My son doesn’t talk about school at all, and has become so gymnastically adept at evading our interrogations that we get almost all of our information through other means. Some of this is through official channels, not least the emails the school sends us.
I say ‘us’, but the emails all go to his mum, which is unfortunate. Despite her many other admirable qualities, my wife has a tendency to let these pile up in her inbox, whereupon she sends them to me in clumps of five or six, by which time they may date from any time in the past month.
This means we are the last to know if there are forms that need to be filled out, any cake sales on the horizon, or cases of West Nile virus ripping through the student population.
Our other main resource is other, better parents, especially those who save our lives on a weekly basis in the parents’ WhatsApp group. When Kingdom comes, there shall be a special place in heaven reserved for all those who write things like, ‘What size ladder do we have to pack on Friday?’ prompting my wife and I to realise that ‘Bring a Ladder to School Day’ has come round once more.
But our number one resource is a visual cue on my son’s person. I discover almost all information about his school days from the stickers he comes home with.
Helpfully, they often come branded with text that makes their source immediately obvious. Even the most passive parent can make sense of bright yellow stickers that blare GOOD READING! or MATHS SUPERSTAR.
But even more oblique offerings, like GREAT EFFORT, are rendered scrutable by the other marvellous thing about stickers; while my son cannot be bribed or cajoled into telling us about any part of his day from a simple suite of questions, he is positively enthusiastic to explain any sticker he receives.
So it was that we discovered the exact text he’d read to attain his first adhesive appliqué, and the precise sums he’d managed to get his second. The ‘good effort’ to which the third applied, was in making his handwriting extra neat in his copy book. He described this feat to us in full sentences – a first for any school-related activity – ending with a glorious flourish of garbled self-praise, ‘I writed as neat as a pie.’
This week’s sticker was a big, bright-red heart with no text on it whatsoever, which he informed us marked him out as a ‘fair play champion’. This was, he told me, because he and his friend, Elena, had invited another child into their game in the playground.
We rejoiced at his kindness, its reward and, moreover, the window it gave us into his daily life. Now, if only he can come home with a sticker that tells us what size ladder he needs to bring on Friday, we’ll be laughing.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on X @shockproofbeats
