I’m just no good at life! – almost everyone, at some point.

Eldest daughter has been having a rough time of it the last couple of days. With her permission, I get to share a little of it, because it’s a great illustration of a couple of solid survival practices.

But He’s My Little Baby!

First Grandson Harvey begins school in ten days. That makes it time to register, and if you’ve never experienced trying to get a child registered for school you’ve really missed out on some of the best examples of bureaucracy-in-action that our society has to offer. Health forms, questionnaires, releases, schedules, equipment lists, physical education waivers, instrument rentals, field trip forms…it’s truly a dizzying amount of paperwork. That’s at the best of times. My daughter was perfectly willing to jump through all the hoops and joyfully release her son into the wilds of the public school system, except for one obstacle: They didn’t believe in him. More to the point, they told her that she couldn’t register him without his birth certificate. She had his social security card, she had his immunization records, she even thought she could get a record of birth from the hospital in Arcata, CA, where he was born. But no, the administrator told her. It had to be a birth certificate. Nothing else was acceptable.

The Ragged Edge

It was at this point that I’m very happy to say that Eldest Daughter called me. I’m happy that she thinks of me as a resource for her, and I talked with her about various options and strategies. We talked about the ways to try and get the record from Arcata (which looked to take months) but also about actions to take here. Who did we know in administration? Who could we bring with us to speak before the school board at the next public meeting? What were the options of home schooling him if we couldn’t get him enrolled this year? At the same time she was dealing with this overwhelming personal sense of failure. She felt that she had failed her son, that she’d ruined his life, that she was a bad mom. She said “I don’t know how you did it with the four of us, Dad, I can’t even do it with one!” That just about broke my heart. The last thing I ever want is for my daughter to hold up my experiences with the four of them as some kind of standard. Yes, I’m proud of the fact that they all ended up wonderful women – but that was despite the way they were raised, not because. However, I could give her one piece of advice: You wanna know how I did it? I just did the next thing in front of me. There was no big picture. The big picture was too bleak. The big picture was too much. But I could break it down into the next thing I had to do, and I did it. Over and over again, until it got less scary, until I started seeing those obstacles behind me, not in front of me. Fill out the next form. Cook the next meal. Wash the next dish. Whatever it took. So with Eldest Daughter we talked about making lists. There was a California list, with all the things that needed to happen to get the birth certificate. There was also the Madison list, with the phone calls and strategies for what to do if we couldn’t get the right paperwork. She calmed down, breathed, even when the dear boy came up and said “Mommy, why can’t I go to school?” I swear, children can be more cruel than anyone imagines.

Deus Ex Machina

This is the part where you know I am writing a blog about reality, not making stuff up. If I were creating this as a story, there would be a series of struggles overcome until a triumphant climax with lessons learned through perseverance and toil. Ad astra per aspera. Instead, a few minutes after I hung up the phone with a still-scared but more-prepared daughter, I got a text from her:

Oh good god. I just called the school back and asked “What’s it gonna take to let him start?” They put me on hold and she comes back and says “Oh, you know, what I said before was wrong – his immunization record will do fine.”

This was followed by another text:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

…which she later told me was the hysterical laughter that happened with the sudden relief of pressure. Because that’s the other reason to keep doing the next thing, and just keep doing it. Because there are forces out there moving in mysterious ways, and suddenly things can change completely. You can’t count on it – sometimes the miracle is just that you suddenly discover that you’ve done the last thing that you needed to do. But when it does happen, what else can you do but laugh? And then look around for what the new next thing is. When you don’t know what to do next, that means it doesn’t really matter. Just do the next thing, whatever it is.

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