“Nothing, just a junk piece of paper” she replies [but the look on her face tells otherwise.
“Oh” I say, “I’ll throw it away for you.”
She hands me the paper and the look on her face turns to relief.
Well, you know Momma didn’t just throw the paper away….I pieced it together.
It is a letter.
It is an apology letter to Mr. Maxwell.
Dear Mr. Maxwell,
I am sorry I pushed at you and threw food at you. I made a very bad choice. Please accept my apology.
Sincerely, Emma Sage
Uh-oh, Scooby, I think we have a problem here.
As I’m standing in the kitchen, a little girl comes in to see her biggest fear…..me standing there reading.
She breaks down crying. It is the kind of crying that I know she is not feeling well. Actually, it is the kind of crying that scares me as her Mother, as every single time she gets like this, it is a precursor of her white-blood cells going crazy.
We sit down. She explains that she apologized and that she had to sit the rest of lunch in with the Principal. She never fully explained what happened. She said it was “only a little piece of my bread from my ham sandwich” [like that would make it OK?]
She promised she would never make that bad choice again.
I believe her. Her tears flowed freely and I know that whatever it was that provoked her, it was most likely beyond her control with how she is feeling physically. This is her pattern. Something is brewing. So now I am on pins-and-needles waiting to *see* exactly why she is not feeling well and thus being a rebel rouser in the lunchroom.
She took the note and wanted desperately to burn it and get it out of her life. I let her place it in the woodstove [you should have seen how her tense body, loosened up] It was as if that paper was weighing her down.
After dinner we go back into finish up her homework. I go to look in her agenda and she ‘freezes’ and grabs it from me. Ah-ha…….you can’t fool me little girl…….there is something in the agenda that you don’t want me to read.
She sure did try to hide that note.
There in the agenda, scribbled out in pencil was a note……
She was trying to hide the second piece of evidence.
The note basically said the same thing her apology letter said.
I was told I could call the Principal if I wanted to discuss the *incident* in greater detail.
I’m not calling.
The tears on my little girls’ cheeks said it all.
Her promise to me that “It will never happen again” is all the reassurance I need.
And a Momma stands on guard…..watching my little imp for signs of what might be wrong…and brewing.
