We were out late last night—for a school night—visiting friends with a new ten-day-old baby named Owen. He’s real cute and it was fun to hold a newborn for a while. The new mom and dad actually looked peaceful and somewhat well-rested. My kids played very happily while we visited. But this morning when it was time to get up, they just weren’t having it. This is what we get for being in summer mode while school is still in session.
Vigil felt it the worst this morning. It was past time for everyone to get up and get dressed. But he was climbing out of bed to find a parent to snuggle with, his body’s clock telling him it was more like 5:30 am instead of the actual 7:30 am. This led to a morning of cranky crying from the moment I told him I’d help him find a belt after we said morning prayers. He did not come downstairs for a long time, but stayed there just wailing, in that false, I’m-trying-to-get-attention kind of cry that we know so well around here.
Everyone else was pretty sluggish too. I had trouble shaking last night’s dream out of my head. In an attempt to forget about it, I asked River what he’d dreamt about. Surprisingly, he remembered: he was a teenager again, and his parents abruptly sent him to boarding school with barely any time to pack. Once there, he encountered his own children. “It was weird,” he said. “Which part?” I asked. “Being sent to boarding school… the way they did it… as though they weren’t going to tell us the plan,” he answered. Intriguing as this dream was, it didn’t shake my own.
In the dream we had Hieu with us late at night, going out and doing stuff together, and the evening crept on until 2:30 am when we arrived back at our New York City apartment. Somehow we knew that Hieu should stay over since it was so late. But we returned to find several phone messages from her Puerto Rican grandparents. This was odd because in real life Hieu’s family is Vietnamese. The grandparents were going off in their phone message about how it wasn’t right for Hieu to be with us, and they had not yet met us, and they needed her home. I couldn’t even tell if these people were for real—and did they expect us to drop her off at this hour? Not knowing what to do, we all stayed up, sleepless and worried. I woke up exhausted, blending together my experiences from the previous day and week with the dream’s events.
As I began to process the dream I realized it connected both with my experiences with Hieu’s family as well as what happened yesterday with Jasmine, another one of Council’s classmates, after our last neighborhood children’s class for the school year. We had a great spring session and by the end, have had about eleven kids participating, but little to no contact with their parents. Jasmine in particular has an awkward situation after school because it’s her 12- or 13-year-old brother who picks her up and takes her wherever he goes until they can get home. Both of her parents work, or so she told me, although their hours might be flexible on some days.
Yesterday, when her brother did not show up to pick her up at my house after our class was done, I began to worry. At one point I had her mom’s cell phone number written down but I had misplaced that scrap of paper. How was I to contact a parent in case her brother couldn’t make it? When we had parted ways at the school earlier, he and I had only said a brief hello and I started walking off; he disappeared without asking me the usual, “Should I be there at 4:30?” So maybe some trouble had arisen, or he had forgotten; all kinds of thoughts passed through my mind, and an increased awarness of what a risk I was taking by having kids over under these circumstances. I couldn’t even be totally certain that Jasmine’s parents knew where she was or what she was doing. It seems insane to leave those decisions up to a middle-school-age kid. But they had reassured me in the past that the mother was fine with it. We just never got proof of that, a written note of any kind.
Jasmine has memorized both her house address and both her parents’ cell phone numbers. I pressed her to tell me exactly where her house is just in case I had to take her there. “Is anyone home?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Where did your brother go?” “He went to visit a friend,” she said. I gave her my phone, prepared to help her dial. My daughter watched in fascination as Jasmine expertly pressed “talk” and then dialed her mom’s number. “You have to press ‘talk,’” Council pointed out. “I already did,” Jasmine replied, listening to the rings. No answer. She hung up and then dialed her dad. She appeared to get his voice mail but only said, “Uh, hi,…” and then hung up not completing the message. “They’re not answering,” she said. We could only wait.
Quite a while later, her older brother finally showed up. I asked him where he’d been and if everything was alright. “I had to take care of my little cousin,” he said. Sheesh. Off they went. I was greatly relieved.
A few minutes after that, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the name on the caller ID but it looked like a phone number Jasmine had possibly dialed. I let it go to voice mail. But the caller didn’t leave a message, he only called again. And again. The third time, I finally picked up. I realize this is the tactic people use in Springfield to try to get a human on the other end of the line—it’s what Hieu does when she wants to talk to Council; she calls maybe seven or ten times in a row and does not leave a message, or if she does, it’s only a recording of her pressing buttons on the phone. Irazu across the street does the same thing—recently she has taken to calling us every morning to ask if there is school that day. If we don’t pick up she just calls and calls again, sometimes just letting the phone ring twice and then hanging up. I’m ready to throw the phone out the window by the time I finally answer.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hello?” A man’s voice on the other end.
“Yes?” I said.
“Who’s this?” He said.
“This is Heather.” Pause. “Is this Jasmine’s father?”
“Yes.”
“Hi. She called you?”
“Yes.”
“Her brother was late. He just came to pick her up. Everything’s fine.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Bye.”
Weird. I haven’t had a phone call that strange in a while, where I felt like the 1-800 psychic line. Call me, and let me guess who you are and why you’re calling.
On the other hand, I can see why he’d be a little suspicious. Let’s say he has no idea who I am or why he would get a partial message from his daughter on my line, a phone number he doesn’t recognize. I’d be a little wigged as well. All the same, why not instruct the older son in some lessons around what is okay and not okay after school with the little daughter? How am I supposed to be psychic about that? Especially when I get crossed wires: nearly every other child who joins us after school has a similar situation. I could open a new at-home business, “Psychic Lady’s After-School Day Care, for Parents Who Want People to Guess What They Need.”
Where are all the adults in the world?