Mother of the Year - NOT!

I have it on good authority that I will never be elected mother of the year. According to my oldest daughter, Petunia, my elementary school children were the only children at their school who did not have pierced ears at age eight and who were required to help with the dishes. All the other children at their school regularly had cocktail parties, owned clothes with designer labels, and flew on their Lear jets to the Riviera for the Holidays. And here were my children: they were ordered to turn off the Saturday morning cartoons at 9:00 a.m. What was the reason for the T.V. going dark at this unheard of hour? So they could do WORK. Yes, manual labor. They cleaned bathrooms, emptied the garbage, washed walls, and mopped floors.
This uncalled for toil is only part of the whole reprehensible story. You probably remember that my poor, neglected children were only allowed two birthday parties where they invited their classmates: at age five and age eight. The rest of the birthday parties were just family parties and the grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, and cousins came. The poor kids. Somehow they survived with only minor emotional scars. One of the children poured this tale of woe into the ears of a classmate’s mother. This woman was so appalled at this neglect that she offered to have a birthday party for my poor, neglected twins.
Another evidence of my total disregard for my children’s well being was the fact that I refused to buy their jeans at the boutiques in the mall. Every other 7th grader had designer jeans that cost $75 and came from the exclusive shops in the mall. Sale jeans from Shopko just did not make the grade for school clothes. Any 7th grader could have told you that. Finally, I got tired of the school shopping clothes dilemma. I gave my under privileged children summer jobs around the house so they could earn money for school clothes. Then I turned them loose and let them buy their own clothes. The odd thing was that the Shopko jeans that were completely unacceptable the year before, suddenly became a sought after item. I heard Petunia tell Prudence, “Let’s go shopping this afternoon! Shopko has jeans on sale for $12.99 a pair.”
Foregoing nomination as mother of the year was completely worth it. If you have ever watched the clock, praying for the time to pass so that parents will come SOON to pick up the 23 children in you charge, you know that no accolade is worth sitting on that powder keg five times a year. Once in a lifetime time praise of the press cannot compete with a little help cleaning the house every week. And I would gladly exchange the Nobel Prize for children who happily shop sales.