A Glutton for Punishment

Today is D-Day, my friends.

Today is the day yearbooks come out.

As the yearbook adviser at my high school, I've waxed on many a time here on the old blog about all the random responsibilities that befall me.

Picture Day. Senior Superlative voting. Arm-wrestling principals to make sure my students get computers that actually work.

And, for the most part, I'm successful. (Although I was stuck using a classroom full of computers that once took 50 minutes to sign on to one Web site. That was a dark day, my friends, a dark day.)

But today, oh, today.

Today is the day.

The day I dread more than any other every year.

Today is Yearbook Distribution Day.

Imagine you're the lone adult standing amid 500 pre-teens and adolescents. They're running at you, screaming, reaching greedily for a book you've looked at so many times that you'd rather throw up then turn its pages again.

Your only help is from the 20 young students on the yearbook staff, who are passing out books right and left and selling Sharpie markers as quickly as their little arms can.

Meanwhile, you stand there trying to figure out why little Susie's name is not on the "Buyer's List" without actually revealing to her that Mommy and Daddy's cheque bounced.

You also have to resist the urge to smack that one senior who calls you a nasty name because she's only in the book four times.

And this is all before a little freshman walks up to you in tears because she ignored the 18,734 warnings you sent home, announced, and posted around the school, and now, there are no yearbooks left, and She. Didn't. Get. One. Waaahhhh!

All while you sweat profusely in your Florida high school's un-air-conditioned gym.

Lord, save you. Er, I mean, me.

It's enough to make me considering curling into a fetal position right there and then, amid all the chaos and the name-calling and the obvious absence of any other teachers and administrators.

I hate this day.

Because, honestly, no matter how well we prepared, and now matter how good the yearbook is, it never goes well.

Some kid will get upset; somebody's name will accidentally get left off the list; some parent will call me, complaining and screaming about something as inane as the color of the book's cover.

And then I will go home and cry, cry, cry because parents are mean.

I will also then force my husband and I to sign some kind of future parenting pact that we will never call a school and complain about something as silly as the "unfortunate, unflattering" angle of our daughter's Homecoming parade photo on page 46.

I will then consider taking up heavy drinking to numb the pain but decide it's too much work and that the sheer stress of this day alone will do enough damage to my liver on it's own.

So I just fall into bed and pray that I can sleep off this nightmare for the next two days.

Which, last year, I did.

But this year?

I have to chaperone the prom tomorrow.

Oh, man, I hate this day.

***

I have two huge favors to ask:

1. Please offer up a quick prayer that no rogue parent - enraged by the fact that they weren't consulted about the yearbook's theme this year - engages me in some sort of tiff. Or just goes straight for my jugular.

2. If Yearbook Distribution Day is the Achille's heel that finally takes me down, promise me someone will come finish packing my stuff up and take my husband's XBox to South Carolina. He's going to need that to cope with the grief of losing his young wife to a pack of angry teenagers.

Be back next week! (I hope.)