\t\u0093I guess this is the depressing part of repatriation.\u0094 That is how Bill summarized Back to School night at Kaitlyn\u0092s school.<\/p>\n
\tIt wasn\u0092t because of his wife\u0092s Marsha Brady-like fascination with signing up for every activity. (Which I didn\u0092t do, by the way. I just entertained the idea long enough for my senses to take over again and make my hand drop the pen.)<\/p>\n
\tIt wasn\u0092t the half hour spent crammed into a tiny chair at \u0093Camp Learn-A-Lot.\u0094 That\u0092s what Kaitlyn\u0092s teacher is calling her class this year. Every class has a theme. I didn\u0092t bother to check out the others on my way through the hallway.<\/p>\n
\tThe hallway.<\/p>\n
\tThat was the problem for Bill.<\/p>\n
\tHanging outside each classroom: the requisite variations on \u0093what I did this summer\u0094 projects done by kids in the first four days of school.<\/p>\n
\tBill had gone to the first session with Kaitlyn\u0092s teacher while she stuck with me around the sign up sheets.<\/p>\n
\tWhen the principal announced it was time to wrap up session one and head to session two, Kaitlyn led me to her classroom. That\u0092s where we found Bill standing in the hallway. Stunned. I mean, he looked stunned. A mixture of anger and frustration and sadness. Not realizing she was pointing to the very thing stirring up this cocktail of troubles inside her dad, Kaitlyn proudly pointed to her construction paper \u0093sleeping bag.\u0094 Decorated on the outside with, I suppose, things she likes. I remember seeing a peace sign before she opened it up to reveal the utter nonsense written, no, scribbled inside. All the other sleeping bags were filled with neatly written sentences. That made sense. Shakespeare isn\u0092t among her classmates. But all Bill could see was that his little girl had completely missed the mark on the assignment. Because she obviously simply couldn\u0092t do it. \u0093I wrote all the words I could think of!\u0094 she proudly declared. This did not help. <\/p>\n
\tBill tried to talk to me right there about his frustration, but to me that seemed like the wrong place for the discussion and I suggested we talk about it at home. So he and Kaitlyn headed off while I attended session #2 with the teacher. Little did I know that while I was stuffed into Kaitlyn\u0092s Kaitlyn sized chair listening to the speech about second grade, Bill was home stewing over what he\u0092d seen.<\/p>\n
\tThis is not to say that I wasn\u0092t upset. Quite the contrary. I nearly burst into tears sitting there. And not because of the chair. As I walked up at the end to introduce myself to the smiling Mrs Philips, I had to take a moment to compose myself and work to keep my voice from cracking. And it may have, I don\u0092 t really know for sure. Talking to the teacher made me feel better. But I still wanted to cry when I got to my car. It\u0092s an incredibly difficult thing to learn that your child is struggling and is so far behind where you think she should be. (And where the education system thinks she should be, too.) It\u0092s hard to separate the achievement from the ability. The actions from the intelligence. And it\u0092s hard to separate what you as a parent should have done from your own feelings of self worth. And, man, that sucks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u0093I guess this is the depressing part of repatriation.\u0094 That is how Bill summarized Back to School night at Kaitlyn\u0092s school. It wasn\u0092t because of his wife\u0092s Marsha Brady-like fascination with signing up for every activity. (Which I didn\u0092t do, by the way. I just entertained the idea long enough for my senses to take […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaitlyn-marsue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}