The Lollipop Incident

 As any parent knows, the school drop-off line is fraught with perils. The societal pressure for an efficient launch is suffocating, especially when you are coming in on two wheels because your children have already accumulated enough tardies to generate a truancy form-letter.

Nothing elicits more scorn from your fellow commuters than sitting behind you for an eternity only to find our that your passengers waited until zero hour to unbuckle themselves, locate their school-bags and finish reading the King James Bible.

Sometimes one of your children will scrub the launch at the last second. Two kids will be out of the vehicle while the third insists that disembarking before the front fender is aligned with gym door is utter madness. You are now bargaining with the third child while half-heartedly goosing the engine to give the appearance of getting out of the other parent's way without actually doing so. In the heat of the moment, you will also hastily agree to some ridiculous request that you will forget the moment you drive off because you just wanted them out of the car.

The reckoning for this verbal contract will come 9 hours later when you get them from after-care. There will be a tense discussion and somehow the same child that can't remember the location of their own shoes has become the family stenographer. I am then informed that, according to the transcript, I agreed that he could spend the afternoon micro-dosing FunDip and watching ASMR Roblox videos in lieu of homework.

A few years ago, I was chauffeuring my eldest two children to school and running late as usual. As we were on final approach to the drop-zone, I loudly instructed my offspring to prepare themselves for deployment. During this process, my son reached down to grab his bag from the floorboard and made an unpleasant discovery. There was a partially consumed lollipop stuck to the side of his bag.

My son had several options at the point:

1. Quietly alert me to the presence of said sucker so that I could dispose of it in a dignified manner.

2. Say nothing and return the item from whence it came.

3. Surreptitiously move it to his sister’s area and then blame her.

Never being one to conform, he decided that the path forward was to yell in disgust and indiscriminately launch the BlowPop into the air where it came to rest in his sister’s freshly-brushed hair. At that moment, we were a single car-length from disembarking and all Hell broke loose. My daughter began screaming as she gripped the handle and began pulling her hair out by the roots attempting extricate the scalp-missile.

When I confronted my son as to why he threw the sucker into his sister’s hair, his response did little to diffuse the situation. “I didn’t throw it into her hair on purpose! I just threw it and because she has a giant head there was no where else it could go!!”

By now, I have flawlessly executed the I-swear-on-all-that-is-holy-if-I-have-to-come-back-there rotation in my seat and I am loudly demanding that he issue her an apology. Amid her wails and tears, he grumbled something akin to, “I very sorry that you have a gigantic head" whilst shrugging as if he had left nothing out on the field.

It was at this moment that an upbeat teacher assisting with drop-off began opening the door to facilitate my progeny’s exit. She pulled on the handle while cheerily intoning “Good Morning!!” If she expected this to be reciprocated, she had selected the wrong family.

Ignoring both the optimistic greeting and the person who issued it, my daughter threw the hairball-on-a-stick to the ground and slid out of the car with tears running down her face. She certainly could have just moved toward the school and tried to salvage this dumpster-fire of a morning. Instead, she waited until her brother’s legs had emerged from the vehicle before slamming the door as hard as she could behind her.

The teacher, concerned that my son was gravely injured, looked at my daughter and gently scolded that she must have forgotten her brother was in the car. Without hesitation, she replied, “No, I remembered” before breezily skipping off toward the entrance.

We had been stationary for what feels like an eternity and somehow all my children have not yet cleared the vehicle. I sympathized with my son's plight also understood that there are only so many times a person could be teased about their head circumference without some repercussions.

My son, defiant to the end and shins afire, managed to croak another scathing observation of his sister’s cranial proportions while she was still in earshot before he hobbled away.

Her smile and encouraging countenance all but gone, the teacher looked at me and mumbled something about having a pleasant day to which I answered, “good luck” before squealing off like I had just pulled a bank heist.