All families have rituals. They are the little things that families do all the time, like walking together to school. Or eating dinner together every night. Of course, my family is no exception. Except that one of our main rituals is watching the teenager run around every morning searching for his homework.
Yes it’s true. Each morning, Junior stumbles down the stairs, eats breakfast and then runs around like a chicken with his head cut off, yelling, “Where’s my biotech homework?” This is usually followed by, “Where’s my Spanish homework?” And, of course, the ever-popular, “Where’s my history homework?”
This is because, according to Junior, every night when he’s either asleep or posting to Instagram on his laptop while pretending he’s asleep, I sneak into the kitchen, get his homework out of his backpack and run through the house, gleefully hiding it in many different rooms so the next day he will freak out.
I mean, it’s obvious that I do that, right? It couldn’t possibly be that he doesn’t put his work into the six, color-coded class folders that he insisted he had to have and that he insisted would keep him perfectly organized, right? And it couldn’t possibly be that instead of putting his homework into his backpack when it’s finished, he just moves on to the next thing without wondering what will happen to the piles of paper scattered throughout our home, right?
No, it couldn’t be either of those things. In fact, the only plausible explanation is that his mother, who dearly loves him and wants him to stay on the Honor Roll, gets up every night to hide his homework.
Yeah, that must be it. What else could it be?
In fact, according to Junior, there is no reasonable explanation for finding his homework throughout the house. To him, it’s obvious that he didn’t start out in the kitchen doing his science homework while eating a snack. And he obviously didn’t move upstairs to his desk so he could use Google Translate to help him with his Spanish (the bane of Spanish teachers everywhere). And he didn’t move into the game room for a couple games of Call of Duty while doing history homework, right?
So there’s no reason why he usually finds his science in the kitchen, his Spanish on his desk and his history in the game room. No reason except that his mother gets up in the middle of the night and sneaks around the house hiding his homework, of course.
OK, fine. He might – just might – come by this fear a teeny bit honestly. I mean, there was the one time I threw his homework away. But it wasn’t my fault. Look, there was a huge stack of old Algebra II papers sitting on the counter. And I needed that counter space so I could prepare to burn dinner. And they were OLD. And they had clearly been graded. Plus they were math. How the heck was I to know they had value?
So I tossed them in the trash. And it might … just might … have been trash pick-up day. I know. I know. I cringe too. Of course, the irony is that even though I tossed them into the trash, Junior is the one who took the can out the curb. So he participated too. Yeah, if you are wondering, that didn’t make him feel any better.
And thus began our ritual of Junior freaking out while gathering his homework in the morning. Some days I help him look. Most days I sip coffee and say helpful things like, “Hmm, maybe if you put it away when you are finished with it, you wouldn’t freak out every morning.” Or, “Really? It’s not in your backpack? How unusual.”
And once he leaves for school I start planning where I will hide the new homework. Just kidding. Sort of.
