The first morning of high school went as well as we could have hoped. M woke up on her own, on time, got ready, and was pretty cheerful once she came downstairs. She was pleasant during the obligatory photo session and was chatty on the way to school. She admitted she was nervous but equally excited to get things started.
The first day of the school year is always a big deal at CHS, as the seniors teepee the trees on the long hill that leads to campus, and then line the street to cheer the other students as they drive in. There are always extra folks hanging around so the traffic is super tough to navigate. It is probably with that in mind that the first class begins 30 minutes later than normal. I had been warned by other parents about the nightmare of first-day traffic and those warnings were legit. We made it roughly a half mile from campus when we hit the gridlock. It took 20 minutes to travel about two blocks, thanks to traffic backing up through the one entrance to campus, and three directions of traffic coming together the way we were arriving from. Once we cleared the logjam of back-to-back lights, it was only five minutes up the hill to drop her off. We left a little later today than we normally will, but it was a good exercise to confirm if we don’t leave early next week, the sisters will be late getting to St. P’s.
We’ll see tonight, after she goes to cross country practice, how the first day went.
In the midst of all this M-centric posting recently, I forgot another huge story from her life: she went to her first concert last week.
Well, she was supposed to.
She and her three best friends lucked into free, suite tickets to see Cardi B at Banker’s Life Fieldhouse. They were crazy excited. The parents organized who would drop them off and pick them up, the girls were given very clear instructions on how to get to the suite, how to never walk around alone, etc. There was very little discussion amongst the parents, probably owing to the fact that these four girls are all smart, rule-followers.
That said, I don’t think any of us parents were upset when the concert was cancelled at the last moment because of an “unspecified threat.” M called me and told me there had been a bomb threat, but that has never been confirmed. After a couple days word leaked that Cardi B was either too drunk or too hungover during her sound check and decided to call the show off. That has not been confirmed, either.
So instead the girls went out to dinner and shopped together before hanging out one last time for the summer.1 I was picking M up when I heard them all shrieking. They had just gotten word from the classmate that gave them the tickets that his family would let the girls use them for the makeup show in September. We’ll see if that actually happens.
On the way home, M was very dramatic, sighing heavily and saying things like, “Of course this has to happen at the concert I go to,” and “Why did this have to happen in Indianapolis instead of some other city?” I listened to her quietly while laughing at her in my head for her drama. I also did my best to reassure her that it was better to cancel the show than let it occur and let some crazy person do something awful. We were all glad the girls were not yet in the arena and the mom driving them could just turn around and come back. Three St. P’s 8th graders made the paper in a photo of them sitting on a curb, staring at their phones in disbelief.
The best part, though, was last Saturday at CHS orientation, one of the dads said to me, “I had never listened to any of Cardi B’s music before. I listened to a few songs the other night. They’re really awful! She says terrible things!” I chuckled, thinking of some of the stuff I listened to when I was a teenager. I’m hopeful as with how my parents raised me, M has enough sense to know that it is all a show and not to take any of it too seriously.