But back to homework. The real pisser was that that night I’d arrived home at seven thirty p.m., after leaving the house at four a.m., to find Buff with his feet nonchalantly propped up on the desk while the kids were running wild. Seriously. Casey was behaving nearly normally (for her), but Cole had placed Scotch tape over his mouth and eyes and was navigating the spiral staircase in a pair of slippery socks. For crying out loud, the only thing missing was a knife between his lips!

And when I tried to ask Buff in a calm voice if the homework had been done, his reply was: “They told me it was.”

At which point I began to lose what little mind I had left. “Buff,” I said in what I hoped was a more than-stern-get-your-damn-feet-down-off-the-desk-and-listen voice. “You cannot ask if the homework is done. You have to check it—much the way our government asks rogue nations if they have nuclear weapons, and even then the CIA still has to verify. If there’s one thing you ought to know by now, it’s that you can never take your own children’s word at face value whenever the topic is homework.”

Because Buff is not a good-enough mother like yours truly, he gave me his typical response to the aforementioned more-than-stern-get-your-damn-feet-down-off-the-desk-and-listen voice.

He shrugged.

So I schlepped over to the kids’ backpacks to fish for the homework. I already knew what I would find: homework so incomplete it would undoubtedly receive an I for a grade. Casey hadn’t done her sketch of the moon, which had been her assignment for the previous three heavily overcast days, but her excuse was at least valid—the clouds had gotten in her way.

Cole couldn’t blame his undone spelling list on the clouds. Worse, stuck to his paper was the dreaded note from the teacher.

I’m afraid to say that my response was not pretty.

Buff finally removed his tootsies from the desk, and went stomping off in search of his favorite loungewear. Never mind that his favorite loungewear is a ratty velour sweat suit. Buff knew he’d messed up. The week before, I’d explained to him (for the umpteenth time) that if Cole got bad reports from school, or didn’t finish his homework, the TV had to stay off. Naturally, at the time, Buff had been in complete and total agreement with me.

But tonight, when the buck had stopped with Buff, he’d totally dropped the ball. He hadn’t even glanced at the homework—if he had, he’d have seen the dreaded note.

And Cole would not have already consumed several hours of television he’d known he wasn’t supposed to be watching.

Now, I need to make it clear that when I examine the homework, I don’t literally correct my kids’ mistakes. If I see a lot of errors, however, I’ll sit down with them and make some helpful suggestions for corrections and gently explain what might have been confusing or done too quickly. Casey and Cole know that I never make excuses for them if their homework hasn’t been done properly. (Of course, I never, ever do the fractions, and wouldn’t even if I knew how!)

That’s because I’m busy placing a certain ratty velour sweat suit on a makeshift funeral pyre in the backyard.

Seriously, though, it is easier to deal with the homework when there’s a routine. Children thrive on a regular schedule, and I started small with Casey and Cole. They get home from school, put down their backpacks (okay, fling them down with a sigh and a thump is more like it), have a snack, decompress for a while, and then they know it’s time for homework. It’s especially crucial to set up a schedule similar to this one (and it can be pushed back till after dinner if there are after-school activities) when kids are young, because it instills in them the knowledge that homework is a given, and that it must be done. The deeper the homework habit is entrenched, the easier homework will be to manage when kids reach middle and high school and the pressures and demands of homework become far more intense.

One problem I need to stay on top of is that Cole wants to do the homework only for subjects he likes. Getting him to do the rest can degenerate into a battle. He has a real aptitude for math, which delights me because I have fewer fractions to worry about, but his spelling and reading assignments can be tough. I explain to him that grown-ups often have to deal with the same situation at work. For instance, I sometimes have to report on something I’m not totally passionate about, but I need to do it with the same level of enthusiasm and professionalism as I would for a topic I’m thrilled by. He understands that, of course, but it doesn’t make the grumbling any less annoying!

I really am strict about no TV or computer time until the homework is done and I’ve inspected it. But when the weather is nice, I don’t insist that Casey and Cole do their homework the minute they walk in the door after school. In fact, I kick them right back out again, to go play in the big backyard for an hour or so before coming back in to tackle the work. That’s what the yard is there for, and after being cooped up in classes all day, it does their bodies (and minds) good to get out and run around and scream and shout and throw some balls with Olivia.

This is something I learned from my mother. Since we grew up in California, where the weather was usually lovely, Mom insisted that we get our homework done as quickly as possible, so my sister and I had the rest of the afternoon to play outside with our friends, or hang out, or read, or drive our mother crazy.

One thing that drives this mother crazy is school projects. I don’t mind helping Casey and Cole put things together once they’ve conceptualized the project, but I do mind that other parents are so determined to impress the teacher that they end up doing all the work themselves. (You know, decorating the projects with Sistine Chapel–worthy paintings, hand-looming a blanket, building a Noah’s ark out of toothpicks and cedar shavings, tatting lace, or cultivating a few bonsai atop a miniature lily pond stocked with baby koi.)

For a Valentine’s Day project last year, Casey needed to decorate a shoe box to hold her valentine cards. We found a terrific box and she and I got this ridiculous idea of covering the entire box in crepe paper. After spending the next five hours covering a scant quarter of the box, I asked myself for the umpteenth time why we couldn’t have come up with a better way. (I loved doing the project together, but, well, five hours with crepe paper is about four too many.)

Luckily, I thought, Cole only had to do a shoe-box lunch for his Valentine’s Day project. Shoe-box lunches sound simple, but they often aren’t. Each student picks a name of a classmate out of a hat, and then has to bring in either a shoebox or a metal lunch box decorated with something the classmate likes, along with his or her favorite food and drink tucked inside.

Cole’s recipient was a soccer player, so I went online to buy a soccer-themed lunch box. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Cole told me about this Valentine’s Day project only three days before it was due (and, naturally, over the weekend), so I had to pay for extra shipping to get the specific lunch box in time. A four-dollar lunch box ended up costing forty.

Don’t even get me started on the dreaded dioramas. My heart usually sinks when I hear that one has been assigned, not only because by the time I get home from work my brain cells either are on strike or are fried to a crisp—and I often find it hard to help Cole come up with something fanciful and complicated at a moment’s notice—but also because this assignment can degenerate into a snarky competition among the parents, each trying to outdo the other with the sophistication of their conceptualizing and the rarity of the materials. There’s no way I can compete with the parents who have  time to comb eBay for one-of-a-kind items—such as miniature Hummers or porcelain dolls with dresses handcrafted by Lithuanian seamstresses—in order to build perfect, museum-quality dioramas.

Plus, I am adamant that I will not do all of my kids’ work for them.

Nor, truth be told, do I want to. Children need to know that the power of their own imagination is far more potent and fascinating than any designer-labeled item their parents can scrounge around for or score for them. They should be dreaming up ideas for their dioramas on their own, to be built with their own hands from materials they can easily procure on a limited budget (if that). But this becomes next to impossible when their projects are judged against the well-financed, architecturally blueprinted projects created by parents. I don’t want my children to feel inadequate when their lovingly homemade projects are deemed inferior because the rules of the competition are unfairly rigged against them, but I have as yet been unable to convince the teachers to state unequivocally that parental guidance and hands-on assistance is forbidden.

So when Cole once “forgot” to tell me he had to do a dreaded diorama of a fairy tale (he’d chosen Jack and the Beanstalk), it nearly did me in.

Off we drove to the local supersize drugstore, my mind racing with ideas of how to cram a little Jack and a giant Giant into the shoe box of the dreaded diorama as I made Cole think aloud about ideas. The only thing at the store that could possibly pose as Jack was a small green soldier, but he was holding a machine gun. I shuddered and put him back on the shelf. Then after another twenty minutes of searching, we found another character, but he was too big to be Jack, so we decided he’d be a good giant. After more fruitless searching, it was back to the machine-gun-toting soldier.

“Mommy, it’s fine,” Cole said. “Let’s just get something green to be the bean stalk.”

Right. When Buff got home, he heard the entire story, took one look at my face, and then went out into the backyard with an anxious Cole and dug up a piece of turf with an enormous weed growing in it. When Cole saw that, he was thrilled, and knew exactly what to do with it.

Voilà, the dreaded diorama—a gun-wielding psycho Jack, a large stuffed Giant, and a weed for a bean stalk. And it cost only a couple of bucks. It looked, well, unique. Cole was thrilled that both his parents had helped him construct it—but more important, he learned that no matter what his diorama  looked like in comparison to the psycho-free shoe boxes of his classmates, he’d done most of it himself. He was proud of his efforts and he knew we were proud of it.

Fortunately, the dreaded dioramas don’t get assigned all that often, but daily homework does. I know there’s a lot of vociferous debate about kids being given endless hours of sometimes numbingly repetitious busy work and homework, but in our school district I don’t find Casey and Cole overburdened—yet. Casey doesn’t mind doing homework—in fact, she likes it. She’s an even more voracious reader than I was at her age. Whenever I take her to a bookstore, she wants to move in. Cole, on the other hand, wants to buy books only if they come with a toy. Motivating him to get the homework done, or to read for pleasure, is much more of a struggle. I’m riding him like the Romans rode Spartacus.

Which is why I was so surprised one night when I was relaxing with the kids and Casey handed me her notebook to sign. I was full of pride as I went over the things she’d accomplished, but my bubble quickly burst when I saw an item she was supposed to bring to school. A gallon.

A gallon of what? Milk? Spit? Paint? I had no idea. Worse, Casey didn’t either. She was nearly in tears, since she so rarely forgets anything, and was becoming increasingly upset at the thought of not fulfilling an assignment. Normally, of course, I would have made her suffer the consequences of her forgetfulness, but a good-enough mother knows when to forgive a legitimate oversight and deal with it as best she can on the spur of the moment.

So although both of us were half-asleep, we spent the next half hour searching the house until we realized we didn’t even have a gallon. Of anything.

Casey’s tears began to flow in earnest, and I kissed them away and told her to go to sleep and not to worry. Although she knew the rule—that she is responsible for reading all the notes in her backpack and has to face the consequences if something doesn’t get done—in this case I would make an exception because she’d made a genuinely honest mistake.

A good-enough mother always knows when to bend the rules.

The only thing I could find on my way out the door at 4:10 the next morning was a half-filled half gallon carton of skim milk. So, what did I do? Dumped out the milk (mercifully there was another half gallon in the fridge), rinsed the carton three times, and compromised. A half gallon was better than none.

There. Crisis averted.

Just don’t ask me to add one half and three quarters.

Excerpted from "Good Enough Mother" by René Syler. Copyright ©2007. Excerpted by permission of Simon Spotlight Entertainment. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher

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