4H was no fun

Early in the fourth grade, my mother asked me if I was interested in joining 4H. When she asked me, I didn't really have a response. I just figured if I didn't answer the question, she would forget all about it. I was wrong.

One night, she told me she was taking me to a 4H meeting. I told her I didn't want to join. She told me that because I didn't say anything in the first place, that meant I was joining.

They showed me a list of projects I could take part in. The only one that interested me was Photography. I knew this meant that my parents were going to have to let me touch the camera. So I got the 4H booklet and learned how to take pictures with our camera. I took a few pictures, nothing really special.

One thing no one told us during the entire year was that the goal of these projects was to enter things into the county fair. I guess someone eventually told my Mom that I was required to get presentations ready for entry and we only had two weeks to do them.

Almost none of the pictures I took during the year were going to work. We had to do certain categories of pictures and we had to run out and take them ASAP because it took a week for pictures to get developed back then. I had to do three-photo stories, pictures of landscapes, buildings and animals. Then I had to put everything together in these folders so that the judges could view them.

It was irritating because I never wanted to be a part of it in the first place and now, Mom was mad at me because none of this stuff got done. No one told me I was supposed to enter photos in the fair. The one thing I didn't understand was if there was supposed to be some consequence for not taking part. I think that we would have been just fine not competing, considering we were not ready.

Things really came to a boil when I was filling out the 4H forms and putting things together. We had all these papers, pictures and things used to create the presentations all over the place. Mom kept telling me to what to write where and I wasn't understanding what was supposed to be going on. Mom got so frustrated that she kept smacking my head with a plastic ruler until it broke. Many years later, she expressed regret for over-reacting like that, especially considering that it wasn't my fault.

I stayed in 4H two more years. While they were nowhere near as hectic as that first year, we always faced some sort of crunch two weeks before the county fair. I was done with that nonsense when it became clear I would have the same issue every year.