Permission

 1. The title permission made me wonder what might being asked for permission. My mind immediately went back and I was reminded of the times I had to ask my teacher for permission to do things such as going to the bathroom and getting something from the coat closet. I already thought of this story having a children and teachers and a classroom setting.
2. What confuses me at first is in the first paragraph where the headmistress is speaking I dont know exactly who she is speaking to. Is this a memory ? Or is she speaking to a parent or a child? That I am confused about.
3. What grabs my attention is how clingy the father (who I figure is telling the story) is to his youngest child which is his daughter and how he seems to be more clingy to his son from a distance. I feel that the children are in a sense feeling smothered by their dad but are too young to tell him that they need space, they probably are too young to notice him smothering him.
4. Even when the children are in the pool and he jumped in just to be with them and still clung to them arose in me some feeling of enough is enough already lie let your children breathe and grow, let them scrape their knees and come to you crying. But when the father said he saw his dead so in the pool under his kids who were having fun, I then felt bad for him because he has not let go of his son's death who probably drowned in the pool.When the headmistress asked for him to get out of the pool I felt that his position changed from being an adult to a kid and I felt as if he had a relationship with his this headmistress before maybe when he was younger.