Why Do I Hate Back To School?

As the countdown approaches for Back To School, the mad rush that consumes our neighborhood is nothing short of what a crystal meth overdose must feel like.  Yesterday, while I was moving my sprinkler, my neighbor Cheryl drove by honking while literally holding a dress out her mini-van exclaiming, “Only $8 at Target!”  I found myself turning around looking for Ashton, I thought for sure I was being punked.  Could she be drinking?  But it was only 10:30.  Twenty minutes later, my good friend Kate (who also lives on my block), called me from Walmart insisting, “You have to come here now!  They have glue sticks for 10 cents!”  I asked her to just pick me up a few (why didn’t she just do that in the first place??) and that I’d pay her back when we get together to watch “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” – because they make us feel better about ourselves.  Those women are too busy turning over tables to worry about a sale on glue sticks.

It’s this kind of neurotic back-to-school nesting that modern moms (get real, I rarely see any men holding lists in Staples) experience year after year because let’s face it…by September 8^th we want these little b*stards back in school already!  This is how desperate we’ve become – we do fashion drive-bys and emergency cell phone calls from Walmart.  And who could blame us?!  I’m done with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Statue Of Liberty and the local whaling museum.  We’ve been there three times already this summer and been day-cationing all over the place.  (My husband was unemployed for 9 months in 2009 and now he’s back in school full time so there’s not enough money for a real vacation…sound familiar?) 

When I was growing up (God does that expression make me feel old), I don’t remember my mother going crazy with back to school shopping.  We did buy a few outfits for the fall but she didn’t go mad because we have Indian Summers here – that doesn’t mean we live in a hot casino.  That means it remains short-sleeve-weather here in New York until at least the week after Halloween.  My mother was a savvy shopper.  She waited for all the hullabaloo to die down then she quietly snuck into Marshalls in mid October for the back-to-school clearance rack to find the items we wouldn’t grow out of by the time the weather cooled.  I find myself continuing that tradition too. 

I go out of my way to eschew the back-to-school rush but just like Al Pacino in the GodFather – “They keep pulling me back in!”  My mother didn’t have a Second Grade Supply list that features 33 items!!!  Holy crap!  On top of all the other stuff they want 3 rolls of paper towels as well?!  And 2 boxes of Kleenex?  What ever happened to all the taxes we pay?  Next we’ll be buying coffee for the Teachers Lounge.  You know the supply lists for your child’s school are long when they’re posted on the district website….and my mother complained about having to buy book jackets.  Puh-lease she made them out of left over wall paper.  Year after year, my books were covered with chickens and roosters from our kitchen.

However, if you wait to purchase these items the week that school starts or if you’re really brave (or just have a death wish), the night before (dum dum dummmmm…..scary theme music), you’ll be questioning why you even became a parent in the first place.  I’ve seen the live news reports from stores the night before….with queues 50 persons deep….they give me the chills.  How about the three ring circus of people fighting over 3 ring binders?  Mothers stabbing each other with unsharpened number two pencils.  It’s disgusting.

This year, both my girls want folders with ponies on them so we definitely can’t wait till the last minute with a request like that.  If we do, there will only be the obligatory Bratz collection of spiral notebooks (like those girls even read!) left.  When I was growing up, my next door neighbor Brian’s mother always waited till the last minute.  Needless to say, he got his *ss kicked in 4^th grade for showing up with a Strawberry Shortcake binder.

We recently adopted a 13 year old girl.  When registering her for school, I asked the enrollment supervisor for the 7^th grade supply list and she just laughed….a Dr. Evil kind of mwah ha ha.  “We send that home with them the first day,” she replied.  “Is that because you want parents to go rampage killing at Kmart?”  I asked.  She didn’t get the joke.

The media fuels this whole madness too. With the economy in the achingly slow phase, merchants are scrambling for business so they’re ramping up their advertising and their sales.  If you turn on your TV for even a split second in the last three weeks of August, you’ll be bombarded with trendy kids in cute layered looks donning snarky hats bouncing onto orange buses….meanwhile it’s still 94 degrees here.

But I have to say, what I hate the most about Back To School is not the perfunctory $125 on supplies per child plus the pressure to buy new clothes, it’s all the membership and dues fees that are collected the first week.: $10 for the PTA.  $15 for the class party budget. $22 for Girl Scouts per daughter.  $110 for cheerleading uniforms.  $27 for track – per child!  Don’t they realize there’s no money left?!  September is starting to feel like December - brokedy broke.

It’s pay outs like these that are a real buzz kill the first morning that bus pulls up. That’s when my I-finally-get-a-minute-to-myself high is really over and the back to school blues set in for mommy.