I’m seeing a lot of photos on my Facebook feed today of adorable-looking kids about to start the first day of the school year—like the one of my son (pictured here) and his buddy venturing off (without parental escorts for the first time) to begin 6th grade and middle school. Good thing he didn’t learn about the last-minute late-night discovery that propelled my wife and into an over-tired tizzy to spare him a horrible morning.
Among his first day requirements, I learned last night, was to bring to school a recent photo of himself to be used in drama class. My wife was planning to fulfill this requirement with one of the wallet photos from last year’s school photos. But at about 12:45am, after we watched Stephen Colbert’s debut on “Late Night,” she went to retrieve the folder with last year’s wallets, and it wasn’t where she is used to finding it: On one of our bookshelves that contains a mix of cookbooks and photo albums. Why wasn’t it there? Because I recently spent a good deal of time civilizing our bookshelves to at least look more organized, if not actually be more organized.
So then the question became: “Where did I put the photos?” I had some ideas, but none of them proved fruitful. On the grand scale of parental anxieties, we both knew this wasn’t a true crisis. And yet, our son, who can be so playful and cavalier and thorny when it comes to following our rules and suggestions at home, also tends to be particularly self-conscious about not standing out as a rule breaker or a mess-up in more public settings. Knowing him as we do, we both felt that if he didn’t have a decent photo for the first day it would, at the very least, be an unfortunate and anxious distraction.
So I looked and looked, fretting about being up so late with work in the morning, feeling the added weight of still being a bit jet-lagged from our vacation. Rebecca, meanwhile, shifted into Plan B: Trying to print out a photo of him from vacation using our aging, and frequently uncooperative, computer and printer.
It worked! And in the most important ways.
This morning Adam didn’t think twice about the photo we gave him; and this afternoon he informed us that he really liked his new school and his homeroom, and went so far as to say that he knows that this school is going to hard but that he’s ready for it.
And one more thing: He didn’t have drama today and didn’t need the photo.
Eric Messinger is the editor of New York Family. He can be reached at emessinger@manhattanmedia.com
