I Need to Get Ready!
One fine school morning, Dylan didn’t get up.
I made his breakfast and lunch as always, and waited for the inevitable clamoring down the stairs like thunder-hooves.
It didn’t happen.
I waited for the door to be thrust open, for the slamming of the bathroom door, for the stomping and drawer shutting and other sounds of a boy who waited too long to get out of bed. But none of those sounds happened, either.
Shane came downstairs. “What’s wrong with Dylan?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he didn’t wake up.”
Dylan has been warned many, many times that I would not wake him up if he slept through his alarm. That’s why he has not one, not two, but three alarm clocks.
Apparently, he didn’t use them on this day.
I slammed the door – hard – when I left to take Shane to school, in hopes that this might jar Dylan awake. Half an hour later I came home, and Dylan was still asleep.
At 9 a.m. – two hours after Dylan should have caught the bus – I finally texted Dylan: “I guess you’re not going to school today.”
He burst forth from his room in less than a minute.
“I set my alarm! I don’t know why it didn’t go off!” he wailed. He was all askew.
“That’s why you have three alarms,” I said, folding the laundry carefully and speaking in my calmest voice.
“But I was sure that it would go off! I woke up at two o’clock in the morning just to make sure I’d set the alarm!”
“What do you want me to do about it?” I asked.
“I have to go to school!” He was standing there in his underwear.
“Well, you can’t go like that,” I said.
“I need to get ready!” he screeched.
“So get ready,” I said.
He raced off and got ready in ten minutes, like he always does. Then I drove him to school. He ate his breakfast in the car.
“I can’t do this for you tomorrow or the next day,” I told him. “I am working both days and I simply won’t be home to drive you to school.”
“I’m going to set three alarms, I guess,” he said, chugging his peanut butter and banana smoothie.
“Okay. And I’m picking you up at 3:00,” I reminded him. This is half an hour after school lets out. “You might want to talk to your first period teacher after school and see if you can make up any work you missed today.”
“I will,” he said.
Then he went inside.
I drove away, leaving him to face his own consequences.