A School Holiday Break

I love the school holidays. I am not a school teacher but I love the school holidays! I am not a student anymore but I still love it when the school terms end. Since I don’t have to join the rush hour in the morning, having a term break does not affect me even if morning traffic usually eases during such a time. But as a mother who toils just as hard as her school going kid on an average school day, it is liberation indeed!

From the moment my kids started their first day at kindy, the days of homework and exams became a part of my life as well. And I thought I left them all behind when I left school. Next to project deadlines and office assignments, I think there is nothing more stressful for me than when my daughter comes home from school and tells me she has more than a few pages of homework in her school bag. I can still deal with English but if it’s either Maths or Science, the headache instantly starts even before she takes the dreaded workbooks out of her bag. It’s that bad. Especially when Maths and Science were never my strong subjects and it looks as if they are not my daughter’s either! The nightmare begins.

The word patience has no meaning to me anymore as I take a deep breath and roar down at the blank face staring back at me, after tirelessly explaining to her the method of calculating the sums that have been torturing the both of us the whole afternoon. I tell myself over and again that I am not to use put-down words or raise my voice because child psychologists say that would damage their self esteem and ability to learn. But try doing that every day and see no results? Any sleeping tiger would be wide awake by then! There was one afternoon I really needed to lie down when I felt the vein throbbing at my temples and I felt unable to breathe. Short of wielding the cane (which incidentally, I don’t even have because I had foolishly believed that my mother’s method of caning to get results were old school), I just lost my head and that afternoon, I believe my voice could be heard a few doors down the corridor, even louder than the tuition teacher whose voice booms loud and clear several times a day when she is having her sessions with her students.

My girl is really great in other areas, brilliant when it comes to saying the right things and has no lack when it comes to being helpful and doing things without being told. But when it comes to academic skills, she is just about as ‘smart’ as I was when I was at her age. I shudder when I reflect on those school years when I scraped through every test and didn’t really shine until I switched to the Arts stream at Form Four and found my niche in languages instead. So I do understand the struggle she is going through and in a way, while I empathize with her difficultly in grasping the lessons being taught, I am also frustrated and terrified that she will end up like me – without a tertiary education and having to work three times as hard as others just to be on par if not to excel above.

Birth pangs are only the tip of the iceberg, the beginning of a long journey for parents. With every first in their lives, we play a part. From infant to toddler, from kindy to college, from puppy love to marriage, literally from their birth to death, ours.

School holidays are my break in this long journey. Let me savour every moment until the next homework begins.