The unbearable lateness of being... me

So, tonight I inadvertently cured my daughter of ever wanting to be early again.

You see, I can’t seem to be on time for ANYTHING. I actually once used the wind as an excuse for being a half hour late to pick up my daughter from school.¹

On this allegedly blustery day I went for a walk with a friend (good for me) and completely misjudged how long we would be gone (bad, but typical, for me). It normally takes me six minutes to walk from my house to the local Starbucks,² but it took fifteen minutes to do the reverse that day. Now, according to my mother-in-law, there is an incline on the road to my home.³ Plus this was the end of an hour-long walk and I’m pathetically out of shape. The hurrieder I’d go, the behinder I’d get, so I deduced that the wind must be impeding my progress.

Since I was already fifteen minutes behind schedule, I started to panic. Daughter’s school is at the top of a hill⁴ that generally boasts some absolute gale-forced gusts,⁵ but on this particular day (of all days) there was nary a breath of air to be found atop the hill. I arrived at the school to find a beautiful, breezeless sunny day. An observation I, of course, did not make until after I told the other parents I was late because of the wind.

Oh well. I’m sure they’ll be nicer to my kid if they think her mother’s developmentally delayed.

At any rate,⁶ my point with this idiotic digression is that I tend to be late a lot, seemingly for no good reason. Or rather, whenever I try to explain the reason, I further reinforce my DD designation.

But tonight we were early for soccer. Well, actually, we were late picking up hubby after work which somehow made us a little bit early for the game. We wanted to have plenty of time because daughter and four of her Under-10 teammates had been called up to play for one of the Under-12 teams.

We were the first to arrive for the 7 o’clock game – we were just in time to see another U-12 team from our club get to half time. They spotted my daughter in her striped game shirt and ran over, begging her to play or they’d have to forfeit the game because they didn’t have enough players. Only eight years old but already showing promising signs of the full-fledged guilt of a grown woman, daughter agreed to play even though she was absolutely terrified to play alone with these big girls – some of whom were four years older and about a foot taller than she is.

My point?

Uh.... Who the hell knows by now? Maybe it's that I’m always late because I never shut up?

Oh wait, I remember now. My point is... sorry I’m late with my blog. Again. :)


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1. Don’t worry, there are usually other parents around, and she knows to go to the office if the others leave and I’m not there yet. She knows this because, well, I’m late a lot. Or at least I used to be. I did ok this past school year. Most days. Except windy ones.

2. A fact determined once when my in-laws visited us for three weeks.

3. Albeit a slight incline. A really slight one. Like, not visible to the naked eye nor detectable by anyone who walks more than the length of themselves twice a week.

4. A bona fide hill this time, I swear.

5. Lemme esplain how frikkin' windy it is up there. If Chicago showed up and challenged the St. Stephen's hill to an arm-wrestling contest, the home of Oprah would henceforth have to be re-nicknamed the Gentle Tropical Breeze City. 

6. My father’s “time-to-end-this-conversation” catchphrase.

Please, Sir, may I have a shower?

I had an interesting conversation with a good friend today about how as wives and mothers we feel compelled to ask permission to do – well, anything.

Even in this age of the enlightened husband/father, we still have our unhealthy doses of mother/wife guilt that somehow seep into everything we do.

And we do a lot. A helluva a lot.

There has never been so much pressure on women to do it all and be it all. With a smile. With time to spare. And yet we feel guilty when we have a night meeting. Or when we have a volunteer responsibility (often undertaken for the benefit of our children and their peers). Or when we go to a movie or for supper with a friend. Or when we don’t balance the books. Or when we get a shower.

Wait now – guilt over a shower?

We all need to shower, right? Isn’t the world a better place when you don’t stank up the joint like a rotting cowpatty?

So why do I feel the need to check that it’s “ok” for me to get a shower before I do it? I can’t remember the last time my husband asked me if it was ok for him to get in the shower.

Oh yah – that’s because it’s never frikkin’ happened.

It’s not really asking permission directly, as in “May I get a shower?” It’s more like “I’m going to hop in the shower, ok?” It’s the ok that I tack on the end. It seems like an afterthought but it is, essentially, asking permission.

And that makes me throw up a little on my twin set and poodle skirt.

Now, granted, we put a lot of this pressure on ourselves. Sure our worser halves can be jerks about stuff like this, but I believe that we (ok, I) can be paranoid about reprimands and reproachful glances that sometimes don’t exist. (Sometimes. Not all the time.)

How did we end up with this guilt and need to get sign-off before we do things? What would happen if we did as our husbands do most of the time and just said “I’m doing this right now.” The “Deal with it” would be implied. We deal with it. We may grumble, but that’s what we do. (That’s usually what they do too, but the grumbles are more whiny – at least at my house.)

But seriously – would the world fall apart without female guilt? Would shit just not get done without it?

Ugh – this topic makes me feel dirty. I’m getting a shower.

OK?


P.S. RIP Peter Falk... As you wish.