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        My pre-op appointment with the breast clinic is Monday.  My pre-op appointment with the plastic surgeon is the following Tuesday.  My surgery is that Friday.  Then I’ll have follow-ups with both.  While we wait, let me tell you one of my most favorite tutoring stories.

        Being a tutor, I have a unique position of being in my students’ homes and being a part of their families.  I get to know their pets, their siblings, their parents.  We usually tutor in the same place each session, limited to one table, one desk, one countertop, during the course of a student’s tutoring program.  Occasionally we’ll have to change locations to accommodate a cleaning crew, an older brother being home from college, a noisy baking project, or Mom’s using the dining room table this Sunday to sell small accessories to all of her lady friends.  

        Every so often I’ve had students who didn’t want to meet at their homes–usually because they have noisy siblings AND lots of pets–so we would meet in some public place, like the library or Starbucks or the conference room of Mom and Dad’s business.  But normally, it’s at the dining room table, the kitchen table, the table in the basement, or the desk in the office at the student’s home.

        This one student, EJ, was epic. So epic, in fact, I actually emailed this entire story to my program manager, preserving every detail.  Buckle up. 

        EJ was a student I had when I lived in Cobb County.  His mom signed him up for SAT tutoring to complete in preparation for a December 1st test.  She purchased an 18 hour program.  In November.  We had to squeeze 9 sessions into a 4 week period, avoiding Thanksgiving.  There was also a little confusion between the mom and my program manager that had to be smoothed out before tutoring even started, so I knew this one might be an interesting case.  Boy, was I right.

        I'm on my way to his house for our very first lesson, GPS on. It's about 20 minutes before our session and GPS says I'll get there about 13 minutes early, which is great because I'm thinking I can prepare myself before meeting EJ and his mom. As in sit in my car and breathe type of prepare.  

          As I'm driving, I get a text. EJ's mom wants to change the location to Kennesaw State University's library. Then she calls immediately. I tell her I got her message; I'll just have to adjust my GPS. She says they'll meet me out front, and "he" says parking is easy and there's no penalty on Sunday. I'm thinking the "he" that she's talking about is EJ. He must know about this place, and this must be a location he's comfortable/familiar with.

        I have to park in a "permit only" parking lot and trust that EJ and his mom know what they're talking about. I pull out my bag and start walking towards the building. I'm about 5 minutes early, so I just start messing with my phone. I look up every time someone walks close, but so far no mom with a son. It becomes exactly the time, so I text the mom to tell her that I'm sitting out front (in case they've gone into the building, I don't want her to think I'm late). They come walking up about 5 minutes later. "Here we go!" I think to myself. We introduce ourselves and she tells me "he" says the third floor is quiet. She asks at the desk how to get to the third floor, and this is where I get confused because I thought it was EJ that knew about this library and all the rules. Come to find out, none of us has ever been here, and it's some guy named "Darren" that has given EJ's mom this info.

        The third floor is dead silent with kids studying. I'm thinking there's no way we can do a session up here because we'll disturb everybody. So we find an empty group study room. Perfect!  

        Prior to meeting with a Test Prep student, he or she is supposed to enter the answers to their practice test.  That way, we’ll have something to review.  We’ll have a starting point.  Something to work with. Prior to our first meeting.  Prior to.  EJ had not done this yet.

        EJ sits down at the library study table to enter his test answers into his student portal but needs a Wi-Fi password. So mom goes downstairs to get the password. In the meantime I ask EJ all my background questions (what classes are you in? sports? hobbies? etc). Mom returns, and he starts working on entering answers. 

        Then Mom sat right down at the table with us.  It’s very unusual for a parent to sit in on an SAT tutoring session.  Maybe they’ll sit in the next room or go upstairs if we’re at their home.  This lady sat right next to EJ.  Across from me.

        She then proceeds to pull out a piece of cake.  Like a saran-wrapped piece of cake.  From her pocket. She unwraps it and starts pinching pieces off with her fingers.  She held it across the table.  “Take a piece.”

        I try not to look horrified. “Oh, no thank you.”

        EJ’s mom is offended. “You’d better get you a piece of my mama’s cake!  She makes the best cakes and I went all the way down to Florida to get this cake!  This may be the only time in your life that you’ll ever get to have one of Miss Annie’s cakes–you can’t pass this up!  Take you a pinch.”

        Ok, there are so many things majorly wrong here.  First of all, it’s a cake she pulled out of her pocket.  It’s from Florida.  Did she ride the whole way from Florida to Georgia with this cake in her pocket? I have so many questions!  This is pre-pandemic.  I don’t have a pandemic to blame for refusing her pocket-cake.  I’m a little spooked as to what the cake might do to me, but I’m more spooked about what she might do if I refuse to eat Miss Annie’s pocket cake from Florida.  

        I decide I'll take the bait. When in Rome, right? So I take a small pinch. It's a pound cake. Just a pound cake. I tell her it's really amazing, no I don't want anymore, but yes it's really good. We get into scheduling and put the remaining eight dates on the calendar, working around Thanksgiving and repeating each day and time about four times so there's no confusion. EJ just finishes entering answers, we've got all our stuff pulled out on the table, including the cake, and a group shows up who actually have reserved the room. So we pack up. As we leave the study room, EJ's mom asks them "how do you know the room is reserved?" The KSU student says "you go online and sign up." Poor girl is awkwardly holding a ginormous project as she patiently waits for us to exit the study room. Oops.

        We proceed to walk around the silent 3rd floor to find another place to plop. We finally come across a group study room that doesn't need a reservation, but does have two groups in it already that are a little loud but not too bad. EJ suddenly has a splitting headache. I go into my spiel and tell him we'll start with whatever he'd like to start with, and that normally we'd start with questions about the practice test but seeing that he's hurting, we can start with something easier. He admits that NEXT time he'd like to go over the "impossible" math questions, but not today. Mind you, his mom is sitting with us this whole time interjecting as she sees fit. She starts digging through her purse and pulls a blue pill out of her wallet (not a pill bottle or packet or container--her wallet) and hands it to EJ. "Here baby, for your headache." EJ gladly takes it--I could see the headache on his face and kept thinking "no wonder...with a mom like that"...he must get a lot of headaches. Poor kid.

        He decides the easier math will be a good start. Perfect. Once we get to the table of contents, I tell him to scan the list and let me know where he thinks we should start (because it starts with arithmetic and prime numbers, etc, and usually we can skip some of that stuff). His mom pipes up: "didn't the practice test tell you what he needs to work on?" She grabs EJ’s tablet and tries to interpret the results. I ignore her at this point and let her explore the results herself. 

        Suddenly EJ grabs his throat saying "mom, what did you give me? My throat! It hurts!" She gets a look of "uh..." and tells him she'll grab him a Coke. He says "just water please," as he clasps his throat.

         "Are you ok?" I ask. He says it just made his throat hurt really badly. I ask him if he's having an allergic reaction, and he says he hopes not. Awesome.  Mom brings some water. Let's continue with the lesson.

        As EJ is working, his mom spreads out a TON of college brochures across the entire table looking like she's running a booth at a college fair. She asks me where I'm from. I tell her my family is from Indiana, but I've never actually lived there. She asks if I was conceived there. What?!? WHO asks that?! 

        Then, she's looking at the clock above my head (which hadn't been changed for time-change) and informs me that it's 6:30 already, do I need to go? I tell her it's only 5:30. She starts laughing saying she was debating whether or not to tell me that we were 30 minutes over because she feels like we hadn't done much yet. Awesome. She was going to let me stay late without telling me. On that note, she says she's going to go for a walk. ‘Thank goodness,’ I think. Let us be.

        When the lesson time comes to an end, EJ's mom is suddenly nowhere to be found. EJ doesn’t have a phone, so he has to use my phone to call her. She says to meet her out front. I'm thinking, wow. We have to pack all her stuff up and go find her out front. Mind you, I scheduled a student right after, so I have places to be, people to meet. But with EJ not having a phone, I do want to make sure he finds his mom. 

        So we pack up his mom's FOUR bags of stuff and haul it downstairs. I make a little joke "your mom packs like me!" to keep things positive. We go out front. EJ's mom is nowhere to be found. We have to call her again, but this time my phone isn't getting service. We wait a minute or two and she finally appears. As we're walking to the parking lot (praying that my car is still there with no ticket or boot since it's a permit only lot), she says "maybe next time we'll meet at Switzer library in Marietta." Oh Lord. That library is 20 minutes away from here in a whole other town.  This woman has no idea what she’s doing to my schedule!

        As we squoze all of our sessions in over the following weeks, the adventures continued. Every single lesson got moved to a different location either by suggestion or necessity. The second lesson, the mom switched the location so many times that she literally wrote "final location" in the last text (all I could think of was that game show that the contestants say "final answer"). The third lesson got moved because the location was closed. The next lesson was in a predictable place, but I had to run out and move my car for fear of towing. Then, one time we met at the college, but not only was the library closed, ALL the buildings were closed! EJ's mom actually suggested we meet outside one time because she had "an event" to go to and needed to drop him off. Outside. Thankfully we found an indoor location. One night we met at the tiniest library I've ever seen. The two tables that were there were full right up until the very minute we started (thank goodness!). 

        After those first couple sessions, EJ started showing up to lessons on his bike.  All those different locations.  All different mileages from his house.  On his bike.  He told me he had gotten quite adept with his bike because his mom would drop him off with his bike in random places and make him find his way home.  They lived in Kennesaw.  She has dropped him off in Atlanta before.  He’s had to bike home from the airport before.  They had flown in from Florida (visiting Grandma Annie and her pocket poundcake presumably), and his mom was hopping on another flight to New York City for the night. Poor EJ.

        About two weeks after EJ took his SAT, my program manager called me.  “Don’t answer any of EJ’s mom’s phone calls or emails.  Completely cut communication. She tried to put a voodoo hex on my unborn children.”  What the what??

        Apparently cramming 9 sessions into 4 weeks didn’t provide EJ with a score that EJ’s mom was trying to get (she wanted him to have at least a 1400, but he was at a 1200–if we had more time, he would have increased his score more, but not in the limited time we had).  So she threatened a voodoo hex on my program manager’s future children.  

        Now, I’m not sure how this makes me feel about the pocket cake.  Has it protected me?  Has it cursed me?  I guess I may never know.  And I’ll never know if my program manager’s future children were truly hexed because she eventually DID get pregnant, but quit working when the baby was getting ready to be born.  So many unanswered questions!

 

 

Edited to add update:  I forgot EJ’s mom’s name is that of an instrument.  Like Tamborine.  Or Piano.  I found more old emails back and forth from my program manager. I forgot about all the trouble that woman put us through BEFORE tutoring even started.  We should have known.

I looked her up on FaceBook.  She doesn’t go by her actual instrument name, but instead simply by “Cap.” It lists her occupations as a “License Therapist” (does she provide therapy for licenses?  Does she use your license to provide you with therapy?  Again, so many questions!), “Dating & Marriage Specialist,” and “Speaker.”  Was she specializing in Dating when she flew to New York for one night, abandoning her 16-year-old at the airport? You’d think if she was being a “Speaker” she would have planned better for her kid to get home.  This was a spur-of-the-moment kind of hop on a plane to New York.

On her FB page, she has a video of herself riding a stationary bike.  Highlighting her cleavage and crotch.  I find this very ironic, considering EJ’s bike riding adventures.  She also has a webinar addressing “Do men really want submissive women?”  I can’t find much about EJ, except a picture at her birthday celebration.  He has a FB page with not much public stuff on it.  It does say that he left high school in 2019.  Not that he graduated, but that he left.  I found a picture of him in a cap and gown, so I know he graduated, and it looks like it was college.  He also has his own moving company that he’s advertising on Nextdoor.  I wonder if he does it with his bike.