interludes with Iris

The Guilt Trip: The children do love to hold a grudge against us, the parents, and recently Iris uber Alles spoke at length about a well-cherished parental misstep.

"Remember the time you forgot about me? And I was the last person picked up from extended care? The extended care teacher went home already!"

"When was this?" I asked cautiously.

"In February."

"Oh, when I was recovering from surgery. It wasn't my fault, then."

Iris remarked cuttingly, "Daddude, you only came to get me because I used the computer at extended care to text message you! You forgot about me! Everyone had gone home, and I had to sit out front by the receptionist!"

The Sober Husband's attempts to defend himself were shouted down, but soon enough he was off the hook, as Iris grew distracted by another convenient target of resentment, her little sister. "Lucy got to stay home that day, because she was 'sick.' She got to stay home with Momdude! How come Lucy got to stay home and just hang out with Momdude?"

Her future in politics: Recently Iris remarked, a propos of nothing, "I want to be a politician when I grow up, or a designer. I would like to be a politician because they control people's lives and run things!"

She's being encouraged in this ambition by her teachers. The other day when I picked her up at school, her teacher murmured to her as he held the car door for her, "Iris, tell your mom about how you're going to be a politician."

"Tell me about what happened today that you're supposed to tell me," I instructed her.

With great relish, Iris announced, "Today I questioned authority." She paused to let that take effect. "I asked why we get report cards, and the teacher said, 'So we can see how good a job we are doing teaching you.' That is so not true! So I said, 'Then the teachers should get report cards, not us.' Then someone said we kids should give them report cards, but I said no, it should be someone in the administration, because kids might take it out on them that we don't want to go to school." Iris carried on. Evidently she'd next veered into a perennial flogging-the-dead-horse topic of hers, the ERB standardized test, which Iris views as an offensive waste of time, and the teachers' defense was that it's much worse in public schools, where the children spend a lot more time being tested and a lot more time preparing for the tests. Iris drew herself up. "So I said, 'We're not in public school; we're paying for private school so we don't have to put up with that.'" She denounced the you're-better-off-than-the-public-school-students defense as lame and hypocritical. "And then it was cutting in to time for science, so I had to shut up."

We all reflected upon this. Then Iris said musingly, "Some day I would like the be the first dictator of the whole world. I would control everyone's lives!"