About a week ago, fellow moms from my son’s baseball team asked when my kids went back to school.
“Wednesday,” I said. “No, wait, Tuesday. And I think they have a back-to-school thing on Monday. Honestly, I’m a horrible mom and I don’t exactly know.”
My response was met with laughter. One mom said, “Clearly you’re not a work-at-home mom or you would be counting down the seconds!”
My excuse-of-the-day was that the school web site had been hacked (which, it had in fact been) so I couldn’t look up the online calendar.
I’m also a Facebook fan of the PTA’s page, and they didn’t bother to put a reminder out to the segment of us that are apart of the Clueless Mom Club. I also routinely e-mail my children’s teachers, but honestly, I didn’t want to bother them… seeing as they are all suffering mild depression this time of year.
Do you see where I am going with this? I tend to communicate entirely online. I also tend to rely a bit too heavily on my online calendar.
So when I switched jobs a few months ago, I thought I had transferred all of my personal appointments from my old work calendar to my new one. That is, until the dentist office called shortly after I moved and said, “Hi. You and your son are supposed to be here.”
Excuse-of-the-day: “Uuuummmm…my dog ate my calendar.”
They forgave me and generously rescheduled our appointments, which just so happened to be the first day of school. Do you think I realized at the time we rescheduled that it was the first day of school? Come on, you know me better than that by now.
In my first week on the new job, my other son broke his arm. Guess when the cast gets removed? On the second day of school.
You know what would make my life easier? If every front desk staff member who schedules appointments would be trained to ask questions like, “Oh-kay, it appears we have (insert day) open to see the doctor/dentist/etc. Now, BEFORE you answer, take a couple of minutes to really think about whether or not you want it. I know it APPEARS your calendar is free to you… but is it? Is it really?”
Or, better yet, I’d love it if my coworkers, family doctors, kids’ teachers, spouse, and friends would just coordinate everything together in order to avoid any scheduling conflicts. Then just let me know when I need to show up via e-mail or text message preferably.
That would make life much easier.
But we don’t agree to take the easy route when we become moms, do we?
(I remember the good ol’ days when calculus was the hardest thing in my life.)
Good luck to all of the parents of children who are returning to school. Here’s to getting back into some sort of normal routine.
My children on their first day of school.
