Friday, February 12, 2016

The Call from School

Few phone calls inspire a racing pulse like a call from the school office. After a barrage of texts, emails, and phone calls from the school - alerting me that there would be no evening activities, and then no after school activities at all - I received a call from Connor and Helen's school.

I quickly switched lines to take the call, only to hear Connor's voice saying "Mom, this is Connor" and then nothing. Not a word. Not a sound of a receiver being dropped. Not noise from a Valentine's Day party in the background - just nothing. And then a little static. I repeated Connor's name a few times, spoke into the phone that I could not hear him - if he could hear me, please hang up and call back.

No luck. So I called the number I had been called from, only to learn that it was likely a number from a classroom, and I would need to call the school's front office to get in touch with Connor. I did this, and the administrator surmised that Connor was probably calling to let me know his after school class had been cancelled.

And even though I knew this was probably true, my heart still stopped for moment, as I pondered the probability that he had just fainted, and nobody was there to help him. Should I insist the administrator run upstairs and confirm that Connor was alive and well?

My mind works in funny ways, but at least at this point, my rational self can talk my excited self into calming the eff down.

But it still made me miss the days when the administrator at our beloved Waldorf school would call and before uttering anything more than her name, she would say "everything is fine with your children" and then she would proceed to explain the nature of her call.

Which makes me think I'm not the only one who has a racing heart when they see a school number pop up on the phone.

Elaine

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