A Very Breakwell Breakfast
Newsletter 2026-08-07
I knew from the year that it had to be a scam. The date on the invitation, mass-texted to half of our suburb in a spam against humanity, congratulated the Class of 2034 on the start of school. That’s not a real year. It’s in the distant future, when we’ll go to the moon in flying cars and not just slam into it with leftover rockets for no reason. Then I realized the invitation was for my youngest daughter, Waffle. I had never done the math before for when she’ll graduate high school. It will, in fact, be 2034, exactly 31 years after my wife Lola and I graduated from our respective high schools. Learning the truth felt like being run over by a bus. Once again, I had been betrayed by basic arithmetic. The math wasn’t even the worst part. Everything about that invitation, from the lack of text etiquette to the perils of back-to-school logistics, filled me with despair. I expected nothing less from First Day of School Eve.
The reasoning behind the text was selfless enough. Our community has a tradition where the students of each middle school class have breakfast together at a non-school site on the morning of the first day of school. I absolutely hate it. It adds inconvenience and uncertainty to an already hectic day. If Waffle wanted to participate, she’d have to wake up early and ride with a parent rather than taking the bus, teaching the bus driver to skip our stop and making Lola or I late for work. This wasn’t our first ill-timed rodeo. A few years in a row, my oldest daughter, Betsy, met her class at a classmate’s house a few blocks from the middle school. At least she was supposed to. The first time, someone (likely us) dropped the ball on the start time, and Betsy didn’t get there until the kids were already leaving the house to walk to school. Instead of a doughnut, she got tears and a full-blown first-day-of-school crisis. She could have had Froot Loops at home. When Mae entered middle school, her class met at a country club close enough to walk to the school from the other direction. There were no tears, but Mae only went once. I didn’t try to change her mind when she decided on her own that she didn’t want to go anymore. I love it when my kids learn from our collective mistakes. It’s the surest proof that they take after their mom instead of me.
This year, the parents in Waffle’s class want to meet at a community park far out of walking range. To participate, we’d have to get there an hour before school starts, then wait around for the kids to eat before driving them to school. There won’t be any food for adults, so we’d have to eat in our cars by ourselves while watching our kids eat without us. Far be it for me to complain about someone else offering to feed my child. Well, it’s not that far off for me. I complain so well that it led to a newsletter. I’m a professional whiner. While the breakfast would be a nice gesture, I never watch my kids eat if I can help it. It’s why all of our dining room chairs face the TV. To add insult to injury, the breakfast was announced through a group text message that included every parent of every fifth grader at Waffle’s school. The last time I checked, which was after many departures, there were still sixty adults in the group. That’s forty-five more people than I know total, and sixty more parents in Waffle’s class than I’ve ever met. I knew as soon as it popped up on my phone that the thread would be a disaster. I love being pessimistic. It’s the easiest way to be right.
I’m in a few group text message chains with friends. One of them has eight people in total. If three of us are texting at roughly the same time, it becomes absolute chaos. At my age, if I fall more than ten messages behind, I refuse to go back. I’m not going to speed through a novel to catch up. I didn’t do the reading in college, and I’m not going to start now. With sixty people in the thread, the messages were flying fast and furious, all from unknown numbers. My phone was blowing up. It made me sound popular, which was the greatest lie my phone ever told. I muted the thread for two hours, the longest option that popped up with one tap, and forgot about it. Hours later, my phone exploded again. I went deeper into the settings and muted the thread permanently. I was finally safe from the perils of socialization. If only they had lost my number before they hit send.
The organizers weren’t trying to disrupt anyone’s lives. They were merely upholding a local tradition, which is the easiest way to get in trouble. Just because someone has done something for a long time is no reason to keep doing it. People used to die of polio all the time. It’s for the best that we put a stop to that. I never heard of the breakfast tradition growing up, but I’m not from around here. Either it’s exclusive to this suburb or exclusive to this time period, far from the Paleolithic Era when I went to school. If the latter is the case, the breakfast is a modern tradition, which is the worst kind. Despite being newish, it’s still laden with the guilt-ridden burden of faux nostalgia. It’s the kind of thing that, if a parent did it for their oldest kid five years ago, they have to repeat it for their other kids, and other moms and dads have to jump in to keep up. It’s the most elderly form of peer pressure. Just once, I wish that pressure was to stay home and do less. The breakfast around here used to be just for middle school. At least that’s how it was for Betsy and Mae. I don’t remember what happened with Lucy. Maybe her class was an exception, or maybe the invitation was so traumatic that I blocked it out. It wouldn’t be the first time my faulty memory has saved me. There’s nothing riskier than remembering your own life.
