FLASHBACKS, mirth, gratitude, sympathy and memories of battles fought, all in a moment on the couch this week.
Last week, we carried a story about Janu-worry and its accompanying stresses, one of which was facing the back-to-school (BTS) or first-time school challenges. Not being high on my own stressor list, these didn’t quite hit home at the time.
But this week, some brilliant marketing made it real.
Preparing a grocery shopping list on the online app and trying to be a savvy shopper, the extra deals section had to be checked out. Naturally, at this time of year, the top items were back-to-school stationery.
But barely one quick “scroll” down the specials of exercise books, dozens of different wines were listed.
After chuckling at the juxtaposition of BTS and loads of wine, I was immediately sympathetic to current parents and pupils tackling this tedious task, and very grateful my time has been done.
As a little girl, it was kind of fun to dicky up the brown paper with pictures cut from old magazines. There was also the promise of coloured pencils and lovely new pens, for which I still have a juvenile penchant.
I’m old enough to remember the liquid glue in pots with plastic spatulas to smear it on the backs of the pictures. It ended up all over your fingers, attaching the offcuts to digits and leaving glue smears on the covers. It was pretty gross. Then later, the littler pots with the white, funny-smelling marge-type stuff with small spatulas.
Things did improve a bit with the introduction of stick glue, but the plastic, thankfully optional at the time, was such a wrestling match it ruined the fun.
Back in the day, as a single parent, the dreaded chore fell to me, at least for the first few years of my son’s schooling career. By then, plastic was a requirement. Before I hit the wagon, the whole sticky combat mission was oiled with a couple of glasses from the red box. Perhaps that’s what made it so difficult. It’s hard to remember.
The biggest fights came later, when my young son started to learn he was not going to have a mother who did everything for him. Age appropriate responsibility was the way we rolled, or, at times, roiled.
At first, things went fairly smoothly. He did most of the brown paper and mom helped with the plastic, especially the stupid hard covers where you have to cut and fold the spine section and do some fairly precise jiggling to get it to fit properly.
Things went utterly downhill when it was time to go solo. The mangled final products were not pretty and, as predicted, didn’t last very long. Heaven knows what the teachers thought, but heels were dug in and lines were drawn. After small versions of World War III, the pre-cut brown covers and slip-on plastics were bought, and a slight truce was called. If you can’t have the wine, settle for compromise and relative peace. The issue reared its head every Janu-worry all the way through the school years.
Now, the appeal of the wine is gone, but it’s still very tough to resist all those lovely, enticing pens with all their promise. That desire needs erasure.
- Lindsay Slogrove is the news editor.
The Independent on Saturday