The perfect morning
Expectations are fickle things. As parents of young children, we design the weekend-morning outings of our dreams – brief adventures intended to shape core memories and spark new neural pathways for our children as we show them the world and wonder within it. High hopes. Amirite?
It’s in this frenetic mode of ambitious super-planning that we meet our match. Our expectations are too high, our assumptions mistaken: we assume our children will sit still during storytime, that they’ll listen to the naturalist talk about local waterfowl – not crush a bag of Cheddar Bunnies with sticky fingers and sprinkle the remaining orange dust on adjacent babies as fairy dust.
We signed up for Salty Storytime at the Shoreline Interpretive Center on a Sunday morning. Backpack stacked with snacks, a reasonably clean water bottle, and a tube of Plus-Plus blocks to occupy my son’s attention over lunch, we had 20 minutes to get there, fill my tank, and drop off a package at UPS. I hadn’t thought to check Sunday hours: UPS, closed – 10 minutes lost. A Costco stop for gas put us back another 10. Waze said we’d arrive at 10:01 AM – on time. Great.
Had I not checked to see if the granola bar from my middle console was gluten-free, we’d have arrived on time. But I missed the exit and began heading across the seven-mile-long San Mateo Bridge, a sure stretch, adding another 20 minutes to our trek. Salty Storytime would be over by the time we’d get there, our only scheduled plan for the day negated. It felt like a substantial miss. Damn granola bar. Damn gluten. Damn time management.
As we sped toward the tollbooth, I forgot everything I’d taught my four-year-old about resilience. I forgot to take a mermaid breath and problem-solve, and I instead pounded open fists against my steering wheel, invisible pregnancy hormone-atoms bursting out of me like an angry piñata in a cacophony of electric colors, until my son said, “That’s okay, Mom,” with his shoulders shrugged and a reassuring smile reflected in my rearview. “We don’t have to be on time for storytime, right?”
“You’re right, bud,” I said, “It’s okay to make mistakes.” I complimented him for how right he was, marveling at my little man with more sense than his hungry mother, and found a way to reverse our direction. We made it in time to listen to the end of a story about the ecological diversity of marshland habitats and watercolor-paint a duckling onto a paper plate in the center’s mudroom.
Afterward, we braved the wind outdoors as it whipped through coastal grasses and we walked along the gravel trail surrounded by tidal ponds, flora and fauna that’s learned to thrive in brackish water. A shoe got stuck in the mud. A sock then touched mud. The shoes needed to be scraped along metal brushes affixed to the wood plank boardwalk encircling the stilted nature center.
Next up on our outing: another UPS stop that took far too long, which my son protested until receiving a free pen for his patient waiting. The pen was treasured as we rambled along the sidewalk toward a store selling the secondhand children’s clothing I favor over the new stuff. By the time we reached the storefront, the pen no longer worked. We returned to the UPS store to ask for a new one. Another small hurdle, another small problem solved.
Several pairs of size-six shorts were purchased and our secondary goal of the day was achieved. I craved Ethiopian food, found a restaurant nearby, parked, gathered my son and his backpack from the car, and entered the restaurant. Injera – no longer gluten-free. My Ethiopian food craving would need to be satisfied another day. We headed home, both of us fairly hungry, tossing back dried cherries from a bag I keep in my car door, tuckered out from our perhaps too ambitious outing.
That evening at bedtime when I asked my son what weekend moments were his favorite, he didn’t recall being late to storytime, nor the muddy shoe, nor the fact that we never got to eat lunch out together and play with the Plus-Plus blocks like we’d planned. Despite where I saw holes, the best part of the weekend was, “Being out with you, Mom.”
I became deeply reminded of my own misaligned expectations about what a weekend morning needs to be to be good. As I cuddled up next to him in his secondhand pajamas with that special kind of worn-in softness, I recalled how he showed me the way to turn a missed highway exit into no big deal, fairy dust.
And with regard to those perfect mornings, if I’m to be really zen about it, what’s perfect? Not getting clothes muddy within a half hour of arriving? Gluten-free injera at the moment a pregnant person wants it?
Parenting is the inevitable juggling of too much at once. I am messily learning the power in assuming the balls will drop so that when they do hit the floor, the noise doesn’t surprise me. And if I can get there more often, I’m guessing at some point maybe the noise of those dropped balls – and internal confetti booms, pregnancy hormones or not – will sound less like interruption and more like joyful drumming.
We still got to watercolor-paint ducklings onto paper plates, even with an accidental seven-mile bridge trip across the Bay. That’s a 14-mile round trip (~20 minutes), for the record. But who’s counting?