I dreamed last night that a friend told me she was leaving her husband, which got me thinking on that topic this morning as I was doing all the boring getting-ready things. Specifically, I was thinking about how much of marital success is based on luck.

First, there’s the luck of choosing someone. The Love Feelings are classically difficult to THINK around.

Second, there’s the luck of time: it’s hard to know how someone might change over the next ten or twenty or forty years, or how YOU might change, and whether those changes can be made compatible. If one of you wants to ditch everything and move to another country to be a missionary, this may or may not be something the other one can change with. If one of you wants to start seeing other people, that may or may not be something the other one can change with. If one of you changes religion, if one of you wants a sex change, if one of you wants to quit a job unexpectedly and embark on a new career of smoking pot and playing video games, if one of you gambles away the house and the kids’ college funds, if one of you gets addicted to something, if one of you can’t be happy unless there’s a move to a place the other one won’t live—all of these things can be times that “grow TOGETHER” might not be useful advice. We can talk about being REALLY COMMITTED to a marriage, but that applies within a certain segment of the spectrum of possible changes.

Third, there’s the luck of opportunity. If I never meet someone who makes me feel like leaving Paul, I’m much more likely to stay; that sounds kind of icky, but it’s true. If Paul has a crush on someone at work but she doesn’t return it, or if the crush fades quickly because it wasn’t based on anything serious, he’s much more likely to stay than if he meets someone amazing who would actually be a better fit with him than I am AND she feels the same way about him.

And fourth, there’s the luck of circumstances. If I meet someone flirty when things are going well with Paul and me, I might have an invigorating conversation and then go on with my regular life feeling a bit cuter than before, but that’s it. If I meet someone right when I’m in one of those 3 percent times, I might start daydreaming about a different life, and that’s the kind of seed it’s best not to water. If it’s someone I see every day at work, and if the not-so-great time with Paul is more of a stage than a moment, things could get dicey. Commitment looks easy when it IS easy, which is unfortunately right around the time we’re making that commitment. It’s like signing up for a diet right after eating way too much.

Three things I like:

1. The BBQ Ranch Chicken Salad at Wendy’s. I would NEVER have tried this salad on my own. The new Asian Cashew Chicken Salad appealed to me so I tried that one, but both the BBQ-sauce-and-salad combination and the BBQ-sauce-and-ranch combination sounded icky to me. But my mother’s friend made HER try it, and then my mother made ME try it, and now I daydream about the next time I might drive past a Wendy’s at a legitimate mealtime. The Asian Cashew one is good TOO, but I don’t know how many times in a row I’ll have to eat the BBQ Ranch one before I get tired of it and want a change.

2. Tales of the City.

(photo from Amazon.com)

This is too early to declare a liking of something, because I’m only 150 pages into the first book of a nine-book series. I’d accidentally chosen the NINTH book from the New Books section, not realizing it was part of a series; I commented to Paul that I really liked this book but felt like I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Derp. So I stopped reading that one and checked out the FIRST book instead, and now I am much happier. I hope I DO like it, because it would be so happy to have eight more books ahead of me!

3. Forest Friends Book of Stickers, bought after seeing the bookplates in a post by Definitely RA.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I bought these impulsively while drinking wine. FIVE DOLLARS for STICKERS!! But I love them. I bought them a month ago and I still have the book on my desk so I can leaf through the pages. I haven’t used a single sticker yet. The fox sticker is a candidate for tattooing on my arm. Maybe with the rabbit. And the raccoon. And the bee.

Six things I don’t like:

1. The occasional mysterious mildew smell in the [top-loading] washing machine. I have looked online about this, and I have tried various things, and still there will sometimes SUDDENLY be a load of wash that smells SUPER-MILDEWY despite not sitting there very long. I am resigned to it, yet also resentful.

2. Monday dinner. It takes me by surprise every week and I never know what to make. On Mondays you can find me irritably trying to cram together a box of past-date instant scalloped potatoes, a packet of Ramen soup, and a package of ground turkey. You’d think I’d learn, but no. I think what I need to do is come up with something I make EVERY Monday. Though perhaps this would just push the problem onto Tuesdays.

3. Signing the kids up for summer activities. I always do it wrong, and what’s especially exasperating is that I always THINK I’m doing it RIGHT. I get out my calendar, I carefully mark everything so there’s no overlap. It’s a tremendous pain in the butt. And then there we are on the first day of summer vacation, with me saying, “…Wait. How did I set it up so that we had to be two different places, both at 9:00? And then one of you needs to be picked up at 10:00, but that’s when I’ll be at a third location with a third child?”

4. MAGAZINE AVAILABILITY. I am quoted in the June issue of Pregnancy & Newborn, so naturally I would like to buy multiple copies and leave them casually open to the correct page. Can I do so? CAN I HELL. I first looked at Target, because that’s where I bought copies last time. Nothing! I looked in two more Targets. Nothing! I looked at Barnes & Noble. Nothing! On the way home I stopped at a large baby-supply superstore. Nothing! I went to my local independent book store. Nothing—with a side of attitude (“We don’t have room for magazines. Sorry”—in a tone that DID NOT SOUND AT ALL SORRY.) Tomorrow I am going to try WALMART, I guess. Also, I took a copy from the waiting room of the mammogram place, so I’m not DESPERATE, just FRUSTRATED. (You can read the article online if you want: click this link and you’ll see a copy of the cover of the magazine; click “Find the perfect name for your babe” on the cover and it’ll take you right to it.)

5. There is a BIRD outside my WINDOW that is driving me CRAZY. Actually, TWO birds. One of them has a strident single chirp: “CHIRP!!……………. CHIRP!!………………… CHIRP!!” He alternates this with a weird scrapey/growl sound in the back of his throat. The other one, Paul says it sounds like a dog begging for a treat: little short whining sounds, very high pitched. “Somebody give that puppy a BISCUIT,” says Paul.

6. I need to go through every single post on my old Blogger blogs and take out the photos and transfer them to this blog. The pictures from all those old posts LOOK like they’re here, but the transferring process means the photos are still hosted THERE—so if I delete the Blogger posts, the photos disappear here as well. And I have to delete the old posts because there’s this new search engine thing that means sites with duplicate content get skipped; those old posts, because they also appear on this new blog, are duplicate content. This is going to be a long and tedious task, and as with the mildew smell I am feeling resigned but resentful.

There. I finally got the mammogram done. I don’t mind them. There is some briefly-uncomfortable SQUEEZING, yes, but it’s okay. I HATE gyn exams, more for the embarrassment than for the discomfort, but I don’t mind vertical chestal nakedness much.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I finished reading The Headmaster’s Wife. First of all, I am so tired of The _____’s Wife/Daughter titles. Why so many? It reminds me of that test: “What’s wrong with this sentence: He shot his neighbor’s wife,” and the answer is that his neighbor’s wife is ALSO his neighbor, so it should just be “He shot his neighbor.” (Another thing wrong with that sentence is that you shouldn’t shoot your neighbor.) There can of course be REASONS for phrasing things that way, GOOD reasons, but the GIST is supposed to be that there can be things in our language that reflect unconscious or outdated attitudes, and that is the sort of thing that comes to mind when I see too many “The Man’s Woman” titles.

Secondly, the plot made me very, very uncomfortable, and then even more uncomfortable, until I decided I wasn’t going to read any more of it. Then I took it back out of the library bag and read a little more—and no, I’m NOT reading this. Then I started skimming—and things took a turn for the different, and I finished the whole thing and found it quite mesmerizing. I don’t even know if I RECOMMEND it or not, because I found the first part so unpleasant to read, and the second part is not exactly uplifting or happy. But I was very interested in it.

I’m so HAPPY to be blogging again. I don’t think it would have taken long under the new frantic schedule before I would have figured something out. I remember managing to blog when Henry was a newborn, for example, and that was when the twins weren’t even 2 years old yet. Blogging only got dropped this time because I wasn’t physically near to a computer; if it had gone on much longer, I would have figured out the whole blogging-remotely system.

I’m also so happy because I made TWO hard phone calls this morning. It’s surprising to me that I still have to go through the math: “The phone call has to be made no matter what. So I can feel upset and scared about it for either a SHORT time or a LONG time. Short is less painful than long.” After doing the math, why do I so often choose MORE suffering? It is an enduring mystery.

Anyway, I had to call an investment company, because I had two accounts with them: one a custodial account with Rob, and one my own. And they were going to charge me $20/year unless I switched to paperless statements—which I was happy to do, but I couldn’t set up an online account for the second account because I already had one for the first account, and it was by Social Security number so it kept saying I already had an account. When I talked to the company the last time, the representative INSISTED that in order to merge the two accounts, I would need the manager of my bank to sign and notarize a document certifying my name change, because one account had my middle initials and the other did not. She INSISTED. I expressed doubts that a bank manager would be willing to sign such a form, considering I hadn’t changed my name. She continued to insist. She said that claiming “Swistle Thistle” and “Swistle R. W. Thistle” were the same person was exactly the same dicey situation as claiming “Swistle Margaret Thistle” and “Swistle Eloise Thistle” were the same person. She hinted that I might be trying to take over the account of someone else with the same first and last name who lived at my house. She sent me the form, which was five pages long and required, among other things, a copy of my birth certificate and a copy of the court forms for the name change. It was so maddening and frustrating, I decided to pay the $20/year: it’s only until Rob goes to college, and I would rather pay the fee than add ANOTHER horrible phone call to my Lie Awake catalog.

But then we got another letter saying we would now have to pay TWO charges of $20/year, because there is an accessory account to the main account, used for I don’t know what—I think for holding the money that doesn’t come to enough to buy another bond, something like that. It has $60 in it. It can’t be closed until the main account is closed. I would have to pay an additional $20/year on THAT account. So I called. THIS time I got someone who said, “Oh, no problem, we have a procedure for that. Let me just get some information from you on our recorded line. Do you want both accounts as Swistle Thistle, or both as Swistle R.W. Thistle? Okay, that will take 2-3 business days and I’ll call you when it’s complete.”

DEAR LORD.

The other call was for a medical billing thing, and all I could do was leave a message—but for this one, it’s enough to just get things going. Plus, I love leaving a message: I can say what I want to say without feeling like I need to hurry up. And then they have the information BEFORE they call me back, so theoretically they can be ready to discuss it and/or look into the issue FIRST. Theoretically.

Oh! They just called back, right after I hit publish! It was settled not entirely satisfactorily (a $35 copay when it should have been $20, with a workaround that makes no sense), but I WILL TAKE IT. And I was so high on victory, I also called to make the cat’s annual vet appointment! *dances like Elaine*

Well! We have had some excitement around here! Paul was sick and I would personally have diagnosed him with Acute Bigbabyitis, but then he got sicker and ended up spending three days in the hospital. He’s fine and back home now, tutting over how quickly the garden got out of hand, asking me do we have a multi-alarm pillbox for his antibiotics. (“Oh, yes, Honey, I keep a stack of those in the pantry!”)

The few days he was in the hospital were so busy; I don’t think I’ve felt like that since the twins were newborns. I’d intended to go into more detail here about how busy I was, but then I got a couple paragraphs into it and couldn’t BELIEVE how boring it was. In short, the hospital is half an hour away, and I was also preparing for the twins’ birthdays, and also there are five children, and anyway it was a busy time—the kind where you can’t figure out how you’re going to eat because even stopping at a drive-through takes too much time. I have a FitBit, and I was coming close to the daily goal of 10,000 steps without doing any exercise at all, just moving from thing to thing.

It was interesting to me to see what things got dropped and what things didn’t, and how such things were decided (importance to me + importance to someone else + timing + possibility/impossibility). Candy Crush: dropped. Blogging: dropped. (The URGE to blog: NOT DROPPED.) Cooking: dropped. Shopping didn’t get dropped entirely, but turned into “figuring out when I’d be driving past the store anyway and buying only the one item we had to have.” Reminding the kids about their homework, or in fact worrying about their homework/grades at all: dropped. The kids’ karate class: dropped. Daily walk: dropped. Emailing the teachers about the situation: not dropped. Child’s annual physical: not dropped. Classroom birthday treats: not dropped. Stopping to buy more kid soap: dropped. Noticing library book due dates: dropped.

It was interesting to see where there were caches of available time. Normally in the morning I don’t try to get anything done before the kids go to school, except for the regular morning routines. It turns out there’s enough time in there to also bake a batch of cupcakes and two batches of cookies, if I am fueled by the weird Emergency Mode adrenaline. I could have stopped at the store and purchased those things, and in fact that was my original plan. (Baking: dropped. Caring about the cost of doing things an easier/faster way: dropped.) But there I was, trapped ANYWAY in the house until the bus came, and itching to get to some of the things on the list.

I found it fun to visit Paul in the hospital. It was odd to spend time with him like that: sitting in a hospital room and chatting and playing card games. I also LOVED the cafeteria. Do you remember me rhapsodizing about the food in the maternity ward? THAT WAS AVAILABLE TO ME AGAIN. I had a chicken caesar salad wrap! A fruit cup! Chocolate chip cookies!

I remembered three of the things I haven’t updated about:

1. A long time ago when I wrote about getting the HPV vaccine for Rob, I was very alarmed by a couple of the comments that said their insurance didn’t cover it for boys, and that the shots cost hundreds of dollars. First I confirmed the price: I asked the receptionist to look up the price without insurance, and it was $250 for each of the three doses—so, $750. I’d already had the first shot given to Rob, so at that point I was potentially out $250, and it’s not like I was going to skip the next two doses, so I had to do a little breathing and resign myself to the possibility of $750.

My hope, however, was that our insurance WOULD cover it—or that if they didn’t, they would do so by the time the next three boys were ready for the vaccine. It’s ridiculous for them NOT to cover it, since it’s the boys who are doing most of the transmitting of the virus from woman to woman, but as Paul says, “You’re making the mistake of assuming these things are based on logic.” Happily, our insurance covered it completely, and even sent us letters urging us to remember the second and third shots in the series.

Since then, the recommended age for the vaccine has decreased AND we’ve changed insurance companies, so William has now completed his series of three shots; his shots too were covered completely by the new insurance company. (In fact, he’d had one shot under the old insurance and two under the new, which worried me—but we never heard anything about it, so apparently it was fine.)

2. The opinions on what to do about a graduation gift for the girl I took care of when she was an infant were ALL OVER THE SPECTRUM. I mean, they ranged from “You absolutely have to get her something, and it should be BIG” to “It would be a weird to get her something, and might make the mom feel really uncomfortable.” As Carla put it, “So the responses on this are SO WIDE RANGING you can feel free to do whatever!” Putting the possible outcomes on the balance scale, I was more afraid to make the mom feel awkward about sending the announcement than I was afraid of making the child feel like I didn’t care because I didn’t send money, so I sent a card (no check) in which I wrote how fondly I remember her babyhood and how amazing it was to me that so much time had passed; I closed with my continuing fond wishes for her happy future. I loved the idea of including a picture of me holding her, and if I’d had one I definitely would have done that. (Oh I wish I had one!!)

My second favorite idea was the one about giving a check for $20.14: it seemed to me that the FUNness of the amount made it seem less like Giving Money and more like “This is what I do for all graduates, no big deal and no reason to feel awkward.” After I mailed the card, I even had second thoughts and considered mailing the check with a little note about forgetting to put it in the card, but then I thought no, I would stick with the plan.

I also agreed with everyone who said $25 seemed like a lot more than $20 somehow; I’m going to keep that in mind for the future. I’m also filing away the idea of getting gift cards to a coffee shop or restaurant near the graduate’s future college, or a gift certificate for the college gift shop.

3. Rob’s school trip went FINE. And by “fine” I mean it went just as many of you comfortingly predicted: full of problems, but everyone handled it and everything was okay. He came home and said it went GREAT, and then he was enthusiastically telling me the whole story and I was pale and wide-eyed as he related one alarming thing after another, with him saying “Ug, it was FINE, Mom!” after each one. (Me: “THAT DOES NOT REALLY SOUND FINE!” Rob: “IT WAS FINE.”)

This morning I was thinking, “Oh little neighbor girl! I wonder if you could sing ‘Let It Go’ INDOORS for awhile!”—and then I realized that might be the very reason she ended up outside. Okay, neighbor parent, I see your point of view and can take one for the team.

Also outside my window is a bird that is making me nervous. It stands on a branch with a small worm or bug in its beak, chirping a weird bark-like single chirp, over and over, turning back and forth as it seems to listen for a reply. I wonder if her nest was pillaged by a cat, and she is still trying to find/feed her babies. I got quite worked up and sad about this, and then I remembered a funny section of one of Augusten Burroughs’s books that addresses this sort of thing. He has us imagine that we drive past the scene of a car crash, and we’re haunted by the sight of a doll in the wreckage, and the sad fate of the little girl we assume must have been in no condition to bring the doll with her. Then he has us imagine an alternate scene in which no one has been hurt in the crash and the doll was an antique-store find and so on. He points out that since we’d never have known the real story, there we’d be in a therapist’s office, probably being instructed by the therapist to write a letter to the poor little girl. I imagined myself in the therapist’s office, writing a letter to the poor mother bird who lost her young, when it’s quite possible the bird is just loud and dim and maybe HAS no babies and is kind of a sloppy eater.

********

I am getting frustrated because the mammography center keeps sending me scolding letters about how it’s time for a mammogram, but then when I call them to make an appointment, I get an answering machine and then they don’t return my call. Then I get another letter in the mail. Pretty soon I am going to write back, since that is evidently their preferred method of communication. “Dear Mammography Center, I am writing to make an appointment. Do you have anything on Thursday morning? Write back soon! Love, Swistle”

********

Yesterday seemed like the perfect day to go to an antique store and look through boxes of postcards. But I’d misjudged it: instead of having a pleasant quiet-hobby feeling, I accidentally hit that mood of “This used to be someone’s treasured collection, and now here it is being pawed over (and rejected) by strangers.” Everything I looked at seemed pointless to acquire: Why, when soon we will all be dead and our possessions will only burden our children? Or perhaps I should buy EVERYTHING IN THE WHOLE STORE AND GIVE THESE POOR UNLOVED THINGS A HOME.

The difficult volunteer at the school continues to be difficult, but I feel so much calmer about her now that I know other people find her difficult. In fact, it gives me room to feel some sympathy for her. She’s trying so hard to get things changed, and she is going about it in the wrong way entirely, and I don’t think she has any idea why it isn’t working. I can see her thinking this is a backwards town, or that everyone here is resistant to change, or that people are too stupid to understand her points—when actually it’s that her manner and presentation are ineffective/off-putting in multiple ways.

It reminds me of language, and how hard it can be to explain the difference between two similar words. When a magazine says that a celebrity “ballooned” during pregnancy or “splurged” on a purse, these are highly communicative words—much different than saying someone “gained weight” during pregnancy or “bought” a purse. There’s a huge difference between the word “drugs” and the word “painkillers,” especially if you’re talking about medications used during childbirth. Second-person singular (“You need to keep in mind that…”) is very different than first-person singular (“I need to keep in mind that…”), and both are very different than first-person plural (“We need to keep in mind that…”). Small changes can make large differences: starting a written comment with “Um” can add a strong layer of scorn depending on what is written next, and it would be hard to explain why. People who don’t see the differences find themselves mystified by how TOUCHY people are. People who don’t see the similar subtle differences in human behavior can find themselves similarly mystified.

Awhile back, one of my sister-in-law’s siblings mentioned the idea of a service that would follow you around and then tell you what to stop doing. Like, you’d pay them a fee, and they’d give you a list like “Listen, you keep darting your eyes and it makes you look shifty,” and “Your posture looks threatening rather than confident,” and “You press your lips together about every ten seconds.” Things like that. This is the kind of service the difficult volunteer could benefit from. “Listen, you talk to the other volunteers as if you’re in charge of them,” the service would write in their multi-page report. “Your ‘listening’ facial expression communicates that you think the other person is amusingly stupid.” “Telling everyone that a certain additive leads to childhood brain tumors is unconvincing if none of the children in the entire school system has ever had one; maybe use the study about poorer test scores instead.” “When you compare this public school unfavorably to your kids’ previous private school, and ask for expensive changes to be made to make the two schools more similar, you need to show you realize that the $25,000/year tuition difference between the two schools (rather than everyone’s failure to realize the other way is better) may be the reason the answer is no.” And so on.

It’s given me a lot to think about, because everybody’s got potentially off-putting things they don’t realize they’re doing. Some of us are laughing nervously after every single thing we say. Some of us don’t make eye contact while we’re talking; some of us make overly intense eye contact. Some of us blurt things out before considering if they represent our actual thoughts/feelings on a topic. Some of us ask overly blunt questions. Some of us interrupt too much, or talk too much, or overuse certain words/phrases. Some of us are completely obvious with our subtle prying or subtle suggestions. Some of us choke up CONSTANTLY over NOTHING (ahem). But a LOT of stuff is absolutely fine once we get used to each other. It’s an argument for giving relationships time to develop: the woman I know who asks overly blunt questions did startle me the first couple of times, but now I’m used to it and in fact I consider it part of her charm. Another friend was stand-offish before we got to know each other, and ended up being the best roommate I ever had. Sometimes things that seem off-putting at first end up making the person even more dear to us, or go away once we’re less new to each other. (And on the “can’t please everyone” principle, you can’t even go around changing things like this: one person’s off-putting is another person’s appealing. I myself am put off by attractive, fashionable, confident people with perfect eye contact.)

In other situations, it doesn’t work that way. The person is trying to get things changed, trying to fit in, trying to make friends—and it’s not WORKING. It can be quite easy to notice what someone else is doing wrong (“You’re talking to other people like they’re stupid; you’re working from the assumption that no reasonable person could disagree with you” or “You’re moving too fast; you’re coming on way too strong/desperate”) but hard to figure it out in oneself. The difference between these two situations (something off-putting/startling that is not a long term problem, versus endless unproductive flinging against a wall) has been very interesting to think about, and is something I’m going to keep in mind the next time I feel like I keep flinging myself against a wall.

One of the main sticking points of MY ENTIRE LIFE is this sort of situation:

1. When the rules are X
2. But the reality is Y

Nothing epitomizes this conflict for me like The Birthday Treat Problem. The school rule is that the children may have no more than one treat per month. All the birthday children in a particular month are to celebrate on the same day, and only one of those children may bring a treat; the other children must bring Healthy Snacks or Inedible Treats. But this system is not put into effect in the classrooms: once-a-month parties are not coordinated, and parents continue to send in cupcakes on their children’s birthdays.

It appears to me that the situation is this: The administration put the new rule into place; the teachers are not on board with this rule and/or know that parents are going to send in cupcakes anyway, and so don’t implement/enforce it in their classrooms. I am fine with this, except for the part where it makes it look/feel like I’M the one breaking the administration’s rule. I have written about this before.

Here are the three situations I am perfectly happy with:

1. I am perfectly happy to abide by the rules and coordinate my child’s birthday treat with the other parents of children born that month.

2. I am perfectly happy to send in cupcakes on my child’s birthday, and for my child to eat 20 cupcakes per school year (roughly 1/2 cupcake per week of school).

3. I am perfectly happy to have no classroom bring-in items at all.

Here is the situation I am not happy with:

4. If I send in cupcakes I am a rule-breaker, and if I don’t my baby is the only one who didn’t have a birthday treat. That is a LOSE-LOSE situation we have here, Rule Book.

Oh, I could ask each individual teacher, yes. As soon as I think of a way to ask that doesn’t sound as if I am saying, “Hello, Teacher! Should I break the rules, or should you start following them? Your pick!” Well, actually, I DID manage that in some form last year (I went for the simplified, blame-shifting, rule-not-mentioning approach of “Elizabeth was wondering if it was okay for her to bring in cupcakes on her birthday next week”), so I guess I don’t have any ACTUAL struggle here, beyond WISHING RULES AND REALITY WOULD MEET AT SOME POINT.

I have received a high school graduation announcement for one of the little babies I took care of back when I worked in a daycare. First of all, the passage of time is astonishing. ASTONISHING. Second of all, I need to think about what to send as a response and I have no idea: I think this is the first high school graduation announcement I’ve ever had to deal with.

My first thought was that I really dislike the whole CONCEPT of graduation announcements, and I remember with some distaste my own high school peers talking about how much money they hoped to rake in. On the other hand, that’s not why I think I’ve been sent this card: the baby’s mother has sent me a Christmas card EVERY SINGLE YEAR since I took care of her daughter, always with a school picture. So I interpret this announcement not as a hope for money AT ALL: it was sent by the mother and not the child, and I take it as a “Look at our baby girl all grown up!” + including me on the mailing list because I am someone who would be interested in the child’s milestones, which indeed I am.

Speaking of milestones, another issue is that for most kids I consider high school graduation an interesting milestone but not a huge accomplishment: definitely it is a huge accomplishment for some, but not GENERALLY, and I think not in this case. And I dislike the over-praising for Every Single Accomplishment: gifts and ceremonies for preschool graduations! for fifth-grade graduations! FLOWERS for general and halfhearted participation in the elementary school concert! Standing ovations for EVERYTHING! etc. Not that I put high school graduation into this category, but I still prefer not to Overdo It. [To clarify this a little more, I consider high school graduation a huge and important and exciting milestone and transition, like learning to walk/talk or going through puberty. But for most people, I don’t consider it a huge accomplishment: i.e., it didn’t take exceptional or unusual effort to achieve it, and FAILING to achieve it would have been the unusual/exceptional thing. In a different community, where the outcome was less assured, I would feel differently.]

So combining “I dislike the whole concept of high school graduation announcements” + “I think of it as a milestone not a huge accomplishment,” I thought perhaps I would send a congratulatory card with some sentimental reminisces and sincere positive hopes for her future. But I said so to Paul, and his jaw literally dropped open. He is fully on the side of sending a check, and thinks it is a little shocking that I would show such indifference by not sending money or a present. I said, “Like…$20?”—thinking of that as pretty generous. He said, “FOR A BABY YOU USED TO TAKE CARE OF??”—as if I were Scrooge Himself and the child were a shivering orphan on the street corner begging for a dime. He countered with $50, and I said that’s what we spend on a WEDDING gift.

On one hand, I don’t want to be a cheapskate, and I want to fit in with the normal societal standards: if sending $50 is the norm, sending $20 can seem to send a message of lower regard. And I want to make sure I adjust for the changing value of money, so that I am not the little old lady sending a $5 check for someone’s wedding because that’s what I got at my wedding 50 years ago. On the other hand, I don’t want to give in to pressure of the sort that has people thinking they need to give a wedding gift that costs double what the couple spent per plate. And people have different amounts of discretionary income to work with, and I think that makes any kind of “set amount” ridiculous.

Besides, the normal societal standard will vary from one community to another. In some communities, $20 is what is given to the doorman for hailing a cab, and high school graduates are given pen/pencil sets from Tiffany. In other communities, only grandparents will send money for graduation; everyone else will send a card or maybe they’ll call. In other communities, no one will send out announcements but most people will have potluck pool parties. And so on. What we think is normal for everyone will be based heavily on (1) the community in which we grew up and (2) on the community in which we currently live.

And of course the relationship between the sender and the graduate may factor in. Some people will have a set amount ($20, say, or $50) that they send to every single graduate, but others will send more to the dearly loved babysitter and less to the child of an acquaintance. Some will send a check to a graduate they don’t know very well, but a gift to someone they’re close to. Some will send checks/gifts to non-family members, but nothing to family members because in their family they don’t do gifts for graduations.

So here is my own set of variables. I currently live in a community where I don’t know what the typical situation is—but I might be able to find out by asking around a bit. I SUSPECT that some people send checks and some people don’t, and I would expect the checks to be in the $20/$30 range but I guess I’m basing that on myself, which is what shocks Paul and he lives in this community too (though he doesn’t know EITHER). Paul grew up in a community where, when he graduated QUITE a few years ago, a $20 check was received with almost no impact; he says that if I want the child to think, “Whoa, WHO is this?” (as opposed to adding the check to the stack without noticing who sent it), the check would need to be at least $50. This makes me feel like flailing my fists until I hit someone, ANYONE (probably Paul, for being such an ingrate back then), but it also influences me. On the other hand, none of this information pertains to the community the child herself lives in, which I don’t know anything about.

My relationship with the graduate is that I took care of her for six to eight hours a day every weekday for probably nine months or so, back when she was a baby. So of course she won’t remember me at all, but her mom used to stay and chat a bit each day, and she’d also come at lunchtime to nurse the baby so we’d chat then too. I’ve had no contact with the child since then, except that her mother sends me a Christmas card each year with a school picture. I remember the baby very well, but find it hard to connect that baby with this current 18-year-old.

I think a poll would be worse than useless here, because it gives the WHAT but not the WHY, and because it only allows for one answer when most people probably have several answers depending on circumstances. And although I’m looking for input on this particular situation, this is not the only graduation announcement I’ll need to reply to in my life. So what I’d be interested in would be hearing, in general, how you respond to high school graduation announcements: Do you send a gift? a card? a check? nothing? How much do you spend? How does it vary depending on the particular child? And so on.