I Wasn’t A Good Mother Today

We’ve been looking at houses.  A couple weeks ago, Grace, my mother and I (Yes, we left the menfolk behind, which might have been related to the incident of looking at another house in which Cory turned to me mid-tour and said “This is the house children live in when their parents hate them.”) looked at a beautiful home that was built about 115 years ago.  Affluent area, tony neighborhood, Level 3 sex offender four doors away.  No. Thank. You.  Worse than that, within a half hour of leaving, my mother was really sick.  Coughing badly.  Grace got sick.  I had a migraine for six days.  Not a migraine like a headache.  A migraine like “I need to go to the ER, but let’s wait until this bottle of Kahlua and five Vicodin wear off,” type of migraine.  Eventually it occurred to me that Pretty House was probably mold infested.  My reason for telling you this is to provide you with my first line of defense:  Grace missed two days of school last week.

Therefore, imagine my surprise when we arrived at her school today only to see tons of other pre-schoolers happily skipping up to the red, one-room schoolhouse wearing their pajamas.  Yeah, today was Pajama Day at her school.  I was hoping she wouldn’t notice that her best friend was wearing a fleece two-piece set with kittens on it.  I was so wrong.  Her eyes immediately narrowed into hateful little slits.  With Grace, sometimes a look says it all, and today her look said “Could you have possibly fucked up any more, Mother?’  She underestimates me.  She headed off to her class without a single goodbye.  Her silence cuts me deep sometimes.

I felt really bad, and if I’m to be truly honest, I mostly felt bad about  how bad it made me look.  Thirty kids and mine was the only one in street clothes.  And the fact that her street clothes consisted of an embroidered Gap tunic, Luna Luna Copenhagen skeggings (skirt/legging combo) and white patent go-go boots —  i.e. the best dressed kid there —  meant nothing.  Because today was Pajama Day and I didn’t know.  It’s not like I even forgot, I just never knew.

I headed back to the house and Jack worked diligently on making a sock puppet.  Our dear friends KKS and MBB gave him a kit for Christmas that allows him to make three sock puppets.  The first was born today and his name is Horace.  I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but I’ve never seen Jack interact with another human being quite the way he’s connecting with his orange fleece friend that lives on his hand.  (Allow me a moment to file that in the “Sentences I Never Thought I’d Hear Myself Say” folder.)

We went to pick up Grace at the end of her school day.  She walked out of school, stopped in front of me and loudly announced “Mommy.  You screwed up today.  It was Pajama Day and I didn’t have pajamas.  Everyone did.  But I. Did. Not.”  I tried to convince her that she had actually fallen asleep while wearing that top and skirt once and they therefore qualified, but she was unmoved.  She was slightly more forgiving on the drive home.  She admitted that she does in fact love me, even when I make a mistake.  ”Actually, Mommy, even if you did it on purpose, I still love you.”  No matter how many times I explained that the oversight wasn’t intentional she’d reply, “I know.  But if you did do it on purpose, I still love you and I forgive you.”

Personally, I think it was our brush with nature that softened her wrathful ‘tude.  There is one stretch on the main road where there is field on either side.  As we were driving home, I glanced to my right and saw a — pack?  horde?  swarm?  posse?  Okay, I looked it up … herd — of deer running and prancing in the pasture.  I immediately felt like I was in another country and pretended I was wearing khakis and driving a Jeep.  Truly.  I started talking in an Australian accent too, because the whole experience just felt very Paul Hogan to me.  Anyway, we eventually drove past the open field, but something inside me just told me to stop my car.  And I did.  Right in the middle of a busy street.  The mob –Hey, I Googled it, and “mob” is also an acceptable term for a group of deer — started running across the street about two feet in front of us.  So, I came pretty close to wrecking my car which might have been preferable to having to listen to Jack screech “Where’s Santa?  Where’s Santa?” for the next ten minutes.

Needless to say, we got home in one piece.  We have a routine when Grace returns from school.  She likes to get out of her school clothes right away and into pajamas (you know, the ones she didn’t get to wear at school today?).  Then she has lunch and a good sleep.  Today, whilst we were in the “getting out of school clothes” phase, Grace suddenly shrieked “Mommy!  My shirt was on backwards.  All. Day. At. School.”  She was right.  And before you try to appease me with “I’m sure no one noticed” comments, this is the fucking shirt:

People so noticed.  Every classroom has the one fuck-up mother.  You’ll all be glad to know that at Grace’s school, I am that mother. I would like to take this opportunity to confess that I didn’t bake any cookies (as requested) for her art show and I forgot to send in my donation for the teacher gifts.  I didn’t know about Pajama Day and I sent my kid to school with her clothes on backwards. I am that mother.

We got her into pjs, had lunch and I sent her off for her nap.  I went in to cover her up when I noticed that her pajama top was on inside out.  Reflexively, I went to fix it, but quickly realized:  Today, really, what’s the point?  I am that mother.