school that is familiar to me. We covered our books in paper bags from the grocery store. THAT made sense. Covering notebooks in plastic does not. We put our things in little cubbies; we had a coatroom at the back of the class. THAT made sense. Giving a child a locker key does not: every morning is a frantic hunt for said key and I don't get the point. We had the same schedule every day so we knew what to expect. THAT made sense. Making every day different means inevitably one book that should be there is gone, or the kid can carry the whole 5 kilo set of everything every day, which he does, but it doesn't make sense.

I look around at the other mothers, confidently waving goodbye to their kids at the school doors, the other kids with their perfectly covered notebooks and brand-new backpacks and cleverly attached keyrings, and I think that I am really not good at this at all. I know that to a certain extent the problems are his personality (scattered) and mine (the persistent delusion that if everything is planned, it will be fine) but I think it's also because I'm from a different culture. It's all alien to me. Other parents may also be struggling with the plastic covers, but their struggle is physical. Mine is physical and mental. "Why do we have to do it this way?" I mutter through the tape that's mysteriously stuck at the corner of my mouth, a question I wouldn't ask if I didn't know there was another way. As ever, I am stuck in wanting all the cleverness of my birth culture and all the comfort of the culture we've adopted, with none of the complications of the former and none of the maddening slowness of the latter. The fact that benefits have their downside hits me every time I run against an aspect of the system I don't really understand. Police stations. Health insurance offices. Doctors. Schools.

I don't know. Obviously we choose to live here, which makes things easier, because awareness of choices makes them more bearable. But sometimes I feel like... it's been 12 years. When am I going to feel like a part of the system that is running, rather than always standing outside of it and questioning how it is run? Is this the fate for all transplants?

Or is this me?

Posted by anne at September 25, 2006 08:56 AM