I was talking recently with one of the women I volunteer with (we were on our own so had more time to chat than usual), and she has confirmed a lot of my worries about volunteering. She started three years ago when her youngest started school, so she’s three years ahead of me, and already she is in over her head. She says as soon as they find out you’re reliable and willing, they call for EVERYTHING. She signed up just to help with an event, but they put her in charge of it; she hasn’t been trained, and she’s going nuts with how much work it is, and there aren’t enough other volunteers to help (the school hasn’t sent out a request, so no one even knows volunteers are needed), and the office and teaching staffs are complaining about how she’s doing it, and complaining more because she can’t stay after school or come back in the evenings (she needs to be home when her kids come home from school), and phrasing requests “Couldn’t you just…?” (stay a few more hours, do the massive post-event clean-up—other things that are not at all “just”). I said, “Don’t they realize you’re VOLUNTEERING??” and she said “I think they honestly do forget I’m not paid.”

Anyway. Discouraging. But it hasn’t happened to me yet. I think I need to work ahead of time on my “Oh, sorry, I can’t that day” response. Or if I do volunteer for the local nursing home to see if that’s where I’d like to get a job later on, I could say, “Oh, sorry—this year I’m volunteering at the nursing home.”

Also, I think it would be better to have an entirely different system. What if instead of volunteers, there were several positions every year for odd-jobs type parents? Kind of like substitute teaching. There would be a list, and when miscellaneous temporary workers were needed, the school could go down the list and see who was available; the same as volunteering (irregular hours, different activities) but paid minimum wage. My guess is that those jobs would be hotly sought-after: I know I’d enjoy having a way to earn a little bit here and there, and I know a lot of other at-home parents who are looking for the same thing. And then we wouldn’t have this crazy system where there are jobs that simultaneously MUST be done and ALSO aren’t important enough to pay people to do, and where volunteers end up feeling trapped and overburdened, and where nothing is particularly regulated because it’s just volunteers (my co-volunteer said one teacher asked her to make her a sandwich [I should clarify that this was considered BIZARRE and chalked up to this one crazy teacher, and is not typical of the other teachers at all]; another asked her to clean up a spill in the cafeteria [in this case, my co-volunteer thought this was because of the difficulty of telling volunteers apart from employees]). And it really is SUCH a strange thing to ask of people: “Hey, do you want to come do some work for us, but for free? Like, you do the work and we benefit from it, but we don’t pay you anything?”

Last fall I planted thirty-five new tulip bulbs to join the fifteen to twenty I already had, because seeing the tulips come up in spring is one of my favorite things and I thought it would be nice to have more of that.

The results this spring: eight tulips. Total. Of those, seven are extra bulbs I’d planted in a new location because there wasn’t room for them in the main tulip patch; only one tulip came up where I used to have twenty and was hoping to have more like forty. Our diagnosis so far is VOLES, from seeing certain kinds of evidence (tunnels in the melting snow, tunnels in the top of the dirt) and from listening to the words people said with their mouths after I finished weeping and wailing to them about it.

I’m trying not to treat this like some sort of catastrophe instead of a minor gardening setback of a purely decorative nature—but it gave me this Big Picture feeling of “But I only have a certain number of springs to see the tulips come up! And now this one is lost! LOSSSSSSSST!!”

Also, if the tulips had just been victim to some one-year-only weather issue, I’d just think, “Well, I’ll plant more this fall, and everything will be fine.” But if I plant more this fall, the voles will probably eat them again, and I will feel EXPONENTIAL despair NEXT spring.

We have been the recipients of many vole-repelling suggestions, but all it does is point out to me how unwilling I am to do any of them. I am JUST BARELY willing to put tulip bulbs in the ground; THAT is my level of interest in gardening. I am not willing to:

1. Dig up, store, and move the bulbs each year to a different location
2. Put out vole poison
3. Dig up the whole flower bed and put special cloth around the bulb section
4. Plant narcissus instead, because voles hate narcissus

Well, although, about #4: we have a bunch of very nice narcissus (I don’t know what kind, but they’re small and white with a tiny ring of red around the rim of the trumpet, and they have a nice strong scent) that the previous owner of our house planted along the back of the house, where we never see them and where they rarely bloom (no sun, or too crowded, or proximity to raspberry brambles—I don’t know anything about them). In a fit of vole-related rage yesterday, I dug up a large clump of narcissus that had spread out too far into the yard and transplanted them to where the tulips should have grown. This is a project nearly entirely doomed to fail (there could hardly be a worse moment to try to transplant bulbs), but maybe it will show those stupid voles a thing or two.

A woman in a group I’ve been getting together with for well over a year now is leaving her husband. As you can imagine, this is a riveting piece of news for the whole group. I was pleased that all but one person had what I would consider a good response to the announcement (variations on the themes of sympathy, concern, hugs, supportive remarks, offers of help, non-pushy and sympathetic questions), and that the only person with the bad response is the one group member I don’t like. You know how people will make lists of things NOT to say to someone going through something hard? I hate those lists: I always open them eagerly, thinking finally I will know The Right Thing to Say—and then they contain ALL THE POSSIBLE RESPONSES, INCLUDING NO RESPONSE, all marked as Wrong, each with the intended meaning wrung out of it so that it now means something horrible and hurtful. But such lists ALSO contain a bunch of things that really no one should even be thinking about saying (“Oh! Well, in that case, do you mind if I date him?”), and she basically went down that list, including things such as, I am not even kidding: “No one ever leaves unless they’re having an affair. WHO IS IT??”

This woman gives the rest of us (well, or ME, at least) so many good character-improving negative examples. I suspect I was not the only one who was wondering if there were Someone Else, but the MINUTE The Woman I Don’t Like came up with that concept, I was completely unwilling to make such guesses/assumptions. “What a completely gross and ugly and pursed-lips thing for someone to assume!,” I thought, hurriedly scraping that guess out of my own mind, perhaps to lasting good effect. It’s a reason to keep this woman around.

Yesterday I was sad because we had no good sweets in the house. I was prowling hopelessly in the pantry and I found, if you can believe it, chocolate RICE CAKES. It was like being mocked.

Today I remembered something I wanted to bring with me the next time I went to my brother’s house, so I went to get it while I was thinking about it. It was in the box marked Stocking Stuffers, which I keep in the closet all year: it’s common for me to see some little trinkety things on clearance in, say, February, and need a place to keep them so I won’t forget about them by December.

Anyway, I got out the box and opened it—and you should picture a light like the glow of gold and gemstones shining on my face, like when someone opens a pirate’s treasure chest. Inside was a whole bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups, a whole bag of mini Twix bars, a whole bag of peanut M&Ms, and a whole bag of Hershey Kisses. When I saw them I remembered: I’d accidentally wayyyyyy overbought for stockings at Christmastime, so I’d just shoved all the extra candy back into the box until I could deal with it later. Then we had so much candy over Christmas, I didn’t even THINK about needing or looking for candy. Then it was Valentine’s Day, and See’s did a free shipping deal. Then it was Easter, my favorite of all the candy holidays. And so here we are: Christmas in May.

Rob has been having trouble in science this year. This is what he says the problems are:

1. His teacher is demanding and wants them to give answers including details she hasn’t even asked for

2. His teacher is rigid and only wants things done a particular way, when there’s no objective reason for them to be done that way

3. His teacher is boring, and only wants the blandest possible science projects/experiments done, with no room for creativity or anything interesting

I’ve met his teacher and I’ve seen the several-page letter she sends home at the beginning of the year about her expectations, and this is what I’d say the problems are:

1. His teacher wants more than the absolute minimum

2. His teacher wants things done precisely and accurately and the way they must be done to qualify as science

3. His teacher wants SCIENCE projects, not computer games pretending to be science projects; also, Rob chose a project that didn’t interest him out of spite, and this has turned out to be a poor strategy

In other words, Rob and the teacher are butting heads and my sympathies are with the teacher. On the other hand, I also sympathize with Rob: these are some difficult lessons he needs to learn, and I’m a little anxious because I have that same “sink or swim” feeling I had when his grades crashed right after he entered the much-different middle school environment. He either needs to understand and incorporate these lessons, or he could severely impact the course of his life:

1. Sometimes a teacher (or boss) wants you to do work you don’t want to do, and you have to do it anyway or else suffer the consequences

2. Sometimes a teacher (or boss) wants you to do work you think is stupid or pointless, and you have to do it anyway or else suffer the consequences

3. Sometimes a teacher (or boss) wants things done a certain way, and you think they should be done a different way and you say so, and the teacher (or boss) disagrees with you and then you do have to do it their way

4. Sometimes a teacher’s teaching style is not your student style (or a boss’s bossing style is not your employee style), and sometimes you can do something about this (switch to a different class, switch to a different job) and sometimes you can’t; and if you can’t, you have to find a way to do the best you can under the circumstances

5. Trying to prove your point by making yourself fail only hurts YOU, not the teacher (or boss)

So. That is where things are. He’s frequently mad about this class, and I’m getting good practice finding the line between sympathy and disagreement: “I know that feeling, and I hate it too. I wonder if it would work to…”.

The big deal right now is a science project that makes up a significant portion of their grade. It must be done to certain science standards, and there are many rules for exactly how things must be done and exactly which steps must be included. Rob can say all he wants that it OUGHTN’T to be done that way, or that it’s stupid that generation after generation of students have to do something just because someone long ago decided it should be done that way—but regardless, it must be done that way or he will get a failing grade on the project.

I had a flash of extremely timely inspiration; we’ll wait to call it genius until we see if it works or not. After Rob and I had been going back and forth for awhile (a very good conversation, really, but with the kind of tension that felt to me like trying to keep jumpy livestock from stampeding) and I was advocating the “See if you can find out what your teacher wants and then do THAT” approach whereas he was advocating the “Shoot myself in the foot and blame the teacher for it” approach, I said, “Hey! This is kind of the REAL science project!”

So now we have two hypotheses and we’re doing some testing. (My hope is that we will test only mine.) He handed in an assignment recently on which he gave fuller answers than were asked for, which is a test of my hypothesis. Man, I hope the teacher responds the way I hope she will. My theory is that this will cut down significantly on the number of red-pen marks asking for clarification and the use of certain recently-taught concepts/terms. Rob thinks she will just ask for STILL MORE work: that she will always want more than what he produces and be unhappy with his answers, even if he were to answer each short-answer question will a full college-level essay. (I was tempted to email the teacher and tell her she was being experimented on so I could win, but that wouldn’t be real science.)

Volunteering at the school is continuing to go well. The key, I think, is that the particular activity I volunteer for (which I’m not mentioning because it’s precise and unusual enough to be searchable/recognizable, without being particularly interesting or adding anything to this report—something like “cleaning the school’s ping-pong tables” or “setting tables for the once-weekly Public Speaker lunches”) is an activity that doesn’t have many hours of volunteering available: volunteers are only needed about two days a week for about two hours each time. So even if there were problems with other volunteers not showing up for their shifts and the office calling me to come in (which hasn’t happened so far), the amount of time couldn’t really get out of hand.

And, the way this particular activity is set up, volunteers tend to sign up for only one shift every week or two, which is what I’m doing. It’s perfect: I feel like I’m getting all the benefits of volunteering without the burdens.

Since I’ve mentioned the benefits and burdens, I’ll list some of the ones I’m finding. First, the benefits:

1. Getting to know the office staff, so that they know who I am when I call or send in a note. This has made a huge difference in how easy it is for me to call with something awkward like, “I didn’t send in a note, but I need to pick up Edward in 20 minutes.” It helps me so much to have the person on the other end of the line know who I am as soon as I say my name; I’m not sure why, but it does. Part of it is that because they know me, they see me as one person making one request, rather than yet another person making yet another request.

2. Getting points/credit from the office staff. They now think of me as a Friendly and Reliable parent who Helps and Participates without Causing Trouble.

3. Getting more familiar with the school building and routines, which also makes me feel more comfortable there.

4. Social time with other volunteers. It can be a very nice way to get a little social contact if you’re feeling parched for it. And if you would like more friends but don’t know how to meet them, this is a good method to try once the kids are in school.

5. Feeling included/useful.

6. If I ever want a paying job in the school system, I suspect this would help.

7. Self-satisfaction. It’s a little like exercise: right before I do it, I’m thinking, “Aw, man, I don’t want to do this. *whine*” Right after I do it, I’m thinking, “That was GREAT. I feel GREAT. I should do this MORE!” When I leave my shift, I feel perky and happy and energized, even if I arrived feeling sullen and crabby.

The downsides of volunteering, based less on my own experience and more on the experiences of some of my fellow volunteers who do a TON more volunteering than I do:

1. Once you’ve shown a willingness to do work for free, there are a number of people who would like to get in on that action. It didn’t happen to me all year so I thought I was under the radar—but just last week the school called and asked me to volunteer for something else. Some of us find it difficult to say no to a direct request, even if we want to. Some of us start feeling like pushovers/suckers to be doing free work for people who are themselves getting paid to work.

2. I notice there’s a correlation between number of hours volunteered and level of disdain for other parents who choose (absolutely legitimately) not to participate in that particular hobby. There is a change in perspective, I think, to something like “I’m choosing to work for free, so other people should feel obligated to do the same or else they’re unfairly and inconsiderately ditching Their Share of the Work on me.” I think that’s one of those parasitic feelings that causes significant damage to its host. So far I’m doing just the right number of hours: I feel happy with my own volunteering hobby, without feeling as if my volunteer hours obligate other people to volunteer too.

Overall, I recommend the experience. It was scary to me at first, but quickly got less so—and the nice thing about doing work for free is that I felt less anxiety about making mistakes when I was learning than if I were being paid. Also, if you’re volunteering, you’re not going to get in trouble for chatting while you work, or for going more slowly than your maximum possible speed. And if things get bad, you can just say, “Sorry, my schedule has changed and I won’t be able to come in anymore.” So it’s still work, but it’s a more casual and fun kind of work than the kinds of work I’ve been paid for.

It’s also very pleasing to be talking to other volunteers, because they tend to be parents of children in the same school, so they often know things of interest or usefulness. Like, when there was something I didn’t know how to do (picking up someone else’s child after school), I was able to ask the other volunteers and one of them knew all about it and could give me all the details so I felt about a hundred times more comfortable about it. There also tends to be some good gossip about teachers and other parents, if you enjoy that kind of thing, which I do as long as it isn’t getting ugly and mean. Most of the stuff I’ve heard is more along the lines of who’s pregnant and who’s retiring and who’s moving away: stuff you could talk about with that person standing right there. There has been just a TIDGE of the kind of thing we oughtn’t to be talking about (but oh dear, it can be so fun in tiny doses), such as someone’s kid in trouble, or who’s getting a divorce, or a little venting about who’s very hard to work with. But it’s a nice group, so after a tiny bit of that, it stops and we move on to something else like complaining about our children.

If you’re looking for something similar, the technique I used was asking other people about their own volunteering experiences. If they responded, “OMG, it’s so awful, I mean it’s great of course and so fulfilling but I am SO BUSY and NO ONE ELSE IS HELPING ME,” I put a little NO WAY IN HELL checkmark next to that volunteer opportunity. If they said, “Oh, yeah, it’s cool: it’s just once a week and the kids are cute and I volunteer with my friend so we can get caught up on chatting,” and answered my follow-up question with “No, I haven’t had a problem with people asking me to do more and More and MORE,” I put it on my Sounds Good list.

We saw a lawyer about making a will. His strong opinion was that we should instead make a trust, which costs twice as much. (And I was very glad to have the comments on that post, to brace me for the cost.)

One of the hardest parts of dealing with knowledgeable professionals, I think, is knowing when the money is affecting their advice. I feel the same way when getting car repairs done, or especially with dental work. It is lovely to imagine all such professionals doing what’s best for their customers without any thought at all to profit, but we’re all human beings here. Money IS an issue. A BIG issue. It’s not bad or unethical to prefer to make more money instead of less money.

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We are at a nice peaceful stage right now with Edward’s Crohn’s Disease: he’s on a medication that seems to be working for the time being. (With Crohn’s, this could be permanent but it’s more likely to be temporary.) The pediatric gastroenterologist is seeing him once a month; each time, Edward has to miss a day of school because the pediatric gastroenterologist is a 2-hour drive away. Also, these appointments involve city driving, which I hate so much: one-way streets, pedestrians walking right out in front of cars, cars stopping right in the middle of a lane, parking garages, cars swooping to cut me off, and the HONKING OMG. City driving is like everything I dislike about people, condensed.

And the traffic is its own thing. With something as unpredictable as city traffic, I’m surprised city offices even make appointments at certain times. It seems like instead they’d give appointments for “morning” or “midday” or “afternoon,” and then it would be first-come-first-serve from there. I have to watch for my exit a couple of miles in advance, because it can be backed up that far. Luckily the parking garage guarantees sufficient parking for all patients, but it can still take forever to find a space (why are so many people parked over the line? WHY??), and another forever to wait for an elevator that has room in it. Last time I realized we should have taken the stairs: walking eight flights down would have been two or three times faster than navigating the elevator, and that’s what we’ll do next time.

It’s very frustrating to do all this for something that could be done over the phone: it takes most of the day and significant frustration and stress (city driving) and expense (gas, parking), and the doctor is just asking a few questions and then saying, “Good, good, come back in a month.” My mom and I were wishing it were more routine to be able to pay one’s co-pay for a doctor appointment over the phone, where we could accomplish the same thing in 10 minutes instead of six hours.

Anyway. It’s good that the medication seems to be working. Edward is growing and gaining weight, which are extremely good signs. He’s noticeably more cheerful and energetic. At his next blood draw they’ll test his iron, to see if he even still has anemia or if it’s gone.

Here is what I would like to know, now that I have left the message on the lawyer’s answering machine after 16 years of meaning to get around to doing that:

Is it HARD and SCARY and DIFFICULT to make a will, or is it the kind of thing I will not be able to believe I didn’t do sooner?

Is it piles and piles of paperwork and decisions, or is it fill in these blanks here, initial here, sign here, pay here?

Is it UNBELIEVABLY EXPENSIVE?

Does it take a long time and/or multiple appointments, or is it quick?

Do we have to find witnesses? I don’t know who to ask. I mean, I know people, but. It seems weird.

Will there be Surprise Unexpected Questions and Decisions, such as “Do you want us to store a copy of your will for you? It’s $40/year.” Or anything where Consumer Reports would be all “Don’t pay for these unnecessary services”?

MUST we do the part about life support and so on, or can we just take care of who gets the money and/or children?

(We do have a will made with will-making software, lest you wonder if we have really been flying without one all these years. But this is my first time seeing a lawyer about ANYTHING. I am NERVOUS and UNHAPPY.)

The day before yesterday, I was reading a book that mentioned a woman who wore her hair in a Psyche Knot. I was mildly interested in knowing what that looked like, and also I am on the lookout for new ways to wear my hair up, so I searched online. Several hours later, I was still watching YouTube hair tutorials on various hairstyles, complaining to Paul about how SO MANY PEOPLE have NO IDEA they’re no good at YouTube tutorials.

Anyway, I rediscovered a community I’d been a part of the last time I grew my hair long (pre-YouTube). My hair was about halfway down my back, and I’d just discovered email lists, and those two things converged and caused me to discover there were people who were more than just mildly interested in long hair. GOODness. There were daily discussions about things like the absolute maximum temperature of water that should ever touch your hair, the only hair products that should ever touch your hair, all the hair products that should NEVER touch your hair or else you might as well cut it off because it was permanently ruined, and so on. Things could get pretty heated (BUT NOT ABOVE 90 DEGREES).

A good thing about human beings is that if you have an interest, there’s a community for that. It may be a small community or it may be a large community, but there IS a community.

A good thing about the internet is that it is one billion times easier to find and join and gather together that community. I’m imagining trying to put together a Long Hair Club in my town. Hm. But online? EASY. There are tons of them already in progress. And because it’s online, the groups are meeting any time, rather than Tuesdays at 8:00.

The less-good thing about human beings is that if there’s a community, there’s snobbery and competition. Some of the hair styles I was looking at were listed as being good “even for short hair.” Do you know what “short hair” means in the long-hair community and nowhere else? Halfway down your back. Yes, you are put into your place pretty much right at the get-go. But the good news is that you DO HAVE A PLACE.

And in fact, you have your CHOICE of places. Short-haired newbies who KNOW their place are more than welcome: people higher in the ranks need admirers and students. Or do you want to appreciate long hair without growing it yourself? There are long-hair groupies. Do you want to style other people’s long hair? You are a valuable commodity. Can you effectively and efficiently teach others about styling long hair without saying “Um…yeah, so…” every other sentence and ceasing all progress on the hair style every time you wander off the topic, which is continually? PLEASE MAKE A YOUTUBE VIDEO.

Tonight I had a flashback to apartment living: I was in the bathroom and Paul was listening to music on the other side of the wall, and MAN. I had forgotten how music at a reasonable volume sounds UNTHINKABLY RUDE on the other side of a wall. The wall was VIBRATING, and all I could hear was BOOM-bah-bah BOOM-bah-bah BOOM-bah-bah until I wanted to pound on the wall for old times’ sake.

But the music was not even loud on Paul’s side of the wall. It’s just that the music was CLOSE TO THE WALL. I wonder how many misunderstandings have arisen from similar situations? One side: “WHY do they have to BLAST their music DAY AND NIGHT?? Have they NO CONSIDERATION for others??” The other side: “WHY do they have to POUND THE WALL when I listen to ANY MUSIC AT ALL?? Have they NO CONSIDERATION for others??”

For example, in the apartment we lived in when Rob was born, our next-wall neighbors had what sounded like a full-sized piano but was probably a small electric keyboard. They unwisely put it against our shared wall. They also had two elementary-school-aged children. By the time we moved out, I could have bashed that wall down with my bare hands to get at that piano, and felt glad of the blood and shattered bones my hands would have become.

That is the rule, in apartments: if it makes sound, it does not go against a shared wall. The CD player. The TV. The mixer, if possible, though not as big a deal if it isn’t, because it’s used so briefly and occasionally. The headboard, certainly. None of those things go against a shared wall, even if the external wall is chilly or the interior wall is inconvenient.

Unfortunately, the floor is sometimes a shared wall, and there is no way to put nothing against that.