Note to others: when you push very hard, some things just fall apart. Yesterday, as I was typing rather furiously—Nano, that’s what I’m saying here—the phone rang and it was my seventh grader. The clock read 10:22 AM. “Mom?” he asked. Immediately, I asked whether everything was okay. “I think I got Saskia’s lunch in my bag,” he answered. “I have a banana and a sippy cup.”
I asked whether he was okay. “Sure,” he said. I said it’d be hard to get there since I was working. “People will share with me. Just bring me a big snack when you get me.” I thanked him profusely.
Before feeling guilty that I’d prioritized my work above the maternal task rushing to make another lunch to my son—and drive it up to school—I called Saskia’s school to explain that she had her middle school brother’s lunch, which is why it looked different. She doesn’t normally get potato thyme fougasse and a whole apple. She can, of course, eat apples whole; I just tend to cut them up for school. And, I added, those dates and three squares of chocolate? Please don’t let her see them. I didn’t want you to think I’d begun sending her chocolate to school. I haven’t. Kindly, the teacher said she’d keep that out and was chuckling a bit.
I returned to my quiet writing time before the midday preschool pickup.
On the way home from preschool, I asked Saskia about her lunch and whether she liked her sandwich. “I don’t like cheeeeese,” she said. “I like apples.”
Before his late afternoon pickup, I found myself experiencing a couple of brief guilty pangs for not dropping everything to fix the lunch debacle. Each time I started to head down that guilty path, though, I found myself thinking about how my messing up and my tweenager rolling with it—rolling with it isn’t always his best thing—actually had its merits all around. Showing our kids that things mess up and we all roll, that’s an invaluable lesson to learn, relearn, and affirm. Think about it, things fall apart all the time. That’s the human condition.
And being able to affirm this tweenager whose roll-with-it skills are improving, that’s a very lovely opportunity. We stopped at the bakery conveniently located on our way home for a baguette for some Banh mi (there were quick=pickled veggies in our fridge) and a slice of pizza for the hungry guy, who had been given a rice cake with sunflower butter and raisins, the school’s default forgotten lunch fix.
**
When I regaled the second grader and his pal, Gabriel, with my mistaken lunch packing mistake walking home from school before I hopped in the car to get the seventh grader, they laughed and dreamed up April Fool’s lunches for the high school brother, all the thing he doesn’t like: yogurt and granola bars with lots of raisins. The second grader would need only get a PB&J along with chocolate chips, or even easier, a chocolate peanut butter cup.
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I’m sharing this moment in part because it’s kind of funny and also for my friend, Damaris, who had an unfunny and unexpected frustration over the weekend when her computer was stolen (sending hopes things are already resolving). She reminded me of how much we do matter to one another and that our friends can—in all kinds of ways—bring us cheer.
She also reminded me of something that’s been super true this fall in my life: while I’m beyond busy and overextended—and trust me, after the second meeting for an organization to do some visioning and planning work, a three-plus hour evening on the heels of a similar three-hour meeting Saturday for another organization—I’m pretty overextended, I am feeling simultaneously grateful. I am privileged to live in a community that seeks me out and to love so much—Saturday, Treehouse Foundation, Monday, Sunnyside, and let’s add, Friday busy with benefit for Grow Food Northampton—here. And in that blogggity-blog world, I love that I’m making relationships with and am invested in the lives of people I might not otherwise get to meet, but for whatever reasons, we do click (in more ways than one).
**
I still pretty desperately require more rest. My mother and my mother-in-law said as much. That’s some serious tired. This amount of busy can’t last forever. It won’t end for another week-and-a-half, though.
