jackshoegazer | 467 x 56 = late.

Not a good morning.

I just found out that Ethan is failing math. Not because he doesn't understand, but because of late or missing assignments. When I presented Ethan with the list of assignments, he got very upset, saying he already handed in a lot of them and the only reason they were late was because they were from days when he was sick. He's a very smart child, so what could the problem be?

This always happens when his mother is his main go-to for school. Because of my car problems, I've not been around as much the last couple of months, and this is what happens. In the third grade, when he was with her more for school, he had this problem all the time. She can't keep him on task, because she can't keep herself on task. She never checks his assignments, never goes over his work, apparently never even checks to see if he has homework.

It also doesn't help that he's got a bad case of the absent-minded genius. When I became his main contact for school last year, suddenly his grades sky-rocketed back to respectable levels. Remember earlier last year, when his mother was complaining that she felt left out because I had so much to do with his schooling? She takes a more active role, supposedly, and this is what happens.

I told Ethan to tell his teacher I would stop in after school to talk to her about this. Now that my car is back to normal, functioning order, I will make sure I'm around to get him back on track. I've never thought myself much of an authoritarian, a provider of structure, but compared to his mother, I'm apparently an entire skeletal system.

This is the part of being a parent that I never anticipated, which brings out aspects of myself I wouldn't normally attribute to my personality. That's good, right?