2001-10-24-8:01 p.m.

I wish moms got report cards.

I wish that, every six weeks I could know how I was doing in all the different mom categories: Discipline, guidance, love, teaching, nutrition, friendship. I think there must be about a hundred more but there's probably not room on the report card.

It would be nice to have a little feedback, to hear, yes, you're on the right track, you have very nice study habits and you'll probably be in the top ten percent of your class if you keep this up. Or - you're going to have to start writing down the examples from the board and turning in more homework - your grade is slipping.

It seems like you finish raising your kids and then when you're at the family reunion and you're sitting in your travel trailer one of your cousins comes over and plays dominoes with your husband and some more cousins outside on the picnic table and says out of the blue, you guys did a real good job with your kids. Or maybe you never hear that. That's how you find out how you did. But if you find out somehow while you're in your travel trailer that you weren't doing things right all those years, then it's too late. You can't sign up for school again and swear you'll study hard this time. They don't take old people like you.

If I got a report card I think I'd be afraid to look at it at first. I remember when I used to get report cards in school I'd pull it out of the envelope real slow until I could see the first grade. I'd adjust to that and then pull it out a little more until, finally, I knew what I made in every class. I'd be a little sick to my stomach if I'd made a bad grade in anything, but I'd just make up my mind to do better next time. Then I'd let out a deep breath and slide my report card back in to go show my parents. I think I'd be like that if I got a Mom Report Card, too.

Love is real important. You have to have that subject to go on to higher education. You'll never make it out there without a good grade in that one. I don't want my kids on Oprah when they're in their thirties and forties telling the world how unloved they felt as children. How their mom didn't pay enough attention to them or read to them enough. Or that they got yelled at too much when they pulled all their clothes off the hangers for the sixteenth time when they were three.

I think the others are important, too, but I'd be real sick to my stomach if I got a bad grade in love.

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