Yes, I've worked in a terrifically dysfunctional office with a group of people who work incredibly hard but are quite literally falling apart emotionally for almost a decade. Go me!
Today during a meeting, the conversation veered off from someone's spouse's infusion (or was it someone's mother's dementia? No, it may have been someone's sister's goiter..) to the weather on Halloween.
As it happens during meetings desperate to avoid pointless agendas, talk settled there for awhile.
"Looks windy Friday."
"I heard rain."
"Poor trick-or-treaters..."
"Their little costumes..."
"At least not freezing cold."
"Ah yes, good point."
"At least not a hurricane followed by a blizzard!" I blurted.
No one could argue with that.
"Remember," I asked. "Halloween 2012?"
Try as I might, I cannot forget that Halloween. There are the obvious reasons it stands out: there was a hurricane, during which we lost power. After years of me waking every few hours to tend to children, my husband Chuck finally understood what I'd been experiencing when he had to wake every few hours to tend to the generator. (On sale now: Chuck's biography, "I Successfully Slept Through the Early Years.")
Halloween was postponed in our town, Mulletville Lite, and someone brilliant in town decided that it should be held a few days later during a major snowstorm. As we trick-or-treated in feet of snow, and I carried my hefty toddler — whose slippery snowsuit kept sliding down my body — my neighbor chided me for complaining too much.
Of course I was insulted. Chide moi? The woman who had made multiple costumes, carved pumpkins with a toddler, raked leaves, drank cider, glued googly eyes to construction paper bats, sang "The Monster Mash," and done autumn leaf rubbings? Moi?
Years later, I see that night as one of those "aha moments" — when the preposterous demands of parenthood light up like a neon sign.
See, when you're pregnant, you understand motherhood will probably demand things of you. Of course it will. How could it not? You have to help another human (maybe several) survive and thrive.
What you can't imagine is how utterly preposterous those things will be.
Things like wiping your kid's ass while simultaneously holding a puke bin for another kid while answering a work email while gulping down half a sandwich. Speeding to a doctor's appointment because your kid has a 105 fever and realizing you only have one shoe on, you left your wallet at home and you're on E — and you forgot it's 2:30 and your other kid doesn't have after school club that day and who the fuck can get him off the bus?
The list is endless.
The indignity is that the preposterous acts go so... uncelebrated. Your kids don't appreciate them. The Universe doesn't give awards for them. Your boss doesn't want to hear about them because it usually means you were late to work or missed a deadline. Spouses and partners are usually unimpressed because when you share all the preposterous things you've done, they usually hear all the preposterous things they didn't do and get defensive.
No winning here.
So yah, it may rain for Halloween this year.
But at least it won't snow in the -20 degree pitch black dark of night! And the walk won't be uphill in both directions! And...
Oh my...I'm old.
