I made it through High School and University pretty unscathed. It was no walk in the park at times but I fared out pretty well. Decent grades, lots of beer, worked full time throughout and the occasional all-nighter. There could be no greater pressure in my life to be balancing all of these pressures as a young adult. The working world combined with parenthood seemed easy compared to that. So why the hell am I so overwhelmed with the amount of homework that I am trying to help my boys with!

Mary and I are good parents. We ask the kids to do their homework and put in the time to study. Often this occurs at the kitchen table, all at the same time. Thankfully, we have very different and balanced post-secondary backgrounds and can tackle these issues deftly. My business and writing background meshes with Mary’s science and math savvy and we are almost all covered. It should be smooth sailing except this stuff seems so much harder than it did when we were less wrinkled and had better eyesight.

I am not ashamed to say that I am baffled by high school math, let alone the math my university aged son is taking. The shameful part is I took all the same stuff 20 years ago and don’t remember jack shit. Mary has to tackle that greek scribble and she has a remarkable ability to recollect it. She takes it as a personal challenge to solve the problem, even if it takes her 45 minutes and Nic’s eyes are rolling back in his head. I will hear a random “AH HA!” from the kitchen and she high fives herself for a job well done. She is a pro.

I get to help tackle the writing assignments. Last night I was lucky enough to spend 4 quality hours with one of my sons researching and structuring a project. Nothing I would rather have wanted to do between the hours of 11pm and 3am than do that! We could pull this out of our asses! He had to get a plan in a hurry last night as we started with selecting a topic, creating a framework and I stepped back as he managed to write, edit and reference the whole damn thing. The juices were flowing and I was young again! In typical flying by the ass of his pants fashion, it was due this morning and I’m sure he proudly ran this across campus to hand it in, thinking he had just pulled of a Christmas miracle. I did my best to not nod off at my office this afternoon as the thrill of the moment had long worn off on my old body.

It’s not going to end anytime soon either. We have more kids coming through the system and I suspect I have not formulated my last term paper nor studied subjects that I have never seen in my life. They talk about career students but I didn’t see this one coming when these kids were born. Be warned, parents of the future.

Marco