The 11:00 AM Call

You're never ready for the call.  You know... the call.

It's 11 AM, and your children are safe, and in class. But there's a phone in your pocket, and it's ringing. Something's happening in the world. You have to decide whether to answer the call. Can you call in the world's leaders, the military? Are you tested and ready to lead? 

Are you ready to hear what you son did today at school?

I will be honest.  Connor is a bit... spirited.  That's the polite way if saying he is a creature of id, a maelstrom of chaos the likes of which Cthulhu and the ancient ones would be proud.  A boy who can be the sweetest, most compassionate boy on earth one minute, an her to the mantle of Manson the next.

Yeah. yeah. yeah, I hear you. He's just a typical four year old boy.  But in the past few months, I've come to dread when a specific phone number that ends in "4500" appears on my phone, because it comes with news that:

• Connor smacked a kid.*
• Connor bit a kid.
• Connor punched a kid in the face* 
• Connor grabbed a tree branch and bludgeoned a classmate in the back**

* Is it wrong to take solace in the fact that it was merely a slap? I mean, this kid is taking tae kwan do lessons.  Getting a call that "Connor felled a classmate with a four-direction kick to the solar plexus" would have been far more mortifying.

** Okay, I must admit, when I got the back story I was more forgiving. His wild child classmate threatened to punch Connor in the face. The teachers heard and intervened. But when he looked at Connor again, Connor popped him. Not great behavior, to be sure, but at least somewhat defensible (especially if you met his classmate).

** Okay, before you go thinking I take some sadistic delight in my son assaulting others, I don't. However, I try to see the silver lining in this misbehavior. In this case, it's the hope that he'll get a baseball scholarship and save us six figures of secondary education costs. That or he'll be a mob enforcer. Either way, big paydays.

And that call never comes when you're doing much of nothing. Oh, no. The call comes when you've just gotten off the train for work, or when you're just stepping out of the taxi at JFK about to board a cross-country flight.   And that call is from the Family Services Director (read: disciplinarian), so no matter that you're a semi-responsible 41 year old man, you still feel sheepish and embarrassed.

Today I got that call.

And you can imagine how relieved I was that it was because my son was ill.

It's only hours later, while my sleep-deprived and slightly-queasy son groggily watched an episode of Super Why that I realized that - just perhaps - being happy that my son was sick was not the most paternal response to getting the call.  And I thought just one thing.

Why is it the school always calls me first instead of his mother?