Today I felt like a "real" mom. I was making cookies in the kitchen while the kids, all three of them, dismantled a cardboard box in the toy room. (They were building a "house", which happened to need skylights put in via plastic pliers, hammers, and rhythm sticks.)

"This is what normal people do," I thought, "instead of figuring out new ways to turn baking cookies into a lesson in fractions."

Math makes me feel guilty. I'm not math-phobic, actually made A's in math all the way up to Calculus for Scientists freshman year in college. (When I decided I had had enough math shoved down my throat, thank you very much, and dropped second semester for a class in creative writing. In retrospect, I probably would have gotten more out of knowing more math. Too many angsty nineteen year olds in the creative writing class.) I have a sort of layman's interest in math, in that I like to read books about mathematical history, as long as they don't have too many numbers in them.

So, no, math is not my strongpoint.

Therefore, I worry about math, particularly as my eldest -- who does seem to have an aptitude for it -- has absolutely no interest in it. He runs on obsessions, and his last obsession with numbers involved clocks and calendars when he was four. Since then, it's been all history, baby -- both the human and the natural kind. And since he's never been in school a day in his life, he has absolutely no patience with workbooks and can't imagine that anybody might really use them. So math tends to be a bit haphazard. If it doesn't have to do with dinosaurs, forget it, and he knows when I am making stuff up for the purposes of "teaching" him. (Was it Neil Postman who called it the "crap detector"? Anyway.)

Now I have heard about kids who have done no math until they're teenagers and then suddenly, when they have a reason for it, learn every scrap of lower and higher math they need to "graduate" in a couple of months. But I think that would give me a heart attack.

On the other hand, most of the math I remember is elementary-school math, sprinkled with a light dash of algebra. I still recall that there is such a thing as a quadratic formula, and I remember sitting there in class with the book open while this kid named Travis something-or-other sat beside me and tried to make me laugh, but I cannot for millions of dollars tell you what it is for, how it works, or anything else about it either. I can't tell you anything about most of the math I've had since the eighth grade, but for some reason I am having little twinges in my brain that I sometimes feel like stepping on because I have no time, and these twinges are telling me it might be fun to relearn all that math.

Yeah, that's what I said -- fun. For no other purpose than to learn math.

It's a combination of kids and characters that have done it, I think, because I worry about the kids, and I'm writing about a guy for whom math is kind of fun, and somehow I've gotten myself into a bit of plot which needs a fair amount of mathematical history. My subconscious having some fun with my ego there, I think, because it knows what kind of horrified gasps my ego is capable of making when it occurs to me the kind of research I will need to do to write the stories my subconscious dumps into my brain.

So, anyway, math, and me as the guniea pig. And now I am going to go paint some sugar cookies with this edible cookie paint I ordered for the kids. They wanted to play with the box, though, so now I get to paint all these cookies.

Hey, the mom-job can't be all work and no play, can it?