Goodbye to SPIRIT WEEK!
I said what I said.
Don’t get me wrong, I personally love a spirit day when I am the participant. When I taught K12, I lived for a solid Pajama Day or a Hat Day (hello, messy ponytail!), but as a mom, spirit days suck! There aren’t enough exclamation points for that statement. Spirit days suck even more when kids are so darn young that they don’t really care – or know why – it’s a Spirit Week. As kids age, it does become exciting for them to dress as a superhero or a 100-year-old on the 100th day of school, but holy cannoli, spare us these rituals when the kids are simply so young that they can’t scour the house themselves for attire pieces, and dear God, spare us the elaborate themes…NO, I don’t want to attach 600 pink feathers on a sweatshirt for a “Flamingo Day!” If we have to endure these, leaders and admin, please: Keep it simple.
Please know that when the flyer comes home, or the email is sent out, it’s like dropping a bomb on a mom’s work-week and no amount of Sunday prep can outshine the stress of a 9 pm Tuesday night laundry session because my kid’s only tie-dye shirt (ya know, the one day that looked the easiest to throw together, so I conveniently didn’t get it readied) is in the dirty. And Lord save us all when we pull up for Wednesday morning drop-off and some over-achiever shows up drrriiiippin’ like Jim Brewer’s wardrobe in Half Baked. Good for you Spirit Day Martha Stewart, but you don’t get any cookies for the showmanship.
Does it get any better as kids get older? No. Kids just get more invested in participating or they are dressed in high school to attend the basketball game that night, and of course, we as parents want to encourage their enthusiasm for something as joyous as “school spirit” but dang, give us a bone on the intricacies, schools! The positive in aging kids is that they can brainstorm for themselves, praise be. But who among us hasn’t had a full-blown meltdown because we can’t locate, “That one shirt with the sequins that match the hat I want to wear for crazy hat day!” And the last thing I’ll EVER do is outwardly gripe at the steps of my kid’s school when teachers are just trying their best each and every day to provide the joy that they do so well. This little forum is my respite. All I got.
Look, 2020 made us realize A LOT of things in our cultural norms need tweaking – most things on a very serious level like healthcare and racial equity, so I guess this is my Dear Abby letter to the world…How do we fix THIS stress-inducing concept for the average American household?? Serenity NOW!!!
