Both calendars are loaded. The expectations
whisper:
If I don’t keep the calendar current, if I
miss updating even one event, the only thing that makes sense is to trash them
and start over. There is no room for error. Showing up somewhere for something
that was canceled weeks before and missing commitments – all of which are
mandatory, on which certain success is precariously perched – are to be avoided.
It’s the old story, repeated a thousand times a
day by anyone who does anything: we are busy busy busy and we’re going crazy
crazy crazy keeping up.
I’m not so special. Everyone has tons of stuff
going on. It’s the nature of our society, anyway. I’m tired of hearing about
it, feeling it, saying it.
As phases go, I’m in the mom/taxi one. I go
somewhere every afternoon, every night, sometimes out until ten or eleven o’clock
with our kids. The pick-up and drop-off times conflict most days. On days I am
organized, I coordinate carpooling. On days I am not, I text “Find a ride” to
one of my children and cross my fingers.
My son is in the not-yet-driving high school
phase. He has stuff going on all the time – sports, social life, school work, various
other downtime activities – and he is independent except for transportation and
certain life management and problem-solving skills. He could probably handle
most of it if pressed, but not well. Sort of like me in college. And last week.
My daughter is younger and needs more looking
after, but not much. I still do more for her because of her age and her
femaleness and my inability to treat my children equally, to their dismay. It’s
too hard and time moves too fast to figure out how to divide responsibility evenly,
and I no longer apologize or make excuses for my inconsistency. It’s just how
it is. If my children learn one thing about me, it’s that I am unfair.
The encompassing truth is that once you get
used to the current phase, another one begins. Keeping up is hard, and not just
with the stuff on the calendar. Fluidity is the nature of everything – just go
with it. Move on and adapt or get left behind. Among the worst things that can
happen if you fail to be fluid as a parent is that you treat your kids like
they’re six when they’re sixteen and you miss out on what they’re experiencing
now.
If you fail to go with the flow, you miss more
than a practice or previous commitment. You miss the next phase, and you lose
touch.
Raising kids is the job of putting yourself out
of a job. Their growth requires constant reshuffling of priorities and if you
ever finish, these people you’ve raised will fly on their own without much regular
input from you. Making our best work stick with our children is the goal, so
that we will always be relevant no matter what phase they’re in. When we’re
long gone we hope they will pass this relevance onto their own kids.
This is concerning because when we’ve spent so
much time keeping up with their phases, we may have ignored our own.
Might as well accept that we’ll always be
trying to keep up.
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