Friday Nights
Bailee chose a silver stone from the graveled driveway and etched a curvy line of gray into the green paint of my Saturn S-series. She was four and bored, waiting on her mom to take her home after a long day at daycare.
Bailee, blonde with Shirley Temple curls and a pageant smile, stopped only briefly at her mom's insistence. Lisa picked up her monologue where she left off. Something about an elk hunting trip she was taking that weekend. Lisa made small talk that evening, an attempt to smooth over the fact that she breezed through my kitchen door 50 minutes late for pick up on a Friday night. She made it up to me by keeping me an extra half hour with idle chat, ignoring Bailee's roguery and costing me a $500 deposit on a new paint job. I was distracted and nodding zealously, hoping to appear sufficiently appeased. Wanting Lisa to feel forgiven. To go home.
Friday nights meant laundering blankets and sanitizing cots, wooden blocks, Tonka trucks, baby dolls, manipulatives, and teething rings. Friday nights meant hiding toys under beds, stuffing cots in closets, and locking away art supplies for a two-day reprieve, a temporary reclamation of my space. Friday nights meant grocery shopping for juice, milk, applesauce, Lysol. Topping off the food program report and skimming the attendance sheets in case parents forgot to sign in cursive or log the drop-off or pick-up time. A slight that could cost me marks on my accreditation observation or dollars on my monthly food allotment.
I forged through my chores, sweeping the great room floor for the sixth or seventh time in a day, hiding the high chairs in the storage room, boxing up modeling clay and ABC placements, and taking down the pictures of people we don't know, photos illustrating babies and toddlers from diverse cultures and races brushing their teeth, washing their hands, or eating spaghetti.
Friday nights meant kitchen strike, according to my husband, who hoped that trend would change. Two-and-a-half days' reprieve from the black skillet, baking sheets, boilers, crock pots, and microwaves. Sixty hours of escapist lit, broken rest, American cityscape puzzles, apple-pie scented candles. Thirty-six hundred minutes of quiet.
By Monday, I would be ready to make toddlers into human circles, squares, and triangles in the living room floor. We'd make ice cream with a few ingredients and a ziplock bag. We'd turn the playset into a pirate ship or a firetruck. We'd make the letter 'A' out of play-doh or uncooked macaroni. We'd have an apple-tasting contest and name 'pink lady,' 'granny smith,' 'fuji,' or braeburn' our favorite. We'd read "The Three Little Fish and the Big, Bad Shark." And we'd start ripping apart orange and blue construction paper for Friday's pep rally.
The specificity in this entry is great, especially in the latter paragraphs. Your details really give me a a great sense of your duties. Also, the listing of your duties really captures the busy nature of the work, and maybe even chaotic nature? I could feel the sense of having to rush. You also do a good job of not making it sound like torture, although I'm sure it's very demanding work. By the time you get to Monday, your writing carries that same busy tone of things to do, but in a good way. You're having fun with the kids, and even though it's probably very tiring work, you make it sound like the rewarding part of the job, which works well as a balance to the chaos of Fridays. I feel like you have a good opportunity to transition into some reflection after the short paragraph about your relaxing weekend, or maybe starting within that same paragraph. Reflection sandwiched between the chaos of a Friday and the joy of a Monday. Of course, finding an opening into a unique reflection is the hard part! I'm struggling with that the most. But I think this entry definitely has a lot of potential to grow into a longer piece!
ReplyDelete