It’s the kind of morning where you are not sure which way the day is going to go.

Either your child, who stayed home sick-ish from school yesterday (sore throat and headache, nothing verifiable to the outside eye) will be ready to go back to school and you – who work at home and enjoy all the flexibility and distractions and opportunities for kids to stay home from school that working from home provides – will have the house to yourself: to think, to write, to work, to procrastinate with coffee and newspaper in peace, or whatever it is you do.

It could be that kind of day.

Or, it could be a day where your child wakes up, appearing for all the world to be rested and rejuvenated after a day off; where he eats his cereal and readies himself for the school day without complaint or debate, perhaps with an attitude of “this is my lot, may as well face it; there’s nothing I can say that would change her mind to let me stay home so I will bear this cross and go to school” – at which moment his brother (coughing and nose-blowing and feverish) emerges from the guestroom (where he has slept last night because his own brand new, eco-conscious, expensive mattress is “not comfortable”) in T-shirt and underwear disheveled and clearly not going to school; and upon seeing him the child says with eyes wide: “HE’S still here???”

And you know, deep inside, which kind of day it is going to be, even before he changes his countenance, slouches his posture, and says: “I’m not feeling well.”

But you still hope! Because by this point he is dressed – shoes on – and you have agreed to drive him in the car to school. You still believe that his healthy happy core might carry the day – until you hear his commentary on the quick trip to school: “I’ll be home in an hour; see ya’ soon, Mom,” and “no one ever believes me when I say I’m sick” (guilty) and “remember when I had pneumonia and no one thought I was sick” (no); and he continues this commentary out of the car up to the threshold of school, close enough for us to say hello to the PE coach; and you think about getting a call from school in an hour, when you are in the middle of something, you think about the guilt you will feel (toward him, the teacher, the other kids at school for exposing an actually sick child to them), and you say to your child: “You want to come home?”

He looks at you, incredulous – this campaign worked? he was believed? you have a heart? – and he says “Yes,” still not sure if you meant it. And you do.  You come home. He gets back into his footed pajamas, retrieves his book out of his backpack, and climbs into your soft bed to read.

And you think, this day is going to be a good one.