Vomit in my hair on school picture day. Calls from the counselor about things that were technically not against the rules but were definitely against the spirit of them. A broken arm from what Jax described as “flipping off the shed, but in a cool way,” which I chose not to examine too closely once the cast was on and the x-rays came back clean. If there’s a mess in this house, I have probably cleaned it up. If there is a problem that starts with someone in this house making a questionable decision, I have probably received the phone call.
I have two kids. Lily is nineteen, in college, the kind of student whose essays get used as examples and whose teachers email me unprompted to say what a pleasure she is. She was the child who reminded me about permission slips. She color-coded her notes in middle school by subject and by date, which I did not ask her to do and was slightly alarmed by but chose to interpret as a positive sign.
