Parents, Consider Underachieving

Ms. Feintzeig is a writer in Connecticut.

I see you, parents who have been killing it this school year. You were there for the Halloween parade, the Valentine’s Day craft session, the inexplicable request to come to class for your child’s half-birthday. You made sure said child was dressed up for every school spirit day, somehow managing to continue caring even as you knew the inevitable next school spirit day loomed.

Now it is spring, and while I admire your continued enthusiasm, I, for one, have very little spirit left. I am asking for your support. I am proposing that we all just give up, together.

This may feel extreme, but so was the day last June I spent camping out in the vestibule of my children’s elementary school, attempting to attend four separate, celebratory events between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Each activity (poetry picnic, birthday read-aloud) was of course special in its own way, much like my children, who, for the record, number only two, but that final stretch before summer break nearly broke me.

I can still recall the shame of watching the other, more spirited moms arrive at field day lunch armed with Chick-fil-A for their kids, leaving me to try to pass off a stick of Trident fished from my purse as “special dessert.” Or the shame of assuring my 6-year-old and 7-year-old that their ancestors came from nowhere, so that we could get out of representing a country at the school’s inaugural world fair on a Friday night.

I am just so tired, and so bad at crafts. I dream of the day we can all take it down a notch without shame: skipping an event here, ignoring a made-up holiday there. What I need is a quorum. Without it, my kids will continue to feel neglected — all their friends went to the world fair, and they said the food at Venezuela was incredible — and I will continue to feel guilty, pretty much all the time, but especially when I’m staring at my ceiling at 3 a.m.

So far, support for my phone-it-in approach has been hard to come by on the local level. I sent a polite email to the school principal last year, gently noting that some parents have jobs and/or sanity they’d like to hold on to during the spring season. Honestly, I was mostly hoping that my husband, bcc’d, would take the hint and show up for something called “math morning.” He didn’t, and the P.T.A. continued to plan a staggering number of events.

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