Here in Chicago, the day after Labor Day means back to school time. This year that day was especially full of promise as my youngest daughter was entering Kindergarten. Oh what a beautiful day to begin school…then it hit…
Hair hair hair! Such was the cry of thunder as the perfect storm began to brew. Growing up, I was always considered to have the good hair. We African Americans tend to make a lot of hair, I think because there is so much variance among us. Some have nearly straight or wavy hair at one end of the spectrum, at the other end are tightly curled naps. I’m somewhere in the middle. My wife though is Chinese and has very fine hair with only a hint of waviness. So what do you get when you mix these together? Hmmm, for the boys it’s easy, they have wavy hair that is really easy to take care of. On the other hand the girls’ hair is more of a challenge. They have fine corkscrew hair that is actually very amenable to braiding. Unfortunately, I didn’t grow up doing hair and my wife didn’t grow up dealing with this kind of hair either. So today was the perfect day to have the hair argument right at the school, oh joy! If only that were the end of it…
I’m not one to let things sit without a solution, so I resolved to learn to deal with this hair so that I wouldn’t have to take a sword to the chest (Hero reference) in order to make a point. That was the plan anyway. The call I got on the phone would say otherwise. It was the school calling me. At first I thought it was something with the youngest, instead the call was about my oldest son. All plans were dropped as I left work to pick him up. On arrival at the school I was not surprised to find that he had thrown up at lunch. Sickness calls from school always involve vomit. What did surprise me was the principal telling me that the rash on his chin was ringworm! I later joked with him that if he wanted a few more days of vacation, stomach flu and ringworm was overdoing it a bit!
Well maybe it wasn’t the perfect storm after all, but it was a rocky start to the school year. We capped the evening with a tussle over our differing pedagogical styles in helping our eldest daughter with her homework. Yeah, in all a perfect day in paradise!:-)