Emma Kelly’s kindergarten teacher sent out an email to all the parents. In the nicest possible way, she chided those parents who sent their little ones off to school without sweaters yesterday morning, leaving them to shiver outside during a surprise fire drill. Of course, I’m thinking that has to be MY kid she’s talking about and this is just a thinly disguised letter to ALL parents, but if everybody read between the lines, she was saying, “This means YOU, Kellie Rasberry!” But DID EK leave the house without her sweater that morning?? How could I know for sure?? I left it out for the nanny to give her. Maybe that wasn’t me she was talking about….

But then came part two of the email, the part where the teacher asked parents to get on top of this homework stuff. Apparently some children aren’t getting their homework done. And the teacher can’t grade our children’s homework without the parent checking over it first and then signing off that the work had been done. I sniffed smugly to myself. That OBVIOUSLY wasn’t me. I may not be sure about the sweater situation, but I know EK is doing her homework. And I may be confused about her homework assignments — yes, I’ll admit that kindergarten homework is over my head — but I was sitting right there next to my kid, making sure she read her little assigned pages and circled and underlined and boxed and crossed whatever the heck a “blend” is. I don’t know about those OTHER parents, but I was INVOLVED. I was THERE. So maybe this email had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me because OBVIOUSLY I’m freaking parent of the year over here.

So when I picked up EK from school, she wasn’t wearing her sweater. Uh oh. Before I even asked her how her day was, I asked if she forget to bring her sweater to school that morning. She said it was crammed down in her backpack. WHEW! So then I knew for sure that the teacher’s email wasn’t meant for me. I wasn’t one of THOSE parents. I sat up a little straighter in the driver’s seat and I’ll admit it — my head was tilted back and my nose was pointed out as I pulled out of the parking lot. I even thought about buying one of those “Proud Parent of a Kindergartener” window decals for the back of my SUV just to show how good I was at this parenting stuff.

And then we got home and I opened EK’s backpack.

Out spilled the homework assignment from the day before. It was covered in red ink. There was one big red circle wrapped around an empty line where my signature was supposed to have been and then a big red exclamation point at the end of a sentence explaining to me that Emma Kelly — I mean her MOMMY — had skipped an entire page of homework.

So it WAS me!! I’M the uninvolved, unobservant, self-involved, sad excuse for a parent!! I’m failing kindergarten!! No window stickers for me…