Stop Making Sense

"And you may find yourself
in a beautiful house
with a beautiful wife
and you may ask yourself --
well? how did I get here?"

Okay, we're none of us kids anymore, right? We're not OLD, but we can wipe our own butts and buy the toilet paper.

When, exactly, did we grow up?

My problem is this...I still feel like I'm sixteen years old.

Now I'm not sixteen...my rack is bigger, my ass is bigger, I have more money in my bank account (not a whole lot more, but still), I can talk trash and I can talk with authority. I can vote. I can drink. And all that's cool, but I still can't believe sometimes that I'm not sitting at the kids table at Thanksgiving.

Case in point...back in the Spring, I rallied with some other parents and teachers to keep our school district's full-day kindergarten program open. For lots of reasons that I'll email you if you REALLY want to know. And we won, at least for this year. BUT now the School Board wants more data...hard research data...that supports our position. I've been put on a study panel to do just that. Tonight was our first meeting.

I felt like an imposter.

So I'm sitting with 6 other grownups at the house of one of the school board members. She's a well-respected older professor at Local University. I'm also surrounded by older, retired teachers, an early elementary educator, and one mom too shy to speak. There's one older male, who chimes in with points I consider close to mine. And we're sitting in the professor's house, I mean "mansion", in one of the better neighborhoods, while she serves us imported snacks, and we're talking about kindergarten, our experiences with it, the research some of us have done, the anecdotal stuff that has to come out. I clarify points, I give information, I pull out piles of research and refer to them. I volunteer for major projects. I listen and people listen to me. We're on slightly different sides of the fence, but are open-minded enough to be supportive of all sides of the argument.

We marvel at the fact that every one of us is wearing Birkenstocks.

Yes. We're that crunchy.

The meeting winds down and I make some lame joke at the end, as I stand with my shoulder briefcase bursting, something like, "And to think, when I went to kindergarten, all we were concerned with was the boys who liked eating paste!" And everyone laughed.

I drove home, and as I sit here typing, knowing I have days and days of research and phone calls and survey writing and investigating and number-crunching to do, along with being a wife and mother of two busy kids and working full-time and hoping to get more than 4 hours sleep tonight, I'm wondering:

Damn! Am I a grownup??? Faaaaaack!!! How exactly did that happen???

I think I gotta stop!
I should take my tank shirt off and run down the street shaking my boobies at everyone!
I should get drunk!
I should stay up late and call in sick to work!
I should play angry German techno music really frickin' loud out my car windows!
I should break some beer bottles and pee in someone's bushes!
I should tell the School Board to kiss my pink ass!

I should ...I should....

What?

Oh hell, who am I kidding? I'm too tired for that stuff. Really. And pretty soon I want to check on the kids yet again just so I can kiss their sweaty snoring heads. And I want to spoon with Sergei. All night. And wake up before anyone else, stumble downstairs, listen to the quiet. I want to affect change. I want to be known for being a hard worker. I want to be an expert. I want to ensure that kids here have every opportunity for education.

But.

I will still flash my boobies. From time to time.