A suburban mom is making headlines with the tardy note she gave her teenage daughter.
Nicole Poppic, a 37-year-old mother of three, was having a tough morning with her 14-year-old daughter Cara. Not only did Cara take too long to rouse herself out of bed, but she was also argumentative and disrespectful during their speedy commute to get all three kids to school.
It didn’t take long for Nicole to reach the end of her patience, especially since Cara’s tardiness was going to cause the entire family to be late.
“My lecture went something along the lines of, ‘You need to start thinking about other people, Cara,'” Nicole later told reporters. “‘You are not the only person in this family, and you made your brother and sister late, too.'”
Cara didn’t seem to care, putting in headphones and listening to music on her phone. So Nicole took drastic action: She grabbed her daughter’s phone and threw it out of the window of their moving car.
That wasn’t the end of the morning, however. After making Cara wait while she dropped off her younger children at elementary school, Nicole penned a highly sarcastic note for Cara to take to her school’s attendance office.
“To whom it may concern,” Nicole started the note. “Cara is tardy this morning as a result of a condition known as ‘teenage-ism.'”
She went on to detail the signs and symptoms of teenage-ism, including backtalk, sleeping too late and showing no respect for one’s “birth giver.” She also said that while there was no cure for the affliction, Cara seemed to be recovering her senses after watching her phone fly out of the window.
“Please call me if there is another flare-up,” Nicole wrote.
Her daughter was so mortified by the note that she refused to take it, so Nicole marched her into the office and handed it over to the administration clerk herself. Then she went home and posted a picture of the note to Facebook.
“This is what happens when you are tardy as a result of your own poor choices and you ask me for a note to excuse your tardiness,” she wrote, adding a sunglasses emoji.
Though initially a private post, friends begged Nicole to make it public so that they could share it, and Nicole obliged. The post quickly reached viral status and attracted more than 7,000 likes and 32,000 shares.
Nicole, for her part, was stunned by the attention. Some people lauded her attitude; others criticized her technique. She went back to Facebook a few days later to clear up any misconceptions about her daughter or her parenting style.
“I am very proud of [Cara] and I love being her mom,” she wrote in a follow-up post, defending her daughter as an honor roll student and an active participant in the school band. “She was just having a bad morning.”
She even cracked a joke about teenage-ism, saying that it was both “challenging and rewarding” to raise an adolescent girl. She pointed out that all teenagers have growing pains, and it’s the job of parents to recognize these pains and guide their children back to the right path when they stray.
As for Cara, she says that all is forgiven.
“I was a little embarrassed at first,” she admitted, “but after it was all said and done, I laughed about it.” She added, “I hope people know that my mom and I are close and that I don’t hate her or feel like she is mean to me.”
As for Cara’s phone, it was undamaged in a neighbor’s yard and retrieved by Nicole. Cara got it back after four days.