The Perils of Preemptive Arguing

Tell me I'm not the only one who does this.

On Tuesday, when I picked my son up, his aide mentioned that he'd been very congested and sniffly and coughing, and that if he was still that way in the morning, he shouldn't come to school or the planetarium field trip planned for that day. We'd had discussions like this before, and polite disagreements over whether a cold constitutes a sick-day sickness, or whether this might even just be an allergy.

I was polite again this time around, but spent the afternoon and evening building up a big head of steam. If I'm going to keep my kid home every time his nose is stuffy, I fumed to myself, he's going to miss whole months of school. By my rules, you go to school unless you have a fever or are actively vomiting, and as far as I can tell that is the policy of the district. Why should I have to tell this kid who loves school and needs his routine that, although he is not feverish or lethargic or sick-acting, he has to stay home until his nasal passages are spotless?

I went round and round with this stuff, building up annoyance and resentment, even though I like the aide and the teacher and I sympathize that being in a small poorly ventilated room with a sniffling coughing kid who does not blow his nose very well could seriously send one round the bend. Once I'm in full raging Mama Bear mode, you know, it's hard to slow down for sympathy.

I wound up sending my slightly sniffling son in to school on field-trip day, but that didn't stop my internal dialog. All day, I imagined infuriating scenarios: Maybe they didn't let him go on the trip, but plunked him down in some strange classroom for the day. Maybe they made him feel bad for wanting to come to school and pass his cold to his classmates. Maybe I was going to get a lecture when I went to pick him up. Oooh, I was prepared. I was overflowing with righteous indignation. I had a piece of my mind all ready to serve. How dare they discriminate on the basis of disability-related nose-blowing impairments!

And then ... nothing. No one said anything when I picked him up. No notes in the folder. No phone calls. He went on the field trip and had a great time. No words were said about his cold.

And I'm all charged up with nowhere to go, feeling a little silly to have gotten so angry over things that never actually happened.

Do you do that, too -- become all emotional over imagined fights and slights that fail to take shape in the real world? Reassure me I've got company in the comments.