Back to School

It's now mid September, and for the last 2 or 3 weeks American families have been going through the familiar, time honored traditions and rituals of going back to school.



I remember the feeling of summer drawing to a close... the 8 or 9 weeks that had stretched endlessly before me on the last day of school dwindling down to the last few weeks, then days, hours, and precious minutes till freedom was over and prison began again.

I remember the feeling of new school supplies... marbled composition books, fresh, clean binders, a ream of loose leaf paper, yellow unsharpened #2 Ticonderoga pencils, all laid out and ready to go, like ammunition before a battle that would last for the next 10 months.

I never quite understood the marbled composition book, though. If you tore out a page, a page somewhere in the back of the book fell out. For every action an equal and opposite reaction... the yin and yang of education, I suppose.

This year my daughter has started a new school. It was a big decision, taking her from the tiny, private school womb into the larger, more feral world of public education. But the local elementary school is a pretty good one, and lord knows we can save the monthly tuition for college, or something else.

But anyway, there we were in the schoolyard on the first day of 2nd grade, small knots of parents chatting each other up, kids milling about in the frenzy that is the first day of school, and my daughter.

A little girl with a big backpack.

I was prepared for tears from my daughter... maybe my wife. My little girl surprised me.

My wife, not so much.

I was so proud of my daughter... a huge building, hundreds of kids, new people and faces and routines. And scariest of all, no friends. No classmates from last year, no kids from the neighborhood in her class. I could see how nervous she was, but she sucked it up and marched in like a trouper.

And that was it.

Where was the drama? Where was the run up of tears and anxiety before the first day at a new school? Where was the acting out, the irrational and unexplainable behavior that we as parents were supposed to sagely interpret as the inner feelings of turmoil that she, as a 7 year old, would be unable to express in words?

Could it really be that easy?

No, of course it's not that fucking easy.

Only 4 days into the school year, some kid is picking on my daughter. Tugging at her backpack, talking shit to her on line each morning in the schoolyard. And this morning, finally, the tears came. They came in the schoolyard... probably the worst place of all, in front of her teacher, her class, everyone. My wife called to tell me about it.

I'm a rational dad, not prone to violence or flying off the handle. So naturally my first instinct was to go down to the school and smack this kid. I don't care that it happens to be a 7 year old girl. She made my daughter cry. Only I am allowed to make my daughter cry.

You don't think it's appropriate to talk about smacking the brat who's picking on your daughter? Then you don't have kids. Anyone who is reading this, who is a parent,

knows

exactly

what

I

am

talking

about.

According to my wife, smacking this kid is not an option. So she told the teacher, who promised to nip this in the bud. Great. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it makes the little shit try even harder because she is obviously achieving the desired effect.

I'm working from home tomorrow, so I'm gonna drop my daughter off at school, and pick her up at 3:00. I'd like to get a look at this kid and her parent(s) before I meet them in the Principal's office.

If she comes from the right kind of family, her parents will do the smacking for me.