Winning Hand

Some people on a board I visit once mentioned playing "bad week poker."

I think I broke the house this last week.

Monday, the septic tank overflowed. I told EG, as I toddled off to take Nita to three appointments, "This one's yours."

Tuesday, I called the school, as we were supposed to have reservations for "Special Person's Day" turned in by Thursday. If the child did not have a "special person," then he or she would remain in the classroom during the party and miss the festivities. We couldn't come at our assigned time in the afternoon, so I wanted to change to the morning time when EG could go. The school secretary told me to call the mom in charge of arranging the event, so I did. I explained that we had limited family to start with, and one member was scheduled for surgery the day of special person's day, so could we be permitted to change the time so at least the kids' dad could attend. Ayatollah Starbucks Mom told me, "Absolutely not! That would be too disruptive and chaotic."

Excuse me? You are already taking kids out in two shifts that day, so how could changing shifts be too disruptive and chaotic? I started to cry and hung up. I then emailed the principal.

Wednesday, my beloved office partner, who is an attorney, became incensed at "disparate treatment" and asked me if he could attend the event on the opposite shift as Nita's Special Person/Legal Counsel. I vetoed that idea.

Thursday night came and went, and I finally got a response from the principal, well after I could turn in a permission slip/reservation to attend, apologizing for the rudeness, if I experienced any, assuring me that the parent volunteers were "working very hard to make this a wonderful event for all involved," and telling me to contact her if I had any further concerns.

Yes, I did. I sent this reply.

While I understand that many families have a mom who stays at home and two sets of grandparents who are healthy and able to get to school functions, not all children have that fortunate situation. Many children have two parents who work, family members who are ill, and grandparents who are not available.

I do not see how having a child go to the opposite session would have such a negative effect on the already disrupted school day. Permitting a child to attend a function only if he or she has a "special person" and leaving others behind in the classroom is a disparate way of treating the children. This is on par with passing out party invitations to only some of the children and not to others in the class.

I do not agree that all volunteer families are doing their very best to create a "wonderful experience" for the families at St. A. If that were the case, then ALL children would be included; and not just those who were "special" enough to have family members with schedules that exactly fit in with the plan put in place by the parent volunteers arranging this event. How ironic that a school which purports to follow Christian values would be so inconsiderate of the feelings of its children and intentionally exclude some of them. This mentality is one of the reasons why we are not sending our children to St. A school next year.

Okay, I got a little hot. Of course, I got no further response from the principal.

Thursday, too, my brother-in-law went into surgery to have a pancreatic tumor removed, only to have the doctors discover that it has metastasized throughout the peritoneum. There is some hope, but it doesn't look good.

Plus, we got a call from the principal about the little incident with the kid who sexually assaulted Rocky.

Friday night, I got home from work, and we went to the police station and filed a "documentation" report on Rocky's incident at school. When we got home, we had just sat down in the living room, and the smoke detector went off upstairs. I was frantically running all over, checking light bulbs and outlets, and Nita was saying, "I don't know what happened."

Then I saw the matches on her bedroom floor. She was curious and decided to experiment. Fortunately, she also had five bottles of water, also contraband for the bedrooms, which she used to douse the papers, clothes, and guitar which had been blazing away.

She was incarcerated in her room and lost all her bike riding on the street privileges because of lack of responsibility.

So, if we played bad week poker again this week, I would be happy to have a bad hand.