Why I'll Miss High School (Top 10 Reasons)

No more high school for me. My youngest child has just graduated and is off to college in the fall. She is leaving her cat with me to remember her by. She brought the tiny little homeless kitty home a little over a year ago. Now it’s a big fat cat, although she has never fed it once or taken care of the litter box. I must say, though, I totally dig this cat, and I have always been a dog person.

My daughter named the cat Boo although I had been calling him Booby or Mr. McBoo. Lately I’ve been calling him Batman due to an episode recently I’m going to tell about in a hub entitled “The Cat and the Bat.” I knocked the bat out of the air and he . . . uh well I’ll save that for the hub. He also guards the bathroom. I don’t let Clowns fans or Ratbird fans or Bungles fans use the facilities. They can go take a dump in the woods.

I don’t care if my daughter doesn’t take care of her cat. I don’t care if my daughter doesn’t clean her room. She got her entire college bill paid for by scholarships and grants. This I care about.

But enough preliminaries, on to the subject of this hub. Why will I miss high school?

The homework.

Oh yeah, I’m a Grammar Nazi. She wrote papers full of errors in high school. Mostly stuff like two words that should be one word and words that should be hyphenated. And she misuses who vs. that. That cares? Uh I mean who cares? When I chastised her about the mistakes she told me she was the best in her class at writing papers. Well, she did make high honors and the National Honor Society. What are they teaching these kids in high school?

I helped her prepare over a hundred invitations to her graduation party to be mailed. So I’m putting stamps on the envelopes, and I noticed she misspelled two of her classmate’s last names. I asked if she was going to fix them and she said no. So I crossed out the last names, spelled them correctly, with the notation “Fixed by Dad.”

The proms.

I’ve been to eight proms in the last three years. See my hub “What Do You Tell a Guy Who Is Shopping for a Prom Dress?” for details.

Making lunch.

I made her lunch every day because she asked me too. She doesn’t like what the school serves up. Now last year I made mostly sandwiches. At the start of this school year she told me she wanted a salad for lunch, a Caesar salad, with chicken. So that’s what the spoiled brat got.

Now, I couldn’t really fit the container for the salad in one of those brown paper lunch bags like I could the sandwich. So I bought her a pink lunch box like the elementary kids have. I asked her if anybody else in high school had a lunch box, and she said no. I glued her picture to the pink lunch box, but she kept ripping it off.

Waking her up for school.

You would think one of those expensive IPhones could wake a kid up. No way. I had to do it. And often it wasn’t met with a warm reception. And she didn’t have to get up earlier than necessary to catch a bus because the spoiled brat has a car. In fact, you know how for the yearbook they got best this and best that? She got “best ride” among other ones. It’s a real girlie car. I don’t like being seen driving it.

Writing excuses for her absences from school.

Seriously, she was the queen of skipping school. But since she was making high honors, I didn’t care all that much except for all the nasty truancy letters I got from the school. Since I hate lying, I would refuse to write something that was a lie. Needless to say I had to be quite creative.

Basketball and soccer games.

I’ve been to so many high school sporting events in the past ten years I can’t even begin to count them. My youngest daughter’s siblings all played sports.

This past season my daughter made the first-team all-region soccer team. Her basketball team, for which she played starting guard, made it into the state playoffs, eventually losing to the state runner-up team. Her team was the most successful in the history of the school. That history, incidentally, ends with this graduating class, which I reflect upon later.

The pranks I played on her.

Well, I did put a big doggy milk bone in her pink lunch box one day. I heard from her friends that it was real funny when she pulled it out in the cafeteria.

This one was the best by far. Now, my daughter usually just dismisses me with “Yeah, right” when I’m trying to put one over on her. The Tuesday after Christmas she had basketball practice in the morning due to a big tournament that Thursday and Friday. She asked me to go out to her car and get something as she was getting ready. This is a common occurrence. Often she’ll just have showered before school and yells at me to go get her makeup or some bag or item of clothing she left in her car.

I go out to her car and get whatever it was she wanted and I noticed a case of beer in the back. I took it out and put it in the house. After she left, I asked her sister and brothers who the beer belonged to. Her siblings, who were visiting from out of town for the holidays, are all of legal drinking age and occasionally enjoy a good brew, like their father.

The story was when she and her older sister were out shopping the day before, her older sister bought a case of Yuengling at the request of their oldest brother who lives in Texas and can’t get Yuengling there. Actually, he took half of the case back to Texas in his suitcases, which I do not believe is legal.

Okay, I’m trying to make a long story shorter. In the days previous to this, we had all been discussing a situation that occurred at a nearby high school in the same district that involved a very good friend of my daughter’s. In fact, she ended up going to the prom with him.

This guy had a case of beer in his truck while he was at basketball practice. Somebody told the basketball coach. This is a violation of school policy for any student to have alcohol on school premises. The long-time basketball coach handled the matter himself, as he usually did. He made all the players run extra laps. So some of the players told their parents. The parents complained to school officials. As in, why should my son run extra laps, he didn’t do anything. Well, this situation exploded. The kid with the beer (the story was it belonged to his dad) got suspended for 10 days, and the basketball coach got fired.

So my daughter left for basketball practice. I told her sister and brothers and the older brother’s wife I was going to play a joke on her, and they were all for it. My daughter came home a couple hours later. We’ll all sitting in the living room talking for about fifteen minutes. I go into the other room and call the house phone with my cell phone. I pick up the house phone in the living room and talked seriously for a few minutes. I hung up and said, “That was your coach. He said somebody saw a case of beer in your car while you were at practice.”

Well, my daughter just broke out bawling. She’s thinking oh boy I’m getting suspended and no basketball tournament. My oldest son said, “That one really went south quick.” She calmed down a little once everybody assured her this was all a joke, but she definitely didn’t think it was very funny and was pretty mad at me. Oh, she laughs about it now. She told all her friends and they said I was really mean.

Problem solving.

Why would a teenage girl ask me whether she should wear jeans or shorts? Seriously. Oh, there were a lot of problems, but we worked them out. One I couldn’t work out is when she got a speeding ticket and she called me immediately to whine. Boo hoo, I got a speeding ticket. I asked her, “What do you want me to do about it?” Really. I warned her about speed traps in the area. All I could do was pay the $157 fine.

Her girlfriends.

Now, my first rule is that I never hug a teenage girl, other than my daughter, unless she hugs me first. When she first started attending this school for her sophomore year, she told me all the kids at school thought I was intimidating. The girls, especially her good friends who would spend the night and such, got to know me and warmed up to me. Maybe it was the cookies I made for them. If a girlfriend spent the night and there was school the next day, I would make the girlfriend a lunch too. No pink lunch box though. I had to put it in a plastic bag. Anyway, these girlfriends would leave me cute little notes where I could easily find them. So sweet. I’m glad the guys never got over thinking that I am intimidating.

Most of all, I’ll be missing my daughter, but life goes on.

These past several years in which I have been her custodial parent, as opposed to her mother my ex-wife have been the best years of my life.

My daughter occasionally writes me little notes like this one, which I have pinned to my bulletin board in my home office:

“Hello father,

I wanted to let you know I love you very much! You really are the best. I hope you have a wonderful day! I want to thank you for putting up with me and dealing with my messy room. I promise I’ll clean it soon. I love you with all my heart and thank you for everything you’ve done for me.

I LOVE YOU!!!”

Yes indeed, I will miss high school. There was an incredible crowd at the graduation ceremony. Due in part I’m sure to the fact that this was the very last graduation class for my daughter’s school. Next year the school is being combined with two other schools because of declining enrollment. The same thing is happening in school districts all over western Pennsylvania. One of the speakers was a doctor around eighty years old who graduated from this high school’s very first class. Quite a nostalgic evening, for a number of reasons.

Oh well, my daughter will only be a little over an hour away at college. She’ll be playing soccer so I’ll see her at those games and whenever else. It will probably be worse when she gets married. She never had a steady boyfriend in high school, but she told me she is going to find a guy to marry in college. One of her goals, I guess.