When the teacher strikes got settled and the kids in our state went back to school this week, I figured I better quit playing hooky and come up with some kind of a celebratory blob!

Labor strikes by teachers in Washington State are actually illegal, but then, so is spitting on the sidewalk (unbelievable, I know, but true). Personally, I make a practice of hardly never spitting on the sidewalk – at least if a policeman is nearby – but I do vigorously cheer on those “illegally” striking teachers!  What I would earnestly like to spit on though, is the need to ask our legislators this embarrassing question: WHY DO THE TEACHERS HAVE TO GO ON STRIKE TO BE RECOGNIZED FOR THEIR VALUE? 

As a mom, I early-on learned to stand in awe of such unsung heroes. Most of those teachers were wearing a religious habit, but all were firmly determined to educate all seven of my brood come hell or high water – and I owe them my eternal gratitude, because they did.

Of course, like all well-trained Catholics, I have to recognize my guilt. Yes, don’t tell anyone, but sometimes when all seven kids were all at school, it was often quite nice! Yup! And I and all the other moms in my neighborhood never missed a chance to exult in the comfort of that bit of freedom over all the cups of coffee we guzzled together before the 3 o’clock bell rang at school.

Looking back though, it wasn’t as easy as you might surmise. I was thinking about that this week as I knew the mothers (and this being 2022 – the fathers, too) were facing the First Day Of School. It ain’t easy!

Relive with me what I can piece together in my memory from one of those days of yesteryear in our households in St. Joseph’s parish on Capitol Hill in Seattle back in the 1960s. Here goes…

Typically, at the end of the First Day of School, and with the 11 pm news on the television set, I – pale and haggard, and in a state of collapse – would still be stoically labeling book bags, covering books, slapping together tomorrow’s lunches, counting shoes, filling out applications for Girl Scouts, Brownies, Cub Scouts, piano lessons, violin class, school insurance, permission slips for Library Day, checking off my choices for providing “transportation, telephone calling, and typing” on mandatory volunteer worksheets for six different room mothers, and figuring out which of the three children who fit it gets-to-wear-the-new-coat-tomorrow.

And right about then, some statement invariably emanated from the television set that always stopped me in my tracks.

“Today was ‘Mothers Day’, the impeccably groomed newscaster would warble with a cheery chuckle. “Today Mommy waved goodbye and while Junior marched off to his first day at school, she floated into the kitchen, heaved a big sigh of relief, and poured that Second Cup of Coffee!”

I always had a bloodthirsty desire to share with the guy how it really was for the mothers of St. Joseph’s School. A second cup of coffee wouldn’t have even entered my battered mind that day. Which started at 7:30 am, along these lines . . . 

I would have woken that morning to a breathless blur of activity. The Great Search was on. I wasn’t up for a half hour before I would discover that everything in our house was missing. Seven children were looking for, but unable to find, breakfast cereal, clean socks, left shoes, the bathroom sink, washcloths, toothpaste, underwear, buttons, toast, ironed shirts and even the clock. 

(Editor’s note: in case you’re too young to know what an “ironed shirt” was, it was an article of apparel which had to be flattened with hot steam from a hissing triangular instrument of torture. Just kidding. Actually, even though I was always several years behind with the task, ironing was my second favorite household chore. My first favorite was hitting my head repeatedly on the refrigerator door.) But I digress. Let’s get back to our First Day of School scene.

I remember the two eager beavers on the First Day were always whoever was going into kindergarten or first grade. They’d take turns asking, “What time is it, Mommy?” at 3 to 4 minute intervals from 7:30 am on. “We’re going to be late. I just know we’re going to be late!”

Well, so did I (and we were) but I didn’t have time to worry about such insoluble problems with so many Revolutionary Wars erupting underfoot, usually involving who has “all the socks”.

St. Joseph’s didn’t offer kindergarten, so once the grade schoolers, smartly dressed in their nicely creased uniforms and ironed shirts and blouses, were finally on their two-block trek to school, I’d pack up whoever was to be enrolled in Kindergarten at Stevens public school near our house. 

The first day of kindergarten at Stevens was only one hour long for the students. During that hour, all the moms, with their preschoolers in tow, would be ushered into the gym for a kind of presentation ceremony. All the harried mothers would sit there and swill coffee and listen to the principal present a long, searching commentary on all the reasons we should support Public School Referendum #904. I think he always believed that because he knew most of the kindergartners would be graduating to a parochial school, their mothers, as taxpayers, didn’t support public schools. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. I never knew a Capitol Hill mother who didn’t genuflect in respect whenever she walked past that noble public school or any other that could educate her urchins.

I usually enjoyed the ceremony. On the most frantic day of the year, it was lovely to have a chance to just sit and doze for a while, but the year I was enrolling Teresa (known then as “Terry”), I wasn’t so lucky.

Our four-year-old Judy, enraged and bereft at having just discovered that she had NOT been accepted for kindergarten, howled for water, the urgent need to tinkle, more cookies, and then suddenly hollered in desperation “Isn’t he EVER going to stop talking?”

Well, after he did, I marched Terry and Judy home but we barely made it in time. What that TV newscaster didn’t seem to realize (or maybe he just knew of schools from another galaxy) is that on the first day, St. Joseph’s only kept the kids long enough for them to be “oriented”. Which means that the kindergarten mothers could barely get home in time to find the school uniforms tossed on the couch, crumpled up on stairway and tossed on the dining room table, peanut butter buttered on the kitchen counters, and the grade schoolers having climbed into their swimsuits, were turning on the front yard hose.

Oh, it was Mothers Day, all right! 

I wish I could assure you that the days following the First Day weren’t so frantic, and actually, they wouldn’t have been except for one convention in practice at St. Joseph’s School. During the first years we lived in the parish, any student who lived within 8 blocks of the school couldn’t bring his/her lunch. He/she had to go home for lunch. But not all at one time. Starting about 11am, on a “staggered” schedule, various classes took their turn and were set free to go home and were given 40 minutes to eat their peanut butter sandwiches and get back to school. The sum effect of this strategy was that there were only about 3 hours of the day when everybody was in school. No school day was what you could exactly call a “day off” for mothers of large families in the parish.

Not that any of the mothers were complaining! In fact, most of us thought those three hours were a gift from Heaven, and the perfect excuse to guzzle coffee together. I will always smile when I remember the fun, friendship, and laughing that we had in those years. 

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All that stolen time off though, was directly due to the efforts of the teachers who were educating our kids, and I don’t think any of the mothers I knew would ever forget it. I know I won’t. I just wish they could get the compensation they deserve. Otherwise, prepare for this possible sequel to Breaking Bad . . . .