Crap Mom

Growing up, my mom was never on time picking us up.  It wasn’t because she was working or otherwise busy. 

It was because her passions included sleeping a lot, sitting on the couch or the toilet reading magazines, sunbathing by the pool (a metal cattle trough that was admittedly one of her better drunken purchases), talking in hushed whispers to one of her secret boyfriends on the phone when Dad was out of town for work, and eating massive amounts of vanilla ice cream drowning in chocolate syrup with Oreos crumbled on top while screaming at us to “Stay away!  The ice cream is mine!  Can’t I have anything to myself?!”

If anything stood in the way of one of those things, well, it could just wait.

I remember one Friday night in 7^th or 8^th grade, my best friend (also named Lisa) and I were going to the mall, and it was my mom’s turn to take us there and then pick us back up later.  As Mom swung into the mall’s parking lot to drop us off, I shot a glance at Lisa, who raised her eyebrows and tilted her head toward my mom in the driver’s seat.

“The mall closes at 9, Mom,” I said gently.

“I know.”

“So if you could please be there at 9,” I stammered, “because they lock the front doors and make you wait outside—”

“I SAID I know!” my mom snapped, whipping her head around to glare at me. I could tell she was on the verge of exploding, which usually meant screaming that she didn’t have to put up with this crap and maybe we didn’t need to go to the mall at all.

Lisa and I thanked her for the ride and jumped out of the van.

At 9:30 that night, Lisa and I found ourselves waiting in the parking lot of the mall with the security guard.  It was dark and scary, but not as bad as it could have been since he was kind and stayed with us.

But even nice guys have their limits.  At 9:35, he looked at his watch and sighed.  “Listen, girls.  I got off of work over a half hour ago.  There’s a pay phone right over there so you can call your ride.  Do you need a quarter?”

We actually did need a quarter.  He gave us one and then waited while we called my house.  No answer.

Now what?

At just that moment, a car turned onto the outer road that led to the mall’s parking lot, and Lisa and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. My heart soared…and then immediately sank when the car passed us right up. 

This happened a couple more times before the security guard dug into his pocket and retrieved another quarter.  He handed it to us. “Anybody else you can call?”

This time, we called Lisa’s mom, who I was sure was sick of this type of thing by now—this wasn’t the first time my mom had pulled this—but she never showed it.  “I’ll be there in 15 minutes,” she assured us.

It was a really long 15 minutes; the security guard had headed home knowing we had a reliable ride coming, and now that Lisa and I were alone, we were scared.  We jumped at every noise, clutching at each other for safety in that vast parking lot full of shadows big enough for bad guys to hide in.

Lisa’s mom was a brisk, no-nonsense lady who had a great sense of humor if you worked at it.  I always felt like she was torn between laughing at our jokes and telling us they were inappropriate and washing our mouths out with soap.  She wanted to laugh, but was it the right thing to do? She needed to be a good example, after all.

I liked to call her Miss Linda, and even at that young age, I was proud that I could usually get her to smile. The best was when I would tell a silly fart joke and get a snort-chuckle out of her that she would quicky try to cover with her hand. But I always knew.

She pulled up 15 minutes later, just like she’d promised, and I apologized profusely.  She shook her head and huffed in that gruff way that she had.  “Oh, don’t be silly.  It’s not your fault!”

They’d ordered pizza at their house, Lisa’s mom explained on the ride home, and there was plenty left.  Why didn’t we stop at the gas station and grab a couple of 2-liter bottles of Dr. Pepper, and I could spend the night tonight?

Lisa and I lit up like firecrackers on the Fourth of July, and our terrifying 50 minutes in the mall’s parking lot were forgotten.  At Miss Linda’s insistence, I called my mom once more when we got back to Lisa’s house so that she didn’t worry about me.  She answered this time.

“Why the hell did you bother Miss Linda to pick you up?  I was just getting ready to jump into the van and come and get you guys.”

I glanced at the clock hanging on Lisa’s kitchen wall.  It was 10:15 PM.

“Sorry, Mom,” I said.

My mom’s sigh on the other end of the line was reluctant but full of forgiveness.  “It’s okay.”

I hung up, relieved that I wasn’t in trouble.

Another time—when I was 11 or 12, probably—I had basketball practice right after school until 5:30 PM. At 6:00, the coach and I were the only ones left. This was before cell phones, and I imagine the office ladies had gone home for the night.  So short of taking me home himself, risking major confusion and potential chaos if my mom ever ended up arriving and I wasn’t there, he was stuck waiting with me.

He had a pregnant wife and a small child and most likely dinner waiting for him at home, and this basketball thing was totally volunteer. He did it because we went to a small Catholic school and nobody else had stepped up.  If it hadn’t been for him, we wouldn’t have had a team.

He was one of what would become my favorite types of people in life: a big jock with an even bigger heart who liked to act all tough—and probably could be if necessary—but was actually very kind, with a soft spot for kids.

He had the patience of a saint who liked to cuss a lot.  Our basketball team was absolutely horrible—we never won a game in all the years he ended up coaching us, and once I made a basket for the other team—but he never gave up on us.

Well, he probably did give up on us, but still, he kept on coaching.

We were sitting at the bottom of the wide set of stairs that led from the parking lot down into the gym. He made small talk by asking me how school was going, how I liked my position on the basketball court, how my brothers and sisters and parents were doing.  He kept sneaking glances at his watch, probably wondering if he was going to have to end up adopting me after what seemed like the inevitable conclusion that my mom was planning to abandon me right there at the bottom of the stairs in the local Catholic school, 1950’s style.

I smelled her before I saw her.  My mom always wore bold-colored eyeshadow up to her eyebrows and heavy perfume that wafted into places several seconds before she did.

My heart lifted even as I noticed out of the corner of my eye my coach giving a slight shake of his head. “6:30…” he muttered, soft enough that my mom couldn’t hear him. (I have spent years wondering why nobody ever confronted her about wasting their time. I’m not sure I would have been as nice as my coach was that night.)

She didn’t make her way down the stairs.  She stood at the very top, holding the gym door open with her hip, a look on her face directed towards me that said Why weren’t you waiting outside so I didn’t have to get out of the van and come all the way in here?

She didn’t apologize to my coach. She didn’t say anything, in fact, as I followed her out the door while my coach stayed behind to shut off the lights and lock up.

This happened so frequently growing up that I wouldn’t say we got used to it—it always sucked—but it was one of those things that my 4 siblings and I and all of the people in the community around us just accepted.  Our mom was going to be late.  Hopefully the adult in charge had us on a night it was 25 minutes instead of 45.

But the thing about having a crap mom is that it makes you better.  You know exactly what you’re not going to do to your own kids when you have them.  So fast forward 37 years from that moment waiting for my mom at the side of the basketball court, and now my own kids are really used to hearing me say, “I will never be late picking you up.  If I’m late, I’m probably dead.”

In hindsight, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so adamant about it all these years.  Perhaps I should have taken into account that despite how serious a person is about her promise to never be like her mother, occasionally life happens: sometimes there are circumstances beyond our control, or sometimes people just…make mistakes.

Take, for example, the time that my older son was in about 5th grade and playing soccer for the local traveling team. It was winter, so one of the churches in town was letting them use their gym for indoor practice.

The coach happened to be our neighbor and we were good friends.  I had just gotten home when my cell phone lit up with a call.

“Hey, Mike,” I said, dropping my keys onto the small entryway table.

“Hi, Lisa,” he said jovially. “I’ve got Jay here.  Practice ended about 10 minutes ago and we’re waiting for you…”

I gasped.  I had originally planned to pick up our son but had forgotten I had a meeting that night, so my husband had said he would get him instead.  Apparently in the busy-ness of the day, he’d forgotten that we’d changed plans.

I snatched my keys back up and got back into the car.

When I got there a few minutes later, Mike smiled at me and said, “Jay kept telling me, ‘My mom’s never late picking me up. It’s probably my dad’s fault somehow.’”

We had a good chuckle at that, and I drove away from that parking lot feeling a lightness of heart because my son knew he had reliable parents and could joke about the situation instead of stressing about it.

Did I make this into a teachable moment for my son, telling him that sometimes a situation may occur—kind of like this one—in which his dad and I might get our wires crossed and be a few minutes late, but that that didn’t necessarily mean either of us was dead or that the whole world was about to come crashing down?

Um, no.  No, I didn’t.

Instead, I used it as a moment to bask in the glory of what a good mom I was; I kept replaying the quote “My mom’s never late picking me up” in my head and feeling my cheeks blush with warmth.  My kids KNEW how much I loved them!

SIGH.

And then there might be other times when…well, when people fall asleep.

Not just any sleep, but a deep, dreamless, blissful sleep on the recliner from which not even 15 phone calls and 20 texts are enough to wake that person up.

I’M SORRY, OKAY?!

Ahem.  Let me back up just a little bit.

A few months ago, my younger son, a freshman in high school, had his first band competition in a town about 2 hours away.  My husband was out of town at a college football game with our older son and two of his friends, so I stayed back to go to the band competition.  Except…

“Um, Mom?  I don’t want you to go.  It’s the first one, and you being there watching will make me nervous. You can come to the next one, when I’ll be more used to how the competitions go.”

My younger son has always been this way.  Sometimes we argue with him and insist on going to his things; other times, like during his year in junior high football, we wouldn’t tell him until after the game that his grandpa had been there watching with us the whole time. It made him too anxious.

But this time?  I was happy to get out of it.  Band competitions are great—the kids and directors and support staff and parent volunteers work so hard and the performances are fantastic—but they’re ALL DAY.  It’s like my older son’s track meets:  He’s amazingly fast and I love watching his races, but the 7 hours of other stuff you have to sit through in order to see one?  Misery.

Plus the temperature on that particular September day of the band competition was in the high 80’s, and unless I’m sitting in a swimsuit by a body of water when it’s 89 degrees outside, no thank you.

So I pretended to be sad.  “Oh, man, are you sure, Rex?  Because I really wanted to be there…”

“No, really, Mom. Please stay home.”

“But you promise I can come to the next one?”

“Well, we’ll see.  I’d kind of rather you not.”

At this point I decided to drop the façade. “Okay, good. Because I’d kind of rather not.”  We both laughed.  “But if you ever want me to go, you know I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”

“I know,” he said. He gave me a sideways glance.  “But I’ll never want you to go.”

I was a little bit offended. He and his brother seem to want to “let me off the hook” way too easily when it comes to attending their football games and track meets (older son) or band competitions (younger son), and I often wonder if what it truly comes down to is that they’re embarrassed by me—which is weird because I’m really cool and people think I’m hilarious. 

Honestly I’m kind of sick of insisting “PEOPLE LIKE ME!” to my sons as they roll their eyes and shake their heads. The next time I actually want to go to something, I might have to try turning on the waterworks.

But I didn’t push it this time because it seemed like Rex and I were both getting what we wanted out of the situation and I didn’t want to mess that balance up.

So the plan was I would send him off on the band bus with love early in the morning (that was successful), go about my day (that, too, was successful; I went to an outdoor pop-up boutique with friends, met my dad and sister—who happened to be in town for my nephew’s soccer game—for lunch and shopping, and spent about two blissful hours in our backyard white trash pool), and then pick up Rex around 10 PM from the high school parking lot.

It was that last part that got me.

At about 9:15 PM, I got a text from Rex as I settled into the recliner to watch some DVR’d Real Housewives while I waited to pick him up:

We’re about 45 minutes from home

I responded. Okay!  Text me when you’re 15 minutes from the high school parking lot.  I’ll leave the house then.  Love you!

And that’s that last thing I remember until 10:15 PM, when I was awakened by a noise at my front door.

It was our neighbor from down the road, but it took my thick, sleep-muddled brain several moments to realize that.  I must have sat in the recliner for a good 60 seconds just staring at him through the glass panes of the front door.

“Jason…Jason…” I heard him saying my husband’s name, but the rest was inaudible.

Finally something in me clicked, and I came to. I jumped off the recliner and opened the door.

I have joked since then that the absolute state of me—hair matted from my time in the pool, eyes caked half shut—must have scared our neighbor more than his late-night knock at the door had scared me.

“Jason said to check your phone,” he said, already starting to walk backwards down the driveway to his car as if he was bothering me and wanted to get out of my hair. “They’re worried about you.”

“Oh my goodness!” I said. “What time is it? Rex!”

“Okay,” the neighbor said, hopping into his truck and driving away.

Country folk are often people of very few words. Especially the men.

Still dazed with sleep, I ran to the mudroom (butler’s pantry for you fancy people out there) but could not find my keys.  I stood there blinking for a few moments until I remembered that my husband had taken my car to the football game and I was driving my son’s.

As I ran outside to the car, I glanced at my phone.  There were several missed calls and unread texts from my husband and two boys, all sent between 9:45 and 10:15 PM as I slumbered peacefully.  As soon as I got into the car, I called my younger son.

“I’m so sorry!” I said. “I’m on my way right now!”

I had him on speaker and when he spoke, the relief in his voice filled the car.  “That’s okay, Mom.  I’m just so glad you’re okay.  I was worried about you.”

I found out later that Rex was convinced I had died, and so those 30 minutes they were trying to get ahold of me were kinda scary for him.  “I thought you might have choked on something and since you were all alone, there was nobody around to give you the Heimlich,” he said as we hung out in the kitchen the next day discussing what had happened.

My older son, Jay, laughed.  “Are you kidding, Rex?  Mom eats literally all the time.  She’s a professional.  She knows what she’s doing.”

I decided not to take offense to that. In fact, I could feel my chest puffing up involuntarily with pride.

But then he kept talking.

“I mean, I was worried too, I guess,” he said, shrugging.  “So I was just kind of emotionally preparing myself…”

“How?” I asked, genuinely curious. “By crying or something?”

“Naw,” he said, before catching himself being so flippant.  “I mean…I don’t know…”

“By calling a lawyer to find out how much I’d left you in the will?  By asking Dad to transfer the Bronco’s title to your name?”

“Calm down, Mom,” Jay said, shooting me a mischievous smile.  “I’m just not as emotional as you two are.”

“By making plans to turn my closet into a gun room?” My voice was getting shriller and shriller with every new accusation I thought of, but I couldn’t help myself.  “By setting up a Tinder account for Dad?”

It was at this point that we all burst into laughter, but still, I gave my older son a warning look.  “You’d better be sad when I die.  I expect a full year of severe depression in which you only wear black mourning clothes.”

He rolled his eyes at me.

“But you could do two years if you wanted. And if Dad ever gets remarried, you are to be awful to her and never call her Mom, obviously.”

“Yes, Mom,” he said in a bored voice.  They’d heard it all before.

Anyway, the night of the band competition, my poor son was the only kid left waiting with the band director and two other staff members until I got there at 10:30 PM, a full half hour late.  When I pulled up, I rolled my window down and apologized profusely. “I’m so sorry!” I said to the director and staff over and over again.  “I fell asleep, but that’s no excuse and it’s totally unacceptable.”

I’m a teacher and I’ve done a lot of coaching and after-school activities myself, and it always makes me so mad if a parent is late picking up their kid.  A lot of teachers don’t get paid for the extra stuff they do, and even if they do, it’s beyond rude to make them hang around an extra 10-15 minutes—let alone a half hour—while you go about your daily life.

But those men were lovely.

“Oh, it was no problem, ma’am!  Anytime something like this happens, we take it as an opportunity to get to know our students a little better.  We had the best conversation with Rex! You guys are obviously great parents to have raised such a good kid.”

Imagine having that much grace after a 15-hour day in the heat.

Later, I was talking to my husband and I said, “I just kept thinking of Rex seeing all of those parent cars pull up and then pass him right by every time…” I had HATED that when I was a kid and knew all too well how it felt. My husband said, “I figured you might have been thinking about that.”  There was sympathy in his voice and once again I was in awe of how kind everyone was being to me about the whole situation. 

And then a few days later, my husband said that our neighbor had asked him to please tell me he was sorry in case he’d scared me the night he’d come over to check on me at my family’s request. Huh?

I am the most hardened, cynical person in the world.  I’m the woman stopped at a red light with her windows rolled up, saying to the other occupants of my car, “If you can stand in the heat and beg for 8 hours, you can get a job” and texting my local city councilman to ask why he hasn’t done more to clean up the streets. Isn’t there some kind of city ordinance against begging on every single median island in the entire city? Or passing out on one so often that young children begin to think it’s normal?

Call me a Karen if you want; I don’t care.

But the reactions of the people affected by my picking up my son a half hour late that night made my heart—in the words of a wise man I once knew—grow three sizes.  There are still some really good people in this world.

I still have no patience for shopping carts full of dirty clothes scattered all over my city, though.

In the end, I had two friends with two very different reactions to this story when I told it to them.  The first friend gave a derisive snort and said, “Your husband and boys are kind of dramatic, aren’t they?  They went from zero to MOM’S DEAD in less than 30 minutes?”

The other friend gave me a wide-eyed look.  “If I’m late, I’m probably dead? You told them that? For years, repeatedly? Why would you ever tell your children something like that?”

Because it was so NOBLE of me, didn’t she see?  Didn’t she respect the fact that I’d learned from my mother’s mistakes and could make such a strong, BOLD statement because I’m such a wonderful mother??

“—No,” she answered when I tried to explain this. “It was stupid.  Look at all of the unnecessary worry you caused your family.”

Well, jeez. 

I wonder how she behaves at red lights.