Back to School Sucks

This is it for Dominic. Today's essentially the last day of summer freedom for my eight-year-old stepson, with the first day of school looming Monday. Yes, he still has the whole weekend, but we always have that (in theory). The last weekday of summer can be a bitter pill.

There's a lot you can tell a kid when it comes to the start of a new school year, but it's nothing that anyone wants to hear. Why? Because it's the same shit we adults heard when we were kids.

"When you're grown up, there is no summer break."

"One day, when you're done going to school, you'll look back and think of how much easier life was then."

There are many other versions, none of which do I care to hear or speak again. Then you also have a couple of inevitable questions intended to sugar-coat the situation, as if there aren't holes in each of those efforts too.

"You'll get to spend more time with your friends." Really? 90% of that time will be spent crammed into an uncomfortable desk while someone else is spouting seemingly useless information at us. Plus, if I really thought so highly of these friends, wouldn't I have made more of an effort to hang with them outside of school?

"Aren't you excited to see who's in your class?" Great. That curiosity will be satisfied within the first 20 seconds of the school year. I guess once you're in middle school and high school it'll take a whole day. What about the next nine months?

Face it, it's really not easy to find silver lining when your world gets flipped in such a way. Sure, there probably are some circumstances in which heading back to school doesn't seem too bad. Maybe a kid spent the whole summer at a shitty camp. Maybe he was shipped out of town to spend time with undesirable family members. When kids get older, sometimes work gets thrown into the mix to jack up the summer.

But none of that is the case with the one that my family is sending back to school. He hit Worlds of Fun a couple of times, spent a good deal of time with his dad and cousins, and he attended a tennis camp that he requested and enjoyed. How could it possibly be seen as a positive to start shaking off the morning dew just in time to hop on a nasty old school bus with a driver who barely speaks English accompanied by primarily undesirable kids?

(It should be noted, however, that getting up early isn't an issue for Dominic since he was up by around 7:00 everyday this summer anyway. Likewise with the Latino bus driver, seeing as Dominic speaks Spanish nearly fluently. So the only true problem of those mentioned above is with the unruly kids, two of whom have needed to be reprimanded for their verbal and/or physical abuse of my innocent stepson.)

So third grade awaits. After making his way through all of the annoying parents mingling outside the school on Monday, I'd guess there will be a little excitement for Dominic to see some of the faces that had been missing since early June. It's not quite like later in life when scoping the female talent in your classes carries quite the intrigue, but maybe it's not too early. I think there's talk of girlfiends and boyfriends by this time. I remember having a great sense of pride in fourth grade, during which all but one of the girls in my class asked me to be their boyfriend. Pretty good shit for someone who'd had only just arrived in this town about a year earlier. (For the record, I said no to all of them. It's good to be selfish for a while. Just beware of potential backlash sometimes. You never know when you might be accused of being gay. Seriously.)

Godspeed, young man.