Family Affairs

Such a relief. The last three mornings have been blissful. My 8 year old is no longer distressed about going to school. On Friday last week I was nearly in tears myself. I took him in to talk to his teacher and he refused to go into the classroom because he was embarrassed and thought everybody would laugh at him because he was so upset. He wouldn’t actually say that it was because his best friend had left the country, he blamed it on a multitude of other random ailments. All the way up to school he was shouting “I HATE YOU. YOU’RE WORSE THAN A TORTURER, HAVE YOU ANY IDEA HOW HORRIBLE YOU ARE?….I WILL BE SICK AT SCHOOL AND THEN YOU’LL BE SORRY” and I was hoping that we wouldn’t bump in to any social workers and/or my clients en route.

When he came out of school the teacher said he’d been fine all day. When we talked about it he told me that everybody in his class had been really kind and had tried to cheer him up and tell him jokes and I think he had the dawning realisation that the rest of his class had some empathy towards his situation and that he wasn’t on his own. It was a difficult process for both of us, but he had to go through all that emotion and I had to force him to school everyday in order to get there. The tummy aches have abated. The headaches and toothache too. Phew.

Instead. My morning drama today was having to write a letter to my daughter’s maths teacher explaining why she’s messed up her homework. I wrote that she had spent over an hour trying to get it right, but had somehow made a mistake along the way.

She had to create a polygon by sticking little triangles together in the correct order. Each edge had another sum for her to work out, for example: -2 (5+-12+4). If I was being honest, my letter to her teacher would have said:

I am so sorry about her homework. We all had a go, but failed. I have no idea what was going on and can’t remember which bit needs to be worked out first so she didn’t really bother to ask for my help. Her older brother of course knew the answers easily but would only help her with bribery and she got bored of having to make marmite sandwiches for him every time he gave her a correct answer. We decided that we’d make a snail shape instead, but my daughter felt this was probably not what you wanted.

…and when I say “temporary calm returns” it is all relative because the entire drama unfolded to the tune of “God Save The Queen” which my son was practicing on the trumpet. God. Hideous.