A call and after....

It is amazing, the extent to which our minds can be conditioned over the years; conditioned to experiences, events, incidents and even words…. simple casually uttered words that have the power to evoke strong emotional responses and thoughts, based on preconceived ideas and previous experiences.
Incident…
There I was plodding my way through the day at work when I get a call from my son’s school, which was a first for me. I was asked to pick him up from school an hour after the regular school leaving time since “he has not completed his reading passage work”.
Instant reaction running through my mind -> All those complaints from teachers concerning his incomplete assignments and now he has taken it to this level of being punished with after school detention… grrrrr
Anger begins its infusion.
I leave work early to be able to reach on time to pick him up. I call my husband before starting the car, vent out a bit of my slowly building up anger and suggest that we block my son’s favourite WWE sports channel as punishment.
A 45 minute drive, hardly anything to look forward to, maneuvering through the already heavy early evening traffic, my anger builds up some more, all the time wondering what I am going to say to him. And worse, dreading the thought of meeting his teacher’s reprimanding words and expressions and my mind scolding my son even further for having put me in such a situation. My head begins to throb; my entire body feels like it is being weighed down with lead.
I park the car, enter the school and walk through the corridor towards the reception area and find his classmates standing there apparently waiting for their parents. A small voice in my head notes this with “okay, so he was not the only one to be punished” and my heart lightens just a little bit. My son comes walking quickly towards me bursting to tell me what really happened, the injustice of it all! A flurry of words through which he manages to convey that he had completed most of the homework with the exception of what he did not know requiring help from his teacher while majority of the class had not bothered to do the work at all, which angered the teacher to the extent that she proceeded to punish the entire class.
My son was not at fault…yippee!! My whole being softens and a feeling of sweet relief floods through me. I must remember to ask my husband to retain the WWE channel…my son must never know that I had even considered taking it off...
A single abrupt sentence over the telephone had managed to provoke a successive series of strong thoughts and emotions, and how!