December 12: Walking Up and Down, E-mail, Daughter

He was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly. Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful shaking of his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.

The reason Scrooge is mournful in this passage is simple: he is about to witness an encounter from his past. It’s between a young Scrooge and “little Fan,” Scrooge’s sister. Fan is one of the few people in the novel who exhibits affection and love for Scrooge, and Scrooge is absolutely devoted to her. Of course, Fan dies at a young age, giving birth to Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, which probably explains Scrooge’s animosity toward him in the opening pages of A Christmas Carol. This little moment preceded a scene with the other woman who loved the young Scrooge, his fiancé, Belle. There’s a great deal of disappointment and heartache in Scrooge’s past.

This Worry Wednesday, I want to talk about my daughter. Yesterday, I received an e-mail from one of her teachers. The subject line was simply my daughter’s name. No details. No hint of what the message contained. I didn’t want to open it. I was afraid I was going to find out my daughter was failing a subject or owed the school $600 for a computer she had broken. Well, I wasn’t far off. The first line of the message was, “I’m worried about your daughter.” The teacher went on to explain that my daughter had missed turning in several assignments and was close to receiving a detention. “I’m just wondering if something is wrong,” her teacher wrote, “because she’s such a good student.”

I was touched by the teacher’s concern, and I was a little worried about my daughter. I have to admit that I did a little walking up and down, like young Scrooge in the above passage. I started imagining the worst. Boy trouble. Bully trouble. Mental illness trouble. Physical abuse. Sexual abuse. Verbal abuse. My mind went everywhere. My wife and I have been talking about our financial situation a lot since she lost her job. Maybe she picked up on my worries. (I must admit that I don’t hide my feelings in this arena very well.)

Something was obviously troubling my daughter. She comes by her penchant for worry naturally. It’s in her genetics.

I spoke to my daughter last night. She got pretty agitated when I told her about the e-mail from her teacher. When she calmed down, she told us that she had completed the missing assignments, but she kept on forgetting to turn them in. They were stacked up in her locker at school. (This explanation touches upon another of my worries: I think my daughter has ADHD. Again, she’s genetically predisposed to this condition.)

My daughter’s explanation was a lot better than I expected it to be. No trauma. Nothing requiring extensive therapy. No vandalism or truancy issues. I told her to turn in the missing assignments for partial credit, and I suggested she always carry a folder for important papers to complete and submit to her teachers. Problem solved.

I wish all of my worries were so easily solved. I wish I could put all my troubles into a folder and submit it to somebody for possible solutions. It isn’t quite that simple. Yeah, yeah, I know about prayer and trust and faith. I know all that.

But Saint Marty will still wear a rut in the living room rug the next time he gets an e-mail from his daughter’s teacher.

Do snakes get e-mails?