My friend Sandy in very cool and lives in Brooklyn and paints amazing pieces like this one. Check out #100circles on Instagram to see more.

#1.  Summer Reading

With less than 24 hours until the first day of school this week, my soon-to-be-fifth-grader had yet to complete the second of two books that needed to be read and reported upon by the next day.  At that point, I was beyond tired of talking about it. And nagging about it. And yelling about it. And yet, there we were down to the wire.

I’m not saying I don’t think kids should have some work to do to keep everything they learned throughout the school year from spilling out of their ears and onto the sand during the long stretch of summer vacation. I just don’t want it to be my problem any more.

I was actually angling to adopt that strategy at first. A girlfriend was complaining to another friend and I on the beach in early August about her battle with her incoming high school senior to get his summer reading completed.

“You need to let it go,” advised our friend. “He’s a good student. You know he’ll get it done one way or another so why are you wasting your breath and making it your problem?”

“That’s good advice,” I chimed in. “Do you think I should lay off my 10-year-old and leave it up to him to finish his reading?”

“Um, he’s still a little young,” I was told. “He probably still needs you to stay on top of him.”

Dammit.

#2. Sleepovers

They have been the bane of my existence for about a dozen years and a childhood ritual I try to avoid like the plague. It means there will be a pile of pillows and blankets that will need to be put away the next day and a sofa bed requiring repair. My job as hostess will be to either produce some type of cooked breakfast or go out in my sweats to fetch bagels. I’ll be required to be the heavy at some point, too, lumbering down to the basement to turn off Cartoon Network and shush excited guests. And I’ll have to pretend to be nice and act like it’s all a lot of fun.

It’s a lot of work, and that’s if things go well.

Because when you go through the movie-watching negotiations, air mattress blowing, searching for every nightlight you own to light up the downstairs and ease jitters and then the guest decides he’d rather be home in his own bed, leaving your own child crying in his wake, there is absolutely nothing to be gained through the exhausting exercise. I want a return on my investment. Like, if I’m going to go through the whole sleepover rigamarole, I want the benefit of having created a buffer between myself and my child. Something to keep him busy for 8 or 10 hours. And not busy crying about his life.

#3.  My Period:

(DUDE WARNING: I know, you are sensitive to these issues. I know this girly mystery freaks you out. So, in the interest of honoring the two or three dudes who read my blog and your aversion to all-things menstrual, I’m going give you the heads up that too much period information is about to be shared and you should just skip down to #4. You’re welcome boys.)

I know that at 47, I still have a few years left of this thing and need to remain in the acceptance phase for a while longer. However, it’s been, I don’t know, well over 30 years of this monthly occurrence and I still can’t get a handle on it. It never comes when I think it’s coming and other times it shows up out of the blue. My symptoms change month to month and year over year and just when I think it’s starting to slow down, it comes on with a vengeance. And can I have just one month when I don’t have to throw out a pair of underwear or wash my sheets? I mean, what the hell? You’d think I’d be good at this by now but I’m not because I want it to go away.

#4.  Dealing with other people’s poop:

Recently, it became obvious that the toilet in my bathroom was starting to clog. It does this from time to time, requiring me to dig up the always-missing plunger and relieve it of its congestion. It wasn’t until I spent a week in Greece (not to mention on a small sailboat), where flushing ANY paper (forget feminine products) was strictly forbidden, that I realized that I use my toilet like a veritable trash can. Any time I blow my nose or take off eye makeup, the tissue goes straight into the toilet and not the garbage located about 3 centimeters away from it. I figured I was cutting down on the landfill, man.

At any rate, I guess I’d been wearing a lot of mascara because the toilet was definitely in need of relief, but that night I was running out to meet someone for a drink and figured I’d rather not get involved in latrine duty wearing my cute JCrew shorts and would deal with it upon my return. During the date, I get a text from a child frantically looking for the plunger. I can never remember where I’ve put that thing so told the kid to just leave it and I’d fix it when I got home. I thought it was nice this kid was trying to be such a team player and unclog my potty, until I returned home to fine that the urgent nature of the text was triggered by this child blithely pooping on top of the clog, and who, when relieved of any responsibility for the literal shit show, promptly went out with friends.

So there I was, 10:00 at night in my cute outfit, plunging a poopy potty and sending venomous texts to the pooper. I’ve spent years working with poop – first my younger siblings’ diapers (as the oldest of 8 kids), assorted pets (including the dog whose way of dealing with my ex-husband’s move out of the house was to just defecate daily on the TV room rug), and my own little babies’ up-the-back disasters. I’d really like to claim this time in my life as the poop-free era and institute a you-dropped-it-you-deal-with-it rule.

No shit.