The Easy Button

My good friend Renai and I were commiserating the other day about the trials of 21st-century school selection. Gone, for us modern mamas, are the days when you packed a peanut- butter sandwich in a Holly Hobby lunch box and sent your child off to the school down the street. Now we have School Choice. Which means we have to choose: Public school, private school, neighborhood school, magnet school, charter school, home school, even un-school.

Can we afford private school? (No.) Can we get financial aid? (The answer for me, after turning over more paperwork for preschool than I did for grad school: No.) So, charter school? Magnet school? For magnets, you're supposed to attend the Choice Fair to learn about your options. Then you have to go to open houses at each of the schools you might be interested in. I thought open house meant a chat with the principal and a peek into some classrooms. Um, no.

Tuesday I spent an hour and a half at a school taking in a Power Point presentation. Listening to gifted kids describe their day. Participating in a Q&A with a panel of teachers. Hearing from the “enrichments” specialists (who were called art and music teachers in my day). Listening to the school band—the elementary school band—play three selections. (Three.) Walking down halls where outside each classroom door is the teacher’s name and the name of the college(s) from which she or he graduated. (As if the teacher’s alumni status would matter to my child who will be five when she enrolls.)

That’s if she enrolls. Because, this being a “choice” school, we have to fill out an application, participate in a lottery and wait to see if we’re selected. So, after having participated in the exhausting process of exploring all my options and making the very best possible choice for my child—I have, in fact, no choice in whether she attends the school or not. (Of course, if she doesn’t “win” the lottery, she can go to her neighborhood school. In which case we’ll have to choose whether she should go to the year-round school or the traditional school….)

What I want to know is this: Where is the easy button?

Why has everything gotten so complicated? I don’t mean just the school stuff. Right now I’ve got to make choices about my career, about what kind of car to buy, about which contractor should build the French drain in my yard, even about marriage. (We think of marriage as being a choice you make once, but I’m learning that even that is a choice I have to keep making over and over again.) And each decision seems to require research, reading, evaluation, pricing things out, mulling things over and double-checking your facts.

Some things—like where your kid should go to school—warrants a bit of research and rumination. But so many other things just aren’t worth the effort. How much time did I spend in the baking goods aisle the other day trying to decide whether to buy natural sugar, organic sugar, free-trade sugar, dried sugar cane or to go to the nearest Harris Teeter for a bag plain old Dixie Crystals?

Sometimes the choices are difficult because we don’t make the one choice that could make things easier: The choice to simplify. Choosing to join the one committee that you feel passionate about instead of spreading yourself over too many obligations. Letting the kid play in the yard instead of signing her up for nine different extra-curriculars. Skipping the obligatory luncheon. Letting Saturday actually be a day off.

What would be wrong with choosing the thing that is simpler but just-as-good? The evening I bought a rotisserie chicken and served a bagged salad for dinner with my friend, I had just as nice a time as I did at last year’s multi-course brunch for 30 on New Year’s morning. (In fact, the impromptu chicken dinner was probably nicer because my back wasn’t aching from standing up washing collard greens until after midnight the day before.)

If you’re not careful, doing the easy thing can seem like cheating. We think we're supposed to do the thing that takes the most effort, the most time and the most life blood in order to prove that we’re doing our all and giving our best. Hey, I don’t have anything against doing the best you can. But sometimes—probably most times—what we do best is what we do with the most ease. Sometimes we need to give ourselves a break, see the rat race for what it is and take the easy way out.