How to Sink a Stepmother in Two School Projects or Less

By Jennifer Worrell

As a second grade teacher, I remember planning ways to torture parents improve student learning with monthly projects. I assigned salt dough maps, egg biographies, dioramas, and model projects to propel parents off the deep end my children’s education to the highest possible level. I then married a man with children enrolled in my school and had to figure out how to complete my own horseshit assignments.

My first project as a new stepmother was a salt dough map of Virginia. As my stepson and I rolled out the dough, I fantasized about how kick-ass myBig T’s map would look. When I tried to cut out the Eastern Shore, the dough rose up around the blade and flipped me the bird. I muddled my way through, overlapping stuck pieces of dough until the Virginia that I created resembled some sort of triangular-shaped vagina completely wrecked by multiple childbirths.

“That looks like shit,” my husband helpfully noted.

“Do it yourself then,” I said, handing him the knife. He made one weak attempt at cutting the dough.

“Screw this,” he said. My husband took the paper template and headed for the barn and his tools. When he returned, he held a piece of wood shaped like Virginia.

“Behold,” he said. “the map.”

“But, Daddy,” Big T. whined, “it has to be made from salt dough, not wood!”

“We’ll cover the wood in salt dough—it’ll be perfect,” my husband said. Within the hour, we had created the most amazing topographical map of Virginia in the history of fourth grade. We kept Virginia, Not Vagina displayed on our stair landing for two years. My stepdaughter, Big A. turned it in when she hit fourth grade.

The next month my grade two teaching team assigned the egg biography project. All the parents kids would blow out an egg and decorate it to represent the famous person they were studying. My stepdaughter decided she would learn all about Martin Luther King. I brought home twenty-four eggs. I figured I’d have to blow them all to get one good head.

Girlie peered into the egg cartons and glared at me. “These are white eggs.”

“Yeah, so?” I asked.

“I’m doing my report on Martin Luther King,” she said. “White eggs won’t work.”

Shit. Now the proud owner of 48 multi-racial eggs, I started blowing. Eighteen eggs later, my kitchen looked like the front porch of a no-candy-giving-asshole on Halloween night. I did finally succeed on number 19.

“Good job, Jenn,” Big A. nodded. “Proud of you.”

“How are we going to decorate ole’ Martin?” I asked, lightheaded.

She shrugged.

“Let’s head upstairs and see if we can find some Ken clothes for him,” I said.

Naked Barbie and Ken dolls littered the floor of her room in a veritable Mattel orgy.

“Where, for the love of all that’s holy, are all their clothes?” I inquired.

“Let’s look under my bed,” she said. She lay on her stomach and inched her way beneath her bed. Shoes, stuffed animals, a microphone, lone socks, three moldy cookies, and two of my bras flew out.

Both bras were old, and the underwire was poking out from the side of one. The other had random detritus from beneath her bed attached to it.

“Care to explain this?” I asked, holding the cleaner one up. Big A. clammed up. I sighed.

“Next time you want to see how you look with boobs, ask first, ‘k?” I asked. She nodded slowly.

I bent down to see what was attached to my other bra and found a little pair of Ken-sized brown pants stuck in the hooks.

“Look!” I cried. “Martin has britches!!!”

I picked up an errant tennis shoe.  I heard something rattle inside the shoe and found a nifty pair of G.I. Joe boots. A little hat sat on top of the pile.

“Perfect!” I cried.

With Dr. King’s wardrobe collected, we could then assemble our hero. With his Sharpie eyes, nose, and mouth, and his pants, hat, and boots glued into place, Martin the Egg looked quite smashing.

I finished cleaning the kitchen sometime around midnight. I dragged my bleary butt into my colleagues’ rooms the next morning.

“As I stand here before you all,” I decreed, “I will freeze my tits off in hell before I assign myself another one of my flarking projects.”

Jennifer Worrell

Jennifer Worrell is a mom and stepmom, hoisting her sagging tits every day and bridging the generation gap between her four kids, ages one, four, nineteen, and twenty. She’s an aspiring novelist who sucks at cooking and cleaning. She does, however, do pretty well in the sack as evidenced by the satiated husband who thought he was done changing shitty diapers. Check her writing out at http://jenniferworrell.wordpress.com/. You can find her on Twitter @jennwrites.