Whose Exam is it, BTW?

I have developed this ritual of getting together with my ‘women friends’ every now and then for a chill out session. Initially the rationale was to let our hair down, forget all our domestic and on-job ordeals, and concentrate on doing something unusual. However, in a couple of months it frizzled down to swapping domestic help horror stories and invariably, the parenting nightmares.

This month though when I set about emailing and messaging the friends about our usual ‘chill-out session’, what I got in answer fazed me. The SMSs slowly filtered in, ‘Sorry, d kids r havin xams…’, ‘r u crazy honey, dis is exam time…’ and ‘we r busy now with exams, c u next mth …’

Oops! Whose exams? The kids’ or the moms’?

It is indeed amazing that lives are becoming so much children-focused and exam-centric. Children are getting stressed in schools, under pressure to perform well in studies and activities. Somehow, this pressure is communicating to us parents. So exam time means time-outs for Moms, when they abstain from social activities and organize their schedule to fit in their roles of child-sitters and study facilitators.

No wonder that more than 70 % of student counseling is just before exams, and the time spent on counseling parents outweighs that on the children!

It was disappointing though, that our ‘girlie meet’ was called off. I was myself looking forward to a break from the state of anarchism reigning in the house. After all, it is September, the time of school mid-term assessments and project submissions, and I do have a school-going child as well!

This; even though, I do not involve myself in the child’s studies, am not a regular diary and copy scrutinizer or habitual test paper dissector. In fact, I make an effort to stock up on my child’s (story book/magazine) reading requirements and ensure a fair share in computer-time. Yet, I still feel the need to go on a Mall-shopping spree or walk into the movie being screened.

It has always been easy to offer advice to other parents, even sometimes scoff at their hyper ways. Maybe this ‘exam thing’ is like smoking. The latter affects the actual smoker, passive smokers and pollutes the environment as well. The manner in which the education system has evolved in India, has turned exams into burdens. These burdens bulldoze the child for optimum performance, stress parents who view this as a report card of their parental feats and even, affect people like me, who try as they might not to, still get bogged down into this examination quagmire.

I think I will take my mother out to lunch, maybe she will give me a tip or two, coz I have a hunch I am headed for a burnout.