My middle girl came to me this morning and was ready to ask me to stay home because she didn't feel well enough to go, and I made her go anyway. I wouldn't even listen - I said take what you need to take, but you have to go to school. I feel like the worst piece of shit on the planet and at the same time I know I was being a good parent.
It's so hard to balance my instinct to protect her from everything with my job as her mother to push her to try everything. I want them all to be happy all day, every day and I want them to be tough, strong and independent and you can't have both. You can't have both. To make strong, tough, independent kids you have to make them miserable some of the time. That's a shitty truth, but there it is.
I want absolution. I want a papal dispensation saying it's OK for me to be tough if I have to be. I want assurances that my children will still feel loved and know that they are not alone in this world even if I make them tough it out when they don't feel good. I feel like getting on my knees and whispering "mea culpa", because I feel like the meanest, worst mom on the earth right now, and part of what's wrong is that it feels good to know I am doing the right thing.
And I'm not even Catholic!
I'm asking for donations on a scale that's way beyond anything I have ever done before and it's taking a lot of time. My BUTT hurts from sitting in this chair.
This is how it goes: you figure out which store you want to hit up. Then you call to find out if they do donations per store or if it's a corporate thing. If it's per store, you get on the Internet and print out a list of each of their stores within thirty miles of you, the distance you can sanely travel to pick up donations if, by some miracle, they buy your spiel. Once you have that list, you call each store to find out who their store manager is.
Then you take the letter you send out asking for stuff and address it to each manager individually. You print out the return label with your address on it for both the outer envelope and the enclosed SASE, because your hand hurts from writing it over and over and over again.
Once you have all that done, you take each letter (and any additional forms they may ask you to enclose), fold it up, add the SASE, stick it all in the outer envelope which you then hand address - again, that personal touch that means so much.
That may not sound like it takes a lot of time, but it does. Three or four hours today for letters to twenty three different stores in only TWO chains, never mind the other three or four waiting to go. All this, and I am sick as a dog, probably from some weirdo chain-store virus I picked up yesterday while handing my letter directly to the managers of the stores closest to me.
Then, again, we wait for a few weeks to see what happens. Most of these places have monthly budgets and they are considering our charity for their November and December.
