Comment: New at this whole elementary school culture thing

There are a few things I didn’t know about kindergarden etiquette. And the first one is the dang spelling. In Canada, it’s spelled with a D, and in the States it’s kindergarten. So I constantly get mixed up about that and this annoys me because I pride myself on being an excellent speller. Ahh, hubris.

Anyway, for example, the first big school-wide fundraiser is set to occur this weekend. Like many other schools, we are doing a walk-a-thon. Now, I don’t know about you, but in my day, (creak) we had to solicit sponsors door-to-door in an endlessly humbling and hideous progression up and down the streets in our neighborhood. It didn’t matter if we didn’t know them; they were our neighbors, or rather, neighbours. It was the norm to scope out your neighborhood and knock on everyone’s door within a certain walking radius.

Nowadays? Not so much.

We’d no sooner loose our elementary school aged kids on a systematic neighborhood door-to-door pilgrimage than leave them home alone with premium cable with some random guy we met at the Quik Mart.

I’m not going to subject my child to the humiliations and possible breach of security of going door to door to houses that happen to be on my block, when we only know a few of our neighbors; nor am I going to put the neighbors we don’t know in the oh so awkward position of contributing money to a kid they don’t know. I’m only asking people we already know well for contributions; so far we have one, from my son’s grandparents. And that’s it.

On the walk-a-thon registration form, there’s a line that asks for a $25 donation to offset costs. So we have to donate a certain amount to get to do the walking in the first place! I’m happy to cough up some bucks for the school, but that seems like a lot of pressure on a kid who’s only been in school for two months to have to raise that much money.

And another thing: you were supposed to pre-order the student-designed walk-a-thon shirts. I skimmed over that section of the information packet (and believe me, it was a freakin’ PACKET o’ PAPERS) and honestly? I didn’t think my kids needed yet more t-shirts that they would wear all of once. However I felt sheepish several days later when a super-nice and elementary-experienced mom got hers for all three of her kids and gushed about how excited she was for them to all wear them as they walked.

Crap.

Are my kid and his preschool-aged sister going to be the ONLY ones at the walk-a-thon without t-shirts? Am I setting my son up for some kind of pariah-ship? I hate to think he’ll feel left out, but the only way I’m getting a shirt for him or his sister is if I go early and try to score some from the no-show pile. Not bloody likely. We have a hard enough time getting out of the house early on weekdays.

So with the prospect of my son going t-shirt-less and sponsor-less to the walk-a-thon, how should I feel? Should I be learning something here about participation, or should I just not give a flying fig because nobody is even going to remember this event in two years?

We worry that we’ll traumatize our children if they aren’t just like everyone else, if they stand out in a way that could make them uncomfortable. But my family is just not made up of major “joiners.” We don’t like going to amusement parks, large family events, family fairs, fundraising jamborees or evenings in the park with half of the city there. None of us are in any kind of club and we all balk at the idea of joining groups. I’ve joined groups but never attended any meetings. You get the idea.

But we are happy to do things that our children want to do, but they don’t seem that excited by this.

So if I’m not excited, and my son’s not excited, am I supposed to manufacture the excitement for this family fundraiser this weekend?

It just leaves me a little cold. So stay tuned to see if we do actually go, and if we do manage to pay a small fortune for a t-shirt and if my son actually walks more than once around the track. And if there are any other non-joiners out there walking the wrong way on the track or wearing a radical t-shirt with no writing on it.