Can you tell I'm off the Lexapro this month?

On Tuesday morning, I called the pediatrician's office and spoke to the appointments desk. I explained that somehow, we had missed our son's 4-year-old well child check, and we really needed an appointment this week so that he could start school on Monday.

"Well, it'll be difficult," said the woman, "because she's only in tomorrow morning."

"Mmmm," I said noncommittally.

"I guess I can try to squeeze you in at 9 tomorrow," she said after a moment. "But I'll have to check with the doctor."

"Oh, that's fine," I said. "You can ask her. I mean, we hang out." Which is perhaps a slight exaggeration -- I mean, we don't go get our nails done together, but she did invite my family to her son's bar mitzvah and she has attended parties in my home.

Apparently, it was good enough for the appointments lady, because she immediately said, "Oh, then fine. I'll just put you in for 9."

So she did, and the next morning we saw the pediatrician, who told me I could choose my own percentile numbers for D's height, weight, and BMI. She showed me the chart. If the normal growth percentiles were in, say, Texas, D's plot points would be in, say, North Dakota. I'm going with 437th percentile. It feels right.

She praised me for all that we've done with D., the progress he has made, and so on. At one point, she asked me what Dr. F's recommendations were, and I looked at her blankly. "Dr. F?"

"The ENT," she said, and I do, in fact, remember taking D. to several appointments on that floor of the hospital, and then....nothing.

"Yeah, she didn't need to see us again," I said.

Clearly, my system of "scrawl appointments in unintelligible shorthand in my Blackberry" needs some work.

At any rate, D. received five shots. He did not enjoy the actual needle going in and did try to fight back a bit, but he didn't become the hysterical mass of tears that my girls would have been. And then we left, clutching our updated shot records and our stickers.

Several hours later, I swung by D's new school to drop off the forms. I handed them in and asked the receptionist if she could ask D's teacher to come out.

"Oh, she's no longer with us, and we don't know who the new teacher will be," the woman said. I stared at her. Surely this was the beginning of a poorly executed joke.

"What?"

"Yeah, she's no longer with us."

"And you don't know who the new teacher will be?"

"Right."

Perhaps my face showed something akin to ABJECT FREAKING HORROR, because the nurse, who had been reviewing my forms, immediately summoned the special education coordinator to come speak with me.

I remember standing there, repeating, "Oh my God. Oh my God." About eight times. Now, I understand that my reaction may seem a little extreme in a world of, well, all the crap the world has to offer, but I was really thrown for a loop. We've spent the whole summer talking about this woman! And she's gone? And they don't know who will teach the class? The class that starts Monday?

The special education coordinator, who teaches the kindergarten class, came out and invited me to sit down. She explained that the teacher had a family crisis and had to abruptly move out of state. Clearly, she never received the memo that the world is really supposed to revolve around MY needs, but what can you do? Of greater concern is the fact that as of right now, there is no teacher for D's class.

Well, the coordinator said gently, if we don't have someone for Monday, we're going to start the year with a teacher from this school who has 35 years of experience working with special education students. She explained that in a worst case scenario, the students would simply have to adjust to a new teacher twice, once at the start of the year, and once after a new teacher is hired and in-serviced. She assured me that under no circumstances would the school simply hire the first mildly qualified applicant they encountered.

In other words, I think it will be OK, but really, all I kept thinking during those moments at the school was, "Why, God? What the heck did my kid ever do to you? CUT ME A FREAKING BREAK."