Delay

Our son has a two-hour school delay today due to the extreme cold. I didn’t even think about it so I’m glad I found out before I left work yesterday so I could bring my laptop home and go in late today. There’s no practical reason for him to stay home since I drive him the two blocks to school, so he’d be inside no matter what. But it does make sense to have a delay today since you have to do it for the whole school district and a lot of kids do take the bus and not everybody can afford a coat.

However, I’m hoping I won’t roll my eyes too much this winter at school closures. If we get a lot of snow, I understand disruption. It will be when everything shuts down because of an overnight dusting that I get annoyed. Like I said, we live two blocks from school and I’m pretty sure that with 28 years’ experience driving and a 25-mile commute, I can make it down the street without spinning out of control and bursting into flames. We are lucky that our jobs have flexibility but a lot of parents don’t have that and I would feel bad for people who are in the doghouse at work for leaving early because everyone’s panicking in a dusting of snow.

Of course, I don’t envy the superintendents who have to make these calls. They’re damned if they close and damned if they don’t, and if they make the wrong decision, they’ll have parents calling for their heads at the next school board meeting.

My annoyance just continues my longtime attitude toward snow and mocking people who put their heads in the oven when we get a coating. It’s funny: When I was a kid, I would laugh at people freaking out at a few inches, and adults would tell me, “Wait until you have to go to work; then you’ll know what it’s like.” Decades after entering the workforce, it still just doesn’t bother me to drive in the snow (the traffic kills me, but the snow has no effect on me unless it’s literally a blizzard). Now that I’m a parent, I still have the “walk it off” attitude and probably will not be shrieking “STAY SAFE!!!” at the school buses.

The weather doesn’t bother me but what I have anxiety over (and I have much anxiety over many things) is those little unforeseen disruptions to the school schedule. Even before we adopted, I was nervous about how we would handle school drop-off and pick-up, what we would do if we were late, what if we have to leave work to pick him up right now and we’re an hour away, etc. Not to mention what to do in the summer. There is a lot of devil in those little details and now I know why parents get stressed about it.

I worry about the big things, too, like educating our son, raising a good person, helping him through any trauma that might arise with the adoption, preparing him to face racism, and all the other Big Issues that come up in parenthood. But that stuff is more ongoing in the background and doesn’t keep me up at night—little scheduling things do. Is anyone else like this or am I just a weird person with strange priorities?