Covert Mom: Don’t Know Much About Algebra

By Mariah Mottley

My daughter needed help with her math homework. Her father, the natural choice, had been rendered useless by an auditing deadline. I left the groceries in their bags by the fridge; school is important to her. She led me into the dining room and handed me the math homework.
“You’re going to hate me,” I said, glancing at the sheet.

Math expressions that needed to be simplified. Christ. My brain downshifted, whining in anticipation of a heavy load. My academic career had been limited by my difficulty in learning arithmetic, measuring time, and comprehending spatial relationships. Dyscalculia left me tardy, accident prone, and a perennial failer of math tests. Bela had made some mistakes. I picked up my pencil.

“Mom, do you understand the directions?” she said.
“Not really,” I said.
“Dad never starts the problems until he understands the questions,” she noted.
I shrugged. “You can’t let that stop you.”

I erased all the stuff she’d tried. She had incorrectly added two negative numbers and had failed to distribute the negative outside of a parenthesis. You can’t tell her how to do anything, this kid. She knows it all. And here I was with my bad sword hand. I felt a headache come on and fought a sudden urge to read People magazine.

“Let’s start with a clean sheet of paper,” I suggested, the phrase reminding me of white Tic Tacs, and the way my bus pass got rolled up and dirty along the edge where it stuck out of my wallet. A memory I couldn’t place. Grade school.

My daughter handed us both some fresh looseleaf.
“Show me what you got,” I said.
She didn’t move. She had no idea where to start.
“Start with what’s inside the parentheses. Distribute the negative.” I used my pencil to point. “See? Switch the signs on both of them. Now write the new values on the line below.”

We scribbled in tandem. She had combined 5x and -3x incorrectly, trying to get fancy.
“Just make one change at a time,” I advised. “This is about learning the process, not the result. The whole rest of your life, you’re going to be doing equations, and you need to be able to simplify in your sleep if you want to do real math.”
She doesn’t have dyscalculia; she was born for a career in STEM.

For once, she didn’t give me any lip but just sat, scratching away with her pencil. I waited until she looked up.
“Now we’re going to combine terms. All my x’s, I’m going to put them together, and all my regular numbers. Plus, minus, whatever.”
We went through every problem. Again and again, I repeated my directions, never varying them. Bela is smart at math. Scary smart, like her Dad. She has a feeling for three-dimensional space, too.

But she hasn’t learned to work through failure; she doesn’t know that she doesn’t know. I could tell she couldn’t believe how many problems we were doing, kept stealing glances at me to see if I would keep going. I did. We hit the next section. She tried to cram another problem on the bottom of the page, but there wasn’t room.
“Let’s start with a clean sheet of paper,” I offered again.

This time I placed the memory. In 6th grade, I was so behind in math that I had to get up early every Thursday to meet my tutor, Hugh. He drank coffee out of a Thermos, had halitosis and eyebrows that hung down in front of his eyes. I brought him my tangled problem sets, scratched on pages cloudy with eraser marks. After reviewing my hieroglyphs, Hugh would sigh a fetid breath, take a sip from his Thermos, and regard the playground outside the leaded glass window.
“Let’s start with a clean sheet of paper,” he would say.

Math never got easy for me. I had wanted to go to medical school, to veterinary school, but couldn’t maintain the grades. But Bela might. She’s got the goods.
She paused, pencil in her mouth, wanting to save the rest for later.
“Nope,” I said. “You’re laying math code down in your brain. Knock that set out now.”

She did, successfully managing to distribute the negative sign this time. I nodded my approval.
“Mom, you are so much better at this than Daddy.” She skipped upstairs, her anxiety gone.
I sat at the table for a long time, doing the math on how my failures could add up to her success. Redemption comes in strange ways when you are a parent.
– – –
Originally from Manhattan, Mariah was educated in Massachusetts, Montana and Texas, often by failure. She lives with her husband and three children in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Mariah can be reached at mariah@mariahmottley.com.