Paranoid Mama

It's natural, as parents, to dread phone calls from the school in the middle of the day. Usually the cause can only be one of two things: your child is sick, or your child has done something so egregiously wrong that you have to be involved immediately, rather than getting the bad news at the end of the day when you pick them up. Thankfully, my experience has mostly been with the former (including a couple of hilarious-in-retrospect phone calls when Son #1 was in kindergarten, because he had a propensity for absent-mindedly walking into poles). Whatever the cause, though, seeing the school's number pop up on caller ID mid-morning always elevates my heart rate.

I resemble this remark.

Monday morning I got the call midway through an extremely sweaty jog/walk: the school nurse was calling because Son #3 was in her office complaining of chest pains, though he looked fine. I was a bit distracted as I simultaneously tried to talk to the nurse (and briefly to my son) and started trying to map out what this might mean. I've got a little bit of experience at this mom thing, and I've found that children who are genuinely feeling bad are rarely in a state to complain eloquently about it (as Son #3 was apparently doing). However, what if I were wrong? What could chest pains in a kindergartener mean? I wrapped up my conversation and promised to call the nurse back when I got home. Then I rushed back home, trying to decide if I cared if the people in the main office saw me in my sweaty exercise clothes or not, wondering how hard it would be to get him in to see the pediatrician before the end of the school day (when I would have to pick up his brothers), and mentally chucking the rest of my to-do list out of the window.

At home, I phoned the nurse back. She had sent him back to class, but was going to go over and check on him. I wandered aimlessly around the house, not wanting to hop into the now desperately-needed shower lest I miss her phone call. When she finally called back, imagine the anticlimax: he was fine, and the nurse and his teacher, upon conferring, had concluded that his complaint was actually the result of the frustration he was experiencing as they worked on learning to write the letter "e." (As his teacher told me at the end of the day, he has experienced a whole range of bodily aches when asked to work on things that don't come easily to him.) The nurse had told him kindly that he was okay and that he was going to stay in school.

It was all well and good, except for the avalanche of irrational guilt I felt buried under for not being immediately at my child's beck and call the second the school's phone call came. Though I may joke about bon-bon eating and mani-pedi getting while my kids are at school, the truth is that I tend to stick close to home, within easy reach of the phone in case I'm urgently needed. I tend not to schedule anything that would take me far away or require a lot of time; a couple of weeks ago I scheduled a hair appointment on a school day and felt completely irresponsible the entire time. If that dreaded call from school had come, I would have had to tell them that I was unavailable to come get my child because I was having my hair dyed. Worst. Mother. Ever. Right?

It doesn't actually work this way. Sadly.

I know this is crazy. Frankly, if my kids were to have a horrific accident at school, I would hope that I'd be the second phone call the school would make, AFTER calling 9-1-1. But it is hard to shake the feeling that responsible, committed, excellent motherhood requires my whole focus all the time, even when my kids are not with me. It's a quite a bit like imagining the force of your concentration is keeping the airplane you're flying in up in the air. Completely bogus, and yet superstitiously impossible to fully dismiss.

Of course I like to believe that I'm important in my boys' lives. However, when it comes to lurking at home because I fear that my absence may cause terrible things to happen in their lives should I not be available for a phone call from school at any second, I think I need to call b.s. on myself. I can go get a latte with a friend without my kids' world caving in on them. And if I trust the school to educate my kids, I should trust that even if I can't show up the second I get a phone call telling me that, say, Son #2 threw up and is in the nurse's office, they can still hold down the fort until I can get there.

Giving my kids things to complain to their future therapists about--just one of my many services.

Parenthood is hard. But it helps to take a good hard look at what is possible as a parent, and what is just paranoia. I talked to Son #3 about his work, and I reminded him that not everything he learns in school is going to come easy. That it is okay to make mistakes, and he shouldn't be anxious about it. That learning to deal with frustration is a great skill, because many worthwhile things in life are going to take some effort to learn. Do I think he's going to learn this lesson overnight? No. And do I think that if I had been sitting at home instead of trying to get some exercise that this episode would have gone down any differently? I might have spent a little less time afraid to get in the shower and grossing myself out with my drenched sweatiness, but otherwise, no. As a friend of mine once admonished me, it's time to land the helicopter, Mom.