This Morning… To Town
We head to town this morning. Bank. Library. Groceries. Pick up papers.
Meet with our liason with School District. The nice lady who ensures we are, in fact, teaching our kid something at home. The meetings always make me nervous. I find myself overcome with feelings of highschool inadequacy as I anticipate having to admit we haven’t completed our homework. I will have to present unfinished little workbooks confirming we haven’t been working diligently away on our ‘modules’… but likely she already knows this. I’ll feel compelled to list the things we are in fact getting formally (read: academically) accomplished, even though it might be a short list… but likely she has already determined that we aren’t a particularly structured bunch and already knows this.
Sally will confirm what lady already knows by stating casually, ‘nothing’, when she asks what we’ve been doing. I will flush, and kick him frantically under the table give him a look, silently reminding him of what we have been doing over these past two months and in my eyes he will read, ‘tell her about:
the garden… the camera… chess… camping… your first triathlon… baking… cleaning up after baking… how, after so many years HATING it, how much you absolutely LOVE reading… THE READING!’
And he will not understand my pleading stare, no matter how hard I will him from the depths of my corneas, and he will sit, his feet casually kicking the legs of his chair, as we all hang on the word, ‘nothing’.
And then I will begin to babble… as though negotiating frantically for our lives.
But, as with meetings past, she will finish by saying, we’re doing great, give us a few ideas and bid farewell. I will breathe a huge sigh of relief and as we walk out to the van, I will ask, incredulous, “how can you tell her we do nothing?”
He’ll look up at me with a mischievious grin, and as it grows into a downright evil smile, reply so very knowingly, “I dunno….”
Little shit.
