Mistakes

I have made a monumental mistake. This is a brain splurge because I'm completely struggling to get past it and I'm hoping this will help in some way to order my thoughts and help me move forward.

I committed the ultimate internet sin. I clicked the box that said I had read the document with all the terms and conditions and information with an online form. 

But I wasn't buying something I could return. It's not like I've just lost money on something because i was careless. This was my daughter's school placement application.

Only I didn't read it. At least, not the whole of that stupid 14 page document. In fact, I cannot find anyone who did, but for some reason its come back to bite me and me alone. Or it certainly feels that way. 

Last Autumn when i did the application life was on that awful stomach churning downward lurch of a rollercoaster. It was as much as I could cope with to fill in the form and send it, let alone actually really engage with and think about reading a jargon filled document. Of course, hindsight is an amazing and terrible thing. Of course, I should have explained that my eldest daughter had been forced into an out of catchment school that we never chose for her and now I was applying for a sibling to join that same school. But nowhere on the form indicated that i needed to tell them this at all. For some reason I just assumed that they would know that. In fact the paragraph relating to our situation is on page 13 of the 14 page document! But i couldn't even think like that back that, applying that kind of logic in the blackness of everything else was completely beyond me.

And now my beautiful sassy daughter hasn't got into the same school as her sister because I filled the form in wrong and ticked the box to say i'd told them everything they needed to know. The weight of guilt that i have felt is almost overwhelming. So here's to hoping that logic and common sense will prevail in the appeals process, that some lovely people will see that it is absurd to expect someone who doesn't drive to drop two children at schools a mile and a half apart within 15 minutes of each other and to pick both of them up at 3pm and that siblings really should get preference whether or not they live in catchment!

I realise now that I messed this up, but i hope someone out there will give us a second chance, because we were let down in the beginning by a system that didn't give us our catchment school because there were never enough places when Mirembe started. Someone really needs to make the idiosyncrasies clearer! 

It's interesting to note that there is a new school being built before another five hundred houses are built in our town. All those school places have been filled already. Where are the children who move in to those houses supposed to go exactly...?