Today

Today did not turn out the way I expected at all. Emotionally I was somewhat better than I was last night - but still not good. Son1 left today for the next two days - at his retreat through school. It was really cool to have him come up to me before he left while the buses were loading and give me a k*** and get one from me. At his age that's not something expected or typical. Son2 is already missing him - saying he's bored. I'm glad that we have grief group tomorrow night. It was nice to be able to be home most of the evening tonight though.

Probably the biggest stress/frustration from today is that I had a parent of a child on my bus route call and completely chew me out verbally. Long story short - I had told my students to turn off any portable music devices as we were at a blind RR crossing. This student informed me "that's as quiet as mine will go" so I repeated my instructions to turn it off. He started cussing, I had him move....he continued cussing after he moved. He was going to get a conduct report for the cussing and the noise at the RR tracks. Apparently he went home and called dad who called the school to get my #. Then dad called me - said there's no way I could have heard his son's music, that it was my fault the son started cussing because I "made him angry enough to cuss - he's not like that" and then said I "needed to learn to get along with son". I ended up telling the dad that I was finished discussing this and hanging up on him. By that time I was pretty upset myself. Any other misbehavior this week likely would have gotten off with little to no action - simply because I didn't want the fact that I'm grieving extra to influence my decisions. However because this incident occurred at a RR crossing the son endangered the entire busload of students - that simply cannot be ignored. There's a possiblity that I'm going to have to say no personal music players - whether that be a phone, cd player or anything else involving headphones simply because this is becoming such an issue. I already absolutely don't allow cell phones to be used on the bus (which as it turned out this student was listening to music on - I didn't realize that at first). So...I have paperwork to fill out - I've already written this all down on regular paper - that I will then take into the office tomorrow morning to hopefully get the situation dealt with. I talked to another driver this afternoon - she said that everyone is having issues right now - all need a break.

On a different note....the other afternoon Son1 got on the bus and said "Mom I've lost my work ethic." I was like "what?" He explained that he was finding it hard to concentrate and focus on stuff. I was relieved to realize that it wasn't his work ethic that was at issue - it was simply the fact that he was distracted and grieving the loss of his dad this week - and very happy to reassure him that he hadn't lost his "work ethic". (I had to smile at his description though.) This afternoon I bumped into his math teacher at the school - she commented that she'd noticed that he wasn't himself - more easily frustrated, distracted, dreamy. I'm rather glad that she was able to validate that he was struggling a bit this week - though at the same time I hate for that to happen. One wonders when and if the grief will become less.