“How was school today?”
Why do parents love that question so much? Every day, when I get home from school, this question is waiting for me along with a glass of haldi milk (blech!) and a bowl of fruit. I’d rather drink double haldi milk than answer this question. But, there’s no escaping it.
“How was school today?”
What does it matter? It’s over. It’s bad enough I had to sit through eight periods of geometry, similes, greetings in French and learning about the solar system (which was actually kind of cool), but now, I have to come home and talk about it? Not fair.
The interrogation continues.
“What did you do in school?”
Like my mid -term assessment, there are right answers and wrong answers to this question. If I say “I had palak paneer for lunch,” I can tell it isn’t the right answer.
But there’s only so much information my brain can hold, and my brain would prefer to remember what I had for lunch instead of what I did in dance class (I’m not much of a dancer, so I would like to forget the embarrassment of jazz hands).
Zapped out
“Do you have any homework?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe. Can you WhatsApp and ask?”
Amma’s face looks like a storm cloud when I say this. And like a storm cloud, it starts raining questions soon.
“Are you not paying attention in class?” “Are you dreaming?” “What are you doing when the teacher is teaching?”
“I don’t know.”
Uh-oh, there are about a hundred wrinkles on Amma’s forehead now. Plus, her nose is red. That’s the wrong answer too.
Sometimes, she tries to word the questions differently to trick me into answering.
“Soooo was school fun?”
“Does learning paryayavachi sound like fun?” Parents are weird.
Once, she read something on the Internet about how to get your child to talk about school (I know she did, because she told Appa , when she thought I wasn’t listening. Parents, we are ALWAYS listening.)
So then she started asking “Who was funny in class today?”
“If an alien space ship could zap away any of your classmates who would you pick?”
What? No one! I wish an alien would come and zap me away so I wouldn’t have to listen to this.
When that didn’t work, Amma and Appa started telling me about their day.
“It will be fun! Let’s share stories about our day.”
Guys, if you think school is boring, wait till you become an adult. It sounds awful. Amma talks about meetings, meetings and more meetings. And her boss sounds worse than my class teacher. They don’t have a play break, and they eat lunch while they work.
I think I’d rather tell Amma how my day was than listen to how terrible hers was!
