CHILD: Can you bring me Chick-fil-A for lunch?
ME: No, son, I’m working.
CHILD: Doing what? What do you even do?
ME: OH MY GOSH.
So I prioritize the special stuff: parties, field trips, programs, and award assemblies. However, while I’m pretty decent at getting the dates right, the details often turn into white noise. If I assimilate the date, the starting time, and the entry fee, that feels like a mothering win. This is the best I can do. (“I’m so sorry, but I cannot make the class banner for the parade. Why not? Oh, because I don’t want to.”)
Anyway, when Sydney was in fourth grade, she had a field trip to . . . something somewhere. Listen, I am good at other things. I knew driving parents had to follow the buses pulling out at 8:30 a.m. Great. I showed up to the school parking lot with all the other moms and two or three SAHDs and proceeded to return phone calls in the car, which all my girlfriends and colleagues know is the only time I talk on the phone. (Leave me a message and be prepared to never hear from me again, or perhaps possibly next Friday when I’m driving to the airport. But probably never.)
Two buses pulled out, and I got in line behind the other cars and put my mind on autopilot as we headed south down I-35. Three phone calls later, I started thinking, Good night! Where are we going? What was this field trip? Something about government? Or maybe astronomy? I pulled alongside the buses just to make sure I hadn’t lost the caravan, but sure enough, our school name was emblazoned on the side.
After an hour and a half, we pulled into the San Antonio Zoo, which I surely didn’t remember as a pertinent detail. I parked, sauntered over to the buses, and watched the entire fifth grade contingency pile out. Which was delightful. For fifth graders. But my kid was in fourth, and I had inadvertently followed the wrong bus—not to the correct destination ten minutes from school, but to another city.
I will not type out the curses I screamed, as they are unbecoming even to a trucker, but I sped eighty miles an hour to the correct location after despertexting (desperate texting) my girlfriend something that sounded like, “Where the *&#@! are you guys??” I missed the entire movie (Ah! A movie! About whales! At the IMAX!) and finally caught up with the fourth graders at the after-picnic in the park. Helpfully, I’d also promised my friend Becky to be the surrogate field trip mom for her daughter, since Becky couldn’t go.
So I found my two forlorn charges eating their sad sandwiches, motherless, worried that I had either wrecked or run off to Mexico. While my fellow elementary school moms were sprawled on the ground, guffawing about my driving six zip codes away, Sydney said, “Mom, me and Makenna were like the orphaned baby whales in the movie.”
Jesus, be a fence.
Motherhood often feels like a game of guilt management; sometimes the guilt is overwhelming and debilitating, sometimes just a low simmer, but it always feels right there. There is never any shortage of fuel to feed the beast, so the whole mechanism is constantly nourished to administer shame and a general feeling of incompetency. Add our carefully curated social media world, which not only affects our sense of success and failure but also furnishes our children with an unprecedented brand of expectations, and boom: we are the generation that does more for our kids than ever in history yet feels the guiltiest. Virtually every one of my friends provides more than they had growing up, and still the mantra we buy into is not enough, not enough, not enough.
Meanwhile, if we developed the chops to tune out the ordinary complaints of children, we’d see mostly happy kids, loved and nurtured, cared for and treasured. At what point parents began accepting the disgruntlements of seventh graders as a factual State of the Union, I’m not sure, but just because they whine and fuss, or beg and plead, or even experience an actual parent letdown doesn’t mean we are ruining our families and doing everything wrong. We’ve lost the ability to flex, to shrug off missteps, to say I’m sorry and move on, to prioritize the big picture while lending grace to the subplots.
My youngest asked me this week to eat lunch with her at school, and with every workday spoken for and then some, I couldn’t and told her so. After conjuring the most pitiful eyes in history and sulking around the living room for half an hour, she walked up to me and said, like a martyr, “It’s all right, Mom. I forgive you.”
No. Nope. No, ma’am. Forgiveness is offered to someone who has wronged you, not a mother who has a job during your 11:10 a.m. lunch slot at Buda Elementary School. My work is not a sin against you, Child of Sorrow. Most moms on the entire earth work, in fact. I refused to sink into a shame spiral because I didn’t grant my snowflake’s particular wish, especially since we spend most of every day in the same house together.
A few years ago, that would have sent me to the prayer closet, wringing my hands yet again at how often I wound my children. I might have let that seep into my thoughts, poisoning my hope for their healthy childhoods and our future relationships. I may have immediately compiled a list of all the moms who would drop everything, rearrange an entire day to make it happen—the ones who already eat at school twice a week. I would have made up a whole story about how neglected she felt, just a piteous, tearful, walking tragedy, and she would write an essay on feeling unloved, and her teacher would read it to her colleagues and they would lament how disappointing it was when a working mom picked her career over her child.
Instead I said, “Sorry, kid. Have a great day. See you at 2:45.”
And shocker: she was fine.