Supermodel As Far as Homework

Here's something I never thought I'd say: On behalf of all women, God bless you, Christie Brinkley.

Sure, you've made us feel fat and unsmiley by comparison for, oh, a generation. Or two. You've made us hate our relatively non-bouncy hair. And you've made a lot of extremely ordinary, even sub-ordinary, men think that they should keep shopping around for a beaming, busty blonde who never ages, frowns or is seen schlepping a Duane Reade bag. But all is forgiven, thanks to the demand you made in divorce court on Monday.

In order to agree to a temporary child support agreement, you insisted that your louse of a spouse promise to help the children, 8 and 11, with their homework, the New York Post reported.

Married or divorced, a husband who is legally bound to sit down with those damn marble notebooks is what every woman dreams of. Forget the pool boy: Give us homework helpers.

"That's a great punishment," Dina Perez, a 31-year-old Bronx mother of three, crowed, neatly nailing the issue. Homework is punishment — if not for the children, then certainly for the parents.

"It's horrible," my friend Melissa said. She's got girls in 4th and 7th grades, and the main problem for her is plain old frustration: "If my fourth-grader doesn't understand something I'm explaining in what I think is the most perfect way and she still has no idea, I'm just lost. Frustrated. Mad! How can you not understand the concept of 100 pennies?" Like earlier parents who threatened to send their children to reform school, Melissa asks her daughter, "You wanna go to the Sylvan Learning Center?'"

And then she feels bad.

Simply put, bad is the feeling that homework breeds. Parents feel bad about helping too much, and about letting things slide, and, at least in my case, they feel bad about not having cleaned the kitchen table well enough, so there's always a little translucent spot on the worksheet. Most of all, however, parents feel bad about having to be involved at all.

"Any good mood I have when I walked in the door goes away," a New Jersey pal of mine said.

A mother of two in Suffern, Marla Muni, agreed: "Anything that would keep me out of the house from 4 to 8 would be great."

Homework is like an awful second job — with a boss who's incredibly immature.

"My biggest problem is if the kids miss a class and I have to explain them something, you have to overcome the obstacle that you aren't as smart as the teacher," a brilliant friend of mine, Gigi, said. "My fifth-grader missed a class where they had to do long division and she was, ‘You can't show me!' Even though I have an applied math degree from Harvard, she doesn't think I know how to do long division."

On the other hand, when Gigi's husband volunteers to pitch in, "They say, ‘No, daddy. It's okay. We'll have mommy do this.'"

So in truth, maybe the problem isn't always that fathers aren't willing to chip in. It's that mothers are usually expected to solve children's problems, including the ones that begin, "If a train is traveling at 65 miles an hour. …"

Then there are the times when even both parents can't solve the problem, because that's how onerous homework has become.

"We had a science fair last year," a Manhattan mother who preferred not to be identified said. "My son came up with this great idea to build a tsunami tank. Well, not only could he not build it himself, we couldn't build it." Being Manhattanites, they did come up with a solution. They had the super build it.

"It was a huge hit at the science fair," she recalled. But this year, she told her son: "Do it yourself."

Maybe that's what Peter Cook will say when it's time for him to help the children with their homework. Maybe Christie Brinkley will say the same. And maybe if they'd said it a couple years earlier, they would have been so happy, with so much time to enjoy each other's company, that they wouldn't be in divorce court now.