September 07, 2011

The "Worst Parent EVER!"





Ever had one of those? a Worst Parent Ever! moment?


Last night was my official inauguration into the Worst Parent Ever club. It was the night before the first day of school…correction: the night before the first day of Middle School for my brilliant, geeky, funny but sensitive and sometimes pessimistic youngest guy. He’s awesome, and his new school is going to be awesome and everything was awesome… until bedtime. The Man and I always do one last email check before bed (geeks through-and-through), so we both discovered the email at the exact same time.

And gasped at the exact same time.

It was a friendly little note from the director of Jordan’s new school:
What a great first day at school! The kids did an amazing job and it was wonderful to see our new and improved campus filled up with happy faces. Clearly we are going to have a great year.”

Yeah. Alternate reality, right? Whose life did I accidentally slip into just now? The first day of school is tomorrow. It’s tomorrow!

Nope.

We missed the first day of middle school. Epic. Beautiful. Glorious. Swan-Dive-Into an empty pool-Failure!

To my credit, they did start a day earlier than the public schools this year and the rest of us are all public schoolers. But on the “ridiculous fail” side, I honestly clicked that stupid “First Day Of School” link no less than 25 times this week and apparently never actually read the message there even once. So Brilliant.

We laugh in this family. It's a dang good thing.
We decided he can use this excuse for just about everything now. Doesn’t all of life hinge on that first day of middle school?
How many job interviews could he be late for and say, “Yeah, well…my parents made me miss the first day of middle school and I’ve been catching up ever since.” Who wouldn’t have pity on that kid, right?
Card games lost: “I missed the first day of middle school.”
Girlfriends dumped: “Yeah, I missed the first day of middle school.”
Fails the math final: “It must have been what I missed that first day of middle school.”

So as it turns out, we’ve given him a great gift after all, you see.
He now has,
The freedom to fail.
(...oh, and also we bought him the large size at Cuppa Yo after school today).

That's also why I decided to go ahead and write a post about my most fantastic parenting failure to date. Giving ourselves the freedom to fail is the starting place for so many great stories, so many courageous successes! And now I bequeath that to you.

You, my dear friends, now have the freedom to make a creative and far-reaching plethora of legitimate mistakes and all the while, you'll be able to say:  "Yeah, but I had this friend once who totally spaced her kid's first day of middle school."

See that? I can be generous that way (...which probably mostly has to do with the fact that I had the large size at Cuppa Yo today too).

Go ahead. Fail. Laugh. Try again. Laugh some more.
That'll be the policy in our family. At least for as long as there is a Cuppa Yo.



And Jordan?
Jordan's been busy all afternoon coming up with reason after reason why he's the luckiest kid on the block...having not had to go to the first day of middle school.

Geez, I love him!

3 comments:

  1. Missing school when you aren't sick or have to go to some distant relatives funeral?

    That kinda makes you the BEST PARENT EVER!!!!

    :) d of d&j

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  2. I haven't laughed this hard in a very long time. I laughed until tears came to my eyes. It remineded me of the time Jason was to fly back to MN for a summer long ministery training for children and I looked at the flights wrong. Like you I looked at those tickets a hundred times, just in the wrong spot. My youngest son, on his first time traveling on a plane alone, road stand-by until he got to ST Pauls. It's tough to be the perfect parent. There's always somthing that gets in the way.. Ellen

    ReplyDelete
  3. Heh! Yep Ellen, you feel my pain! Thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one capable of overlooking the obvious...more than 12 times!

    ReplyDelete

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