The squeal of the packing tape gun is a sound you either love or hate. For me, it’s the sound of a fresh start, a new state, a better job. The smell of cardboard and dust is the smell of possibility. But as I watched my daughter, Chloe, pull her geometry textbook from a box labeled ‘PRIORITY – SCHOOL,’ her face told a different story. The box was open, the possibility was gone. She held the book like it was a fragile, dead thing. “Dad,” she said, her voice flat, “this is chapter four. We finished chapter nine at Northwood. They’re a whole semester behind.”
The cold shock of that moment was brutal, a sharp pain right behind the eyes. All the logistics, the moving costs, the emotional upheaval-we had planned for all of it. We had spreadsheets. We had contingency funds. But we had assumed, with a kind of blissful ignorance only a parent who has never moved mid-high-school can possess, that ‘tenth-grade geometry’ was a universal constant. A fact. Like gravity, or the freezing point of water.
It is not.