Why I Let My Son Miss School for a Fishing Trip With His Grandpa
At 7:11 on a Tuesday morning, I left a message on the school attendance line saying my son would be absent due to a “family commitment.” The word commitment was doing a lot of work. What I actually meant was: my dad is having heart surgery on Thursday, and this morning he asked to take my nine-year-old fishing one last time before they wheel him in.
I drank my coffee standing up, staring at the answering machine like it might judge me. It didn’t. The automated system simply thanked me and gave me a confirmation number. That was the easy part.
My dad used to take me to the same pond when I was a kid—a scraggly little body of water behind a feed store, stocked with bluegill and bullhead catfish. He taught me how to tie a clinch knot on a cold April morning, his big hands covering mine. Now his hands shake a little, and climbing down to the water’s edge requires a careful sidestep and a hand on my shoulder. When he called on Sunday night and said “the boy and I need one more morning before they cut me open,” I didn’t ask questions. I just said I’d make it happen.
Tuesday morning was overcast with a light wind. The kind of morning that smells like wet leaves and diesel from the nearby highway. My son didn’t understand why this particular day was special, because he’s nine and he lives in a world where grandfathers just exist, unchanged and permanent. He was mostly concerned about missing recess and whether he’d get in trouble.
“You’re not in trouble,” I told him, pouring apple juice into a thermos. “We’re taking a personal day.”
“But school says—”
“School will survive one Tuesday without you.”
I sent an email to his teacher before we left, trying to sound normal. “We’re taking a personal day. Could you set aside the math worksheet and the spelling packet? We’ll pick them up tomorrow.” She wrote back fifteen minutes later: “Sending the work home with a classmate. Hope everything is okay.” It was an honest email. I didn’t pretend he was sick, and I didn’t over-explain.
The fishing trip itself was unremarkable in every way, which is probably why I keep thinking about it. We drove in the old truck with the windows half down. My dad bought gas station donuts in a greasy white box. The reels got tangled before we even reached the water. My son caught a small bluegill on his second cast, and my dad showed him how to hold it by the lip the same way he’d shown me. He laughed that low, dry laugh of his, and for a second the shaking in his hands disappeared as he helped the boy feather the hook out.
At ten in the morning, my son said, “Can we do this again Saturday?”
And my dad said, “Maybe not Saturday, buddy.”
We packed up and sat on the tailgate while the boy tossed pebbles into the shallows. Nobody said anything about Thursday. I didn’t fill the silence, and neither did my dad. The moment just hung there, ordinary and heavy, like the overcast sky.
The school marked it as an excused absence—family commitment apparently fits somewhere in the dropdown menu on their attendance portal. But I know that’s mostly administrative luck. If we had moved to a different district, a principal might have questioned it, might have pointed out that fishing isn’t in the official list of acceptable reasons to miss school. And honestly, they wouldn’t have been wrong. Fishing isn’t a medical appointment. It’s not a funeral. It’s not even a religious observance. It was just a Tuesday morning with a man who helped me with a math problem once when I was ten.
So what makes an excuse valid? Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the validity of an absence depends less on the reason itself and more on what the child carries back into the classroom. Missing school for a 9 a.m. dentist appointment leaves a slightly tired kid and a clean bill of oral health. Missing school to sit quietly next to your grandfather while he points out the way a bobber moves in the current—well, the school doesn’t have a category for that. But the boy came home with a story he keeps telling. He came home knowing something about his grandfather’s patience, about the smell of grass and water and old worm containers. None of that is in the curriculum, but it has stayed.
I should add that I don’t recommend pulling kids out of school casually. If we made a habit of this, it would erode the meaning. A special day becomes just another reason to skip. My son has missed two days of school beyond flu season in his entire elementary career, and both were because of my dad. He’s the line we draw. When the same boy asked last spring to stay home to play the new video game he’d been waiting for, I shook my head and reminded him about the fishing trip. He knew the difference. That’s the part that matters. A rare absence can be a gift; a frequent one becomes a loophole.
The practical side of all this is simple, but it’s the part that counts. Call the office early, before the school day begins. Don’t pretend it’s a dentist appointment if it isn’t—teachers see that stuff all the time, and the trust is worth more than the permission slip. Tell the teacher directly, in a quick email or note, that it’s a family day, and ask for the work without making a big deal of it. Most teachers will support a genuine family moment. What they won’t support is a string of unrelated “personal days” that smell like vacations. The key is being honest and using these days sparingly.
Thursday came, and the surgery went well. Recovery took months, and the next spring my dad took my son to the pond once more. That time was his idea, all on his own. When I signed the absence slip last April, I wrote “family commitment” again. It felt like the truth, even if the reason was just one more morning of bluegill and silence.
I still wonder, sometimes, whether those missed hours cost him anything. He missed a spelling quiz. He missed a math lesson on fractions. He’ll never get those back, and I’ve made my peace with that. Sitting in the waiting room on Thursday, I thought about how life is mostly small, quiet choices, and how a Tuesday morning by a muddy pond can turn out to be more important than anything scheduled in a lesson plan.
The alarm went off at 6:40 the next morning like it always does. My son ate his cereal and asked if Grandpa could come over this weekend. I said I’d ask. There’s no perfect way to weigh a school day against a memory. You just look at your kid, and you decide which one he’ll carry longer. Then you make the call.
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