The Ratio of Humble Pie is...

Oh who cares?  I'm eating the whole pie.

Which is good because while I know Pi =3.14159265359...I've never once understood why, not even when I learned it.  Back in the day, I just memorized and regurgitated, without ever understanding.  Perhaps because few math facts ever were digested, it continues to disagree with me.  At the very least, we lack tolerance for one another. However this discipline and I have worked out an uneasy truce, born of years of systemic consenting neglect, reinforcing our mutual disdain.

But today, I forced myself to reenter the math world, and discovered a whole new reason to hate it.

I'm studying for the Praxis, and that means passing the math.   That means studying.   It also means my teenagers get to mock me mercilessly for my errors.   I'd love to tell them to knock it off, but it's hard to do that when you need them to explain the problems.   It is the cost of doing business with adolescent tutors.

I took the English practice Praxis.  I scored a 99 of 100 and finished in 1/3 of the time.

I took the Math practice and got a 63.   If they don't let me use scratch paper, it will be far worse.

During the exam, I could hear my gray cells squeaking and creaking, as the neurons fired up and found that a whole section of my grey matter needs dusting.   I did remember the slope formula y=mx+b.  Alas, I found it a slippery slope formula as I couldn't remember what to do with it.   On a multiple choice quiz, you don't get any points for recalling partially what is needed, and eenie-meenie-miney-moe proved itself to be an unreliable method of determining the answer.  So much so, I'm fairly certain when I take the actual test, there will be a word problem as follows:

If Sherry guesses at the Praxis on the math section for 1/5 of the 40 problems and gets only 1/5 of those guesses correct, what total number did she miss by guessing?  (I'm not going to go easy on you and give you the answer not because I'm mean but because I actually don't know, don't want to know, and don't want to know even if you know, how to know it).  

So after listening to my children question how I could not know what I obviously did not, how I could forget so much, how I've managed to walk upright and drive given my limited command of arithmetic, I went back to the world of words and took another test.  But my brain felt tired.  I scored only a 92.

Looking at the score with disgust and fatigue, all I could say was, "Et tu Brutus?" and wonder if I failed badly enough, would they send me to 7th grade as a student?   My only comfort, one day, these teenagers will grow up, they'll become adults in the adult world, and hopefully, they'll have children.  Hopefully, one day they'll discover they've been lapped by their kids, and I'll be right there, handing them the recipe for humble pie or Pi.   You take 3.14159265359...

Coming of Age and Coming Clean

Recently, I watched Fr. Barron's series on Catholicism. It's quite good.  At one point, he takes us to tour the room where Saint Katharine Drexel worked and lived.  He shows relics, examples of her extreme poverty including stubbed pencils.  She gave away everything and wasted nothing.

I need more spiritual growth to reach her level.

This week, we ran out of grown up toothpaste and I'd not replaced it yet.  Alas, the Spiderman blue goo doesn't cut it for me.  Granted, I keep it in my bathroom so when the kids are done with their bath, brushing folds easily into the routine, but after two days, I wanted adult something. I looked around at my house.  Shampoo? Yellow Baby stuff.  Menu?  Simple plain kid friendly food.  Television?  The most adult we get is Dr. Who, and that's limited viewing.  The last movie I saw...Monster's University.   The last book I read ...okay, it was aloud at story time for them, but Lily's Big Day.  The part of me that recognizes she's been on this earth 47 years rebelled. The Spiderman goo represented the absence of an adult life, a relic of what I lacked.

If wine and coffee had been in the house yesterday, I would have blended them into a smoothie and drunk it as proof to the universe, yes, I'm of age, I'm an adult, and there ought to be foods and things in my house that don't scream wash and wear, sippy cup and crayon.  

Rather than create a toxic beverage sure to make me and anyone who thinks about it too long ill,  I grabbed my coupon for free bonus bucks at our local pharmacy, (yes, I'm living large), and bought myself a deluxe souped up tricked out tube of pearly whitening stuff.  I locked myself in the bathroom and allowed for two minutes of pure adult brushing teeth pleasure, interrupted only twice by the little people outside, beating on the door to gain access. One to join me (I said No) and offered the goo but he declined, and the other, to ask if she could watch.  I let her.  But I'd done it. I had something not hand me down, not childish. I had a tube of not rated G toothpaste.

That night, after I'd tucked in everyone, done the dishes, encouraged the teen still working, locked the doors and turned off the lights, I began my bedtime routine only to discover, my little tube of refuge gone!  The list of suspects in my head lay three deep, all three in opposite ends of the house, such that if I really wanted this, I'd have to go about the home when sleep beckoned.  That Spiderman goo started to look acceptable.  But "No!" I told myself, this was a matter of principle.

"No!" again I said, walking to the first bathroom, finding it bare of said item.
Again "No!" when I went downstairs to check the girls bathroom for the toothpaste.
Naturally, it lay upstairs, next to the sink in my son's lavatory.   He lay sleeping. Wake and lecture or take and run.  I opted for the later.

But I left him the Spiderman goo. He had the grace not to ask what happened to his tooth cleaning options the next morning, but I smiled an extra dazzling white at him when I asked, "Did you brush your teeth?"

I'll probably be stuck in Purgatory writing "I shall not spite my teenager about taking my toothpaste." using stubby pencils under the direction of Saint Katherine, or having to brush away my sins with Spiderman blue tooth goo.