Flyer Fool

My sister recently left her sprawling country acreage for the densely populated and buzzing city of Montréal. She was heading east for job-related training. When I found out, I felt this sagging heaviness right at the bottom of my rib cage. Training? Montréal? Again? Oh.

I am yearning to be sent away for job-related training (by myself). I am feeling a wee bit jealous. But, according to my kids—I don’t even have a job. And even if I did successfully debate that topic with them, it isn’t a job with training in Montréal, or Narnia for that matter. Nope. I have to stay right here. All my training is, on-the-job. The exhilarating thing about my job-related training is that I often land in the midst of it, as if I were dropped straight down a rabbit hole!

Recently, some fool in our house found a notice in the mailbox, it read:

            CARRIERS WANTED FOR DELIVERIES IN THIS AREA

            ADULTS – Great exercise, lose weight and pay off those credit cards.

            CHILDREN – Learn responsibility and earn extra money.

            FAMILIES – Great for family bonding, earn that vacation together.

That same fool placed it in the kitchen where the kids might notice it. The two youngest were enthused about the prospect of getting a job, and making money. They begged me to inquire. And, so I did.

The one who is married to the fool arrived home from work, and was bombarded by the enthusiasm of two kids who were prospecting about their first job. A job? Wow! They gave him their ten- and eleven-year-old version of the job. “All we have to do is deliver some flyers and we get a hundred and fifty dollars a month!”

He casually strolled into the kitchen as the kids peppered him with the details of their new adventure. There, he found the fool at the counter, sorting through the debris of family life. He placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Do you think this is a good idea?” he asked.

“Of course it is!” replied the fool, “It will be good for them to see how it feels to work and get paid. It will be exciting!”

The one married to the fool raised an eyebrow, and muttered, “I wonder who will be delivering the flyers after the first week.”

The fool?

That same fool has been known to sing or sigh the parenting mantra:

♫ ♪   There is no life like it. :(

Motherhood provides amazing opportunities: challenges, for which there are no training facilities; situations that no policy and procedure manual could possibly cover and (yes!) opportunities that will require self-sacrifice.

So, in the confines of my home, while my sister was cavorting with intellectual beings in Montréal, I was being debriefed on the nuances of delivering flyers…one hundred and twenty-seven of them.

The flyers arrived outside our garage on a snowy day; the temperature had peaked at -14 C. After school the kids loaded the bundles of flyers into our van. It filled the entire back section—with the seats down. (Okay, I thought…so the wagon is out.) I made the assumption that the flyers arrived bundled and ready to go.

On the night before our first run, our oldest son Fraser and his girlfriend Chelsea came over. The younger kids enthused about their new job. The optimism of Laurèn and Yohannes had perked an interest in their older sister Faven. So, all three kids were on board.  During the chatter, I heard Chelsea say, “We did flyers when we were kids too…the hardest part was sorting all of the flyers into packages.”

Wha…? Huh? Hold on.

The following morning I woke up with a gnawing anxiety. Was there a step that I had missed? I checked our distribution list, which listed the thirty-seven flyers that were in the bundles. Then I went to the van to check the contents of the bundles. Sure enough, there were three different bundles. My chest heaved. I carried all the bundles into the house; I sorted them into piles; I cut pieces of yarn to tie them up with, and I began the onerous task of sorting and stacking the flyers into bins and bags. Two hours later, after my second cup of coffee, I was not yet finished. I parceled out the packages of flyers into groups of ten; a bundle of ten (stuffed) flyers weighed twenty-seven pounds. I had moved over 300 pounds of paper (twice) that morning—and we hadn’t even begun the delivery!! 

The afternoon of our first delivery arrived. The temperature gauge had risen to a pleasant -1 C, however, the brisk easterly wind made it feel more like -15. We arrived at the beginning of our route just after 4:15 pm; we clambered out of the van. I gave each child a cart, filled with flyers, and a map. They looked at me, they looked at the map; they looked left, and then right—and then their whole bodies asked the unspoken question, now what?

I had overestimated my children’s abilities. Only one out of three could actually read a map. Another one was so distracted that the fast pace I had envisioned – disappeared like mist. It became apparent that I was quickly being demoted from foreman to front line worker. I grabbed a bag of flyers and we set off. Slowly, my map-reader got it, and I could release two of them to cover one street. My highly distracted (but most enthusiastic) worker kept wandering off task, and off road in every direction possible. Moreover, he had lost his map, and had become completely dependent on me.

And then, the unthinkable happened—the sun went down. My list, which was an 8 or 10 font, became completely unreadable to me. I became reliant on my wandering partner Yohannes. He read out the house numbers, and then we each had to memorize our numbers. As I walked along my section, chanting the house numbers out loud so that I would remember them, he yelled at me from his section, “Was it 56 or 46…or 34?”

Just when I was about to pitch headfirst into a snow bank and end it all – my husband’s little red car appeared, as if by magic. (I still have no idea how he found us—wandering in the dark, camouflaged in winter gear, miles from our house). He lowered the window and asked me if we needed any help. I was speechless. I admitted that I had lost the girls, but pointed in the direction that I had last seen them, and sent him to find them.

Almost two hours after we had left our house, we completed our route. Well, almost completed it; somehow we ended up being eleven flyers short. I wondered if that would be cause for dismissal.

In the end I guess I am the fool, but I am a fool with a plan. My plan is to assist and empower my kids in the hope that someday they will be responsible, independent, and proud. And ultimately, I hope that the day will come when they are standing in the freezing cold supporting their own child to do something of value.