A Working Parent’s Morning, Quarantine Edition
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When I first saw snow, my first thought was, I might be able to talk to my client without screaming in the background. See, now that I am never alone, I look at life through the lens of someone taken hostage in her own home by a riot of pint-sized lunatics. Where some see a funny four-minute YouTube video, I see a window to hit the bathroom all by myself; a handheld vacuum and some thoroughly dusty stairs are no longer a downer, but rather an opportunity to get through several emails, as my captors find the bazooka-like contraption ever so amusing.
So as the snowflakes came down furiously outside this morning, I took a slow sip of coffee and checked the clock on the kitchen wall. It read 8:23am, my call was scheduled at 8:30. I’ve never been good at math, but I can tell you precisely how many seconds it takes to get a pack of four children dressed, their teeth brushed and their hair sort of combed. Seven minutes was barely going to cut it, so I dropped the coffee and ran up the stairs double-time. The promise of snow snapped them all to attention, and soon it was a chorus of pajama pants flying across the room, padded ski suits thrown on in between screams of “that’s mine”, “I had it first”, “what am I going to do with you”, and “that’s what mommy always says”.
My phone read 8:28 as they started gathering their boots and, reader, I’ll come clean. I told them to skip brushing their teeth. I figured the cold would likely freeze any seriously bad germs? I don’t know, listen, when you’re in my position and all of a sudden you have to have it all, all of it, all together at once, shaken and stirred, the clients and the children and the spreadsheets and the teachers and the presentations and the Zoom homework and the KPIs and the skinned knees, well, Buster, sometimes you have to make tough calls. Sometimes you have to weigh your client’s 6-figure account against the dental health of your four children, and the client wins. Because, again, never been good with math, but the thing is, if we lose this account, I would most definitely get fired, and that would mean health insurance goes bye bye, and then these children wouldn’t be able to visit a dentist. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying screw their dental health since I can take them to the dentist all I want. No. It was just today. And maybe once last week. Things are rough and I’m just doing the best I can.
But what made this morning a memorable one was that, after a half hour of having a blast out there in the snowy yard, building a clumsy fort and hammering each other with snowballs, they filed in one by one, stomping snow all over the kitchen, and my littlest beamed at me with those big wondrous eyes and asked: “mom, what is snow?”
I picked her up and proceeded to give them all a totally inaccurate lesson on weather phenomena while I ran them a bath, one earbud in to quarter-listen to a conference call. It was certainly a parent who invented the mute button.
