Officially qualified to “parent”

I finally got around to doing the state-mandated parenting class today. The idea of a state-mandated class for divorcing parents is, I suppose, good in the long run, or else they wouldn’t be putting all these resources into it, but the fact of being forced to sit in a classroom for two and a half hours is easy to resent. Like traffic school.* And I had it easy – I’m not a smoker, deprived of nicotine for that long, and I live right here in town. People over in Florence would have to drive an hour each direction, and it’s possible to get more remote than that within our county. Nevertheless, I don’t even like sitting in one place for two hours to watch a movie, so I wasn’t enthusiastic.

Since one of my colleagues had given me the DVD for the parenting-after-divorce program she’d made, I spent some time doing that in June, hoping that my certificate of completion would be sufficient to get me out of the obligation. Nope, I learned after the fact that that would only work if I lived out of state. So much for special snowflakiness – I bit the bullet and signed up for today’s class. I brought food, lots of paper, and a new crochet project (using yarn given to me years ago by sapphira_altair). And I endured the two and a half hours... most of which consisted of watching snippets of that same DVD program. Glad to be done with that!

* Not that I’ve done traffic school. But I did get to work in the Oakland Zoo for two days for keeping my car registered in Oregon.