parenting for introverts

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Waiting Room Woolgathering

I am in a waiting room at the car place while my vehicle undergoes repairs for yet another recall. In fact, this is a re-recall because I already had this particular issue addressed a couple of years ago. Or, not addressed, apparently.

There is one other woman-presenting person in the waiting room with me. She just consented to a $160 tire alignment. I am 95% sure that the service member who came to speak with her referred to her as Suzanne, and the service person who checked me in already told me my car’s alignment failed. What are the chances that two Suzannes would both have failed tire alignments at the exact same time?!

It’s been kind of a rough start to the school year. Or maybe not rough so much as nonstop busy? None of it is BAD stuff; it’s all stuff that we’ve done or chosen on purpose. Well, except for the leak in our pool. No one wants that. I think it’s like this every year, and I simply block out the memory of the frenetic bustle of it all during the relative calm of the summer months. Annual or not, I currently feel like I’ve jumped into the middle of an ice-cold lake and I’m not that strong a swimmer.  

What I really want to be doing is spending my days walking, writing, and hanging out with my cat. That sounds like my ideal level of interpersonal interaction right about now.

Ignore the doorbell and the dishes and the laundry and the fact that you need to pick up your kid and the neighbor’s children from school and lie down with meeeeeeeeeee…

In practice, I’ve been spending an average of two hours a day in a school gymnasium, making conversation with other parents, cheering for our kids, and trying to stave off butt and back pain from the relentless discomfort of the bleachers. (This little purchase has helped quite a bit with the latter.) Or rushing to/waiting around my house to discuss various home maintenance and repair and improvement projects with a parade of vendors. Or scrolling aimlessly on my phone in an attempt to stay awake while my daughter finishes her homework (she hasn’t gone to bed before eleven a single time this school year). Or driving to or from school and/or sporting events. Or working on a volunteer project, which involves both in-person meetings and a group chat. I remain terrified of group chats.

This is all, like, totally normal parent and life stuff and yet I am feeling overwhelmed and overextended and wholly unsuited to any of it.

Let’s just hope this is all an ADJUSTMENT period, to which I will ADJUST. My kiddo, by the way – who is the one DOING THE SPORTS AND HOMEWORK which is quite a bit more strenuous than observing those things – seems to be handling everything with much more grace and much less whining than I am.

On the plus side, I have not cooked a single meal all week. On the minus side, I did buy ingredients to make a giant salad several days ago and I am pretty sure they are all gradually rotting into inedibility in my fridge.

There are five of us in the waiting room now. One of the staff members has chosen this very moment to vacuum the floor of the waiting room. Why now, buddy? It’s not like someone just spilled a bag of chip crumbs or anything. The floor looks perfectly clean. Is this a conscientious objection to the inanity of Jenna & Sheinelle, which I didn’t know was a show? Is it passive aggressive proof to his manager that he is Doing His Job? Puzzling.

Those of you with better memories and/or experience with middle school and high school kids, is this just… How Things Are? Carla goes to school, goes to sports, scarfs a quick and less-nutritionally-balanced-than-I’d-prefer dinner, immerses herself in homework, goes to bed, repeat. There is literally no time to do anything else. She doesn’t have a spare ten minutes to tidy her room or practice her instrument or go visit the neighbor dogs. The only time we talk is in the car or over a hasty meal of fast-food nuggets. We’ve been sacrificing a traditional breakfast in favor of a few more minutes of sleep, and she’s been eating ants on a log or drinking a smoothie in the car on the way to school. Our only “non productive” time is the five minutes of cat videos we watch together every morning, and the ten minutes I spend reading to her in bed every night.

(By the way, I am currently reading her this book, which I remember liking when I was a kid, although not enough to read any of the other books in the series. But I am finding it boring and kind of dumb???)

My husband thinks that it was like this for him when he was in school. My mom thinks it was like this for me when I was in school. But I have no recollection of doing three to five hours of schoolwork every night. Maybe in college, but even then, only when I had a paper due the next day. Three to five hours of schoolwork seems BONKERS, let alone doing it on top of two to three hours of Sports.

I keep spiraling about Carla’s commitments. The spiral starts with: This is too much! This school isn’t right for Carla! Something must be wrong, either with the teachers or with Carla’s ability to do the work! Should I email the teachers? The principal? Should I encourage Carla to email the teachers? The principal? Should I make her quit Sports?

Then eventually (sometimes with help from my much chiller husband) the spiral makes its way around to this: But Carla seems to be doing okay. She’s tired, sure, but isn’t that true of ALL teenagers, EVERYWHERE? The other parents I’ve talked to say their kids are doing similar amounts of homework, and going to bed similarly late. And none of them are pulling their kids out of school or making them quit the team or marching into the principal’s office demanding Action. And Carla really seems to enjoy Sports! She’s getting better, she seems to be making a positive contribution to the team. The physical activity is certainly good for her. As is the social interaction. She seems to be completing her homework, even if it’s late when she finishes it. Her grades are fine, so far. And her own father says that this is How It Was even back in the golden era of the nineteen-nineties.

The calm doesn’t last particularly long, though. It doesn’t help that I am also getting less sleep than I prefer, and I’m much busier than I prefer. Maybe once those things resolve (will they resolve?) I will be more zen about Carla’s level of busyness.

Speaking of being more zen: The last time I posted here, which was eons and eons ago, I mentioned my fret about feeding the sports team. THANK YOU for pointing out that doing such a thing is inadvisable. I spent the first three weeks of school not signing up, and simply taking Carla some nourishment to eat between games. She eats WRAPS now, can you believe it? Ham, tomato, and lettuce. (I wrap the tomato and lettuce in the ham, so they don’t soggify the tortilla.) (Yes, we have decided to throw caution to the wind and get back on the lettuce train.) Other parents have been signing up to provide sustenance, and I have been observing what they bring. They are not bringing dinner, they are bringing SNACKS. I can totally bring snacks for the team. That’s much less daunting than providing an entire meal. Thanks for talking me down, internet.

And there’s the service guy who checked me in. My car is done, and so is this post.

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Five for Friday: These Exquisite Endless Fleeting Days Edition

Last night was one of those nights: I woke up at two, could not fall back to sleep, and as I drew closer and closer to morning, my brain decided to amp up the anxiety. It went like this: Dinner party stress: I think I will do a Greek salad; I do want to grill the salmon/chicken beforehand, but that means I need to clean the grill today. Probably I should also make hummus today, too, so I can use tomorrow before our guests arrive to panic-clean everything in sight. Birthday party stress: the treasure hunt is still in progress, and I don’t yet know if we’ll have enough kids for teams which affects how I do the treasure hunt. I need to text a neighbor about using his mailbox as a clue location. And oh, since the resolution of the treasure hunt is going to be the big pink flamingo pool floatie, HOW am I going to do that if the kids swim before they treasure hunt? Maybe the kids should do the treasure hunt first, then dinner, then swim? But that means swimming later, and will we bother our neighbors? Upcoming travel stress: Ugh, I do not want to get on an airplane. Will the cat sitter be as good and trustworthy as my friend said she would be? Will the cat be too lonely? My husband will be here with him at night, but he is so used to people. Will he hate me and Carla when we return? Will my husband be lonely? I’ve never left HIM alone this long before, either. Social stress: I have one upcoming week during which I am Carla-free, and I’ve so far planned FOUR meetups with friends, and I want to do all of them, and at least three of them won’t happen this summer otherwise, and yet ACK. Upcoming sleepaway camp stress: Ugh. What will I do without my baby while she’s away? Will she be okay? What if she hates it? What if she gets poison ivy and can’t sleep and is as miserable as she was the first time she got poison ivy, and was more wretched and despondent than I’ve ever seen her? And of course the recent Texas tragedy is playing over and over in my head, God rest the souls of those poor children and soothe the hearts of their parents. What if… Not floods, probably, but fires or bears. How do I teach Carla to evade a bear without terrifying her? IS there a way to evade a bear? She’s so little. Does the summer camp have A Bear Plan? Should I call and ask or will they think I’m crazy? Apocalypse stress: All this flooding feels Biblical in nature. And the wars. And the news. Everything is hopeless. 

That was when I got OUT of bed, because being in bed was no longer going to lead to sleeping. I checked on my child, flopped across the entirety of her bed like a starfish, and stole the cat (also sleeping, also taking up as much bed as possible) (what? there’s no rule against waking sleeping cats), and went and sat in my office trying to hypnotize myself into sleeping via the motorcycle rev of the cat’s purr. 

The cat purred until he fell asleep, slept, and then – as usual – abruptly woke up and decided it was time to play. So I got out my laptop and wrote this post. 

I have been feeling guilty ALL summer about how constricted I feel with Carla around so much. Especially guilty now, as her sleepaway camp nears, and I won’t get to see her at all. I know in my heart that it’s not HER that I’m resisting; it’s the dearth of time alone, that’s all. Spending time with her is, in fact, so precious. Here are five of things I’m loving about our time together. 

  1. Mornings with Girl and Cat: Every morning, I either wake up and feed the cat and then take him up to Carla’s room, where he wakes her up with his purring. Or Carla wakes up first, feeds the cat, and I wake up on my own. Either way, we end up watching cat videos on Instagram for an unplanned amount of time. I hold the phone, she nestles into me, the cat lies somewhere between us, engine rumbling. It’s more comfortable so snuggle up in her bed – there’s more space. But I kind of love the mornings when the three of us gather in the armchair in my office. There’s nowhere near enough room for both of our rear ends in the chair, but Carla squishes herself in, half on top of me, anyway. We have so rarely had morning plans this summer that we take our time. Mostly I try to keep our reel-scrolling to ten or fifteen minutes, but one day we watched for a half hour. We’re in our pajamas. She leans her head against me. Her hair tickles my cheek. Her legs, coltish and long all of a sudden, overlap my own, her feet almost reaching mine.
  2. Car Rides: Now that I’m not driving two hours a day, every day, I’m no longer averse to going places. Carla gets to sit in the front seat now and she loves it. I am surprised by how much I love it, too. She chooses the music we listen to, she makes jokes, I can reach over and squeeze her knee. There’s this very subtle shift that’s happening – I suppose it’s been happening all along, and I only just noticed it – wherein she’s becoming less of a charge I am shuttling about and more of a companion; I’m not ferrying her places, we’re going on adventures together.
  3. Cat Obsession: I am almost embarrassed by how much time the two of us spend observing the cat. He is just so cute, Internet. And Carla and I fully and intensely agree that everything he does is cute, and we want to be informed of everything he is doing so we can take part in the cuteness. The two of us will stand on either side of the cat tower and pet him and comb him and rub his little feet (he loves to have his back feet rubbed and will splay his little toe beans so you can gently rub the webbing between his toes) and admire him and tell him how handsome he is. If he is doing something adorable (most recently he jumped onto my bathroom counter and “hid” in the sink), one of us will call out to the other so we can both bear witness. No one else in the world is as interested in his every whisker twitch as she and I are, not even my husband, and I love that we have this shared obsession. 
  4. Pool Time: Carla seems to have much more fun in the pool when she has a friend over, and I get that. Unless you are a boring adult and enjoy swimming laps, it’s a little lonely to play in the water by yourself. But friends cannot come over every day, and sometimes we just have each other. We play a game we came up with last summer, Water Spa, where one of us is the client and the other is the incompetent spa technician. The client lies down on the pool float and the technician drags her around the pool trying as hard as possible to dislodge her from the float. We practice handstands and Carla gives me tips about how to do mine better. We wave to the kitty, who watches us from the window. I don’t know that I’ve played with Carla all that often since she was a little kid. I was never great at it; I don’t enjoy it. But I’m learning to relish these playful hours in the pool, just the two of us. 
  5. Unexpected Undertakings: During the school year, our time together is fairly structured. Wake ups, breakfast, me cajoling Carla through getting dressed/brushed/out the door, car rides to and from school, me prodding Carla through her weeknight activities or homework, dinnertime, bedtime routine. This summer, with so much free time, we’ve ended up doing things I’d never anticipated. Playing Clue together, then watching the original Clue movie. Watching YouTube videos about how to give a cat a “hygiene cut” and then giving our cat a hygiene cut. Taking videos of the kitten and editing them together for his non-existent Instagram account. The other day, I was working on her treasure hunt and she wandered into my office and perched on the arm of the chair, curious about what I was doing. I didn’t give her a peek at the treasure hunt – she will not get an unfair advantage! – but I did show her my digital folder of birthday things. I’d created a Pool Party Scattergories last summer, in case we had rain and the pool wasn’t part of the party, and she was delighted. We played it together, just the two of us, sitting there on my chair, counting down “Three, two, one” and then saying our answers simultaneously. When the prompt was “things you find the fridge” and the letter was E, we both said “eggplant” at the exact same time and dissolved into giggles. Mundane things made magical.

This summer has reminded me of that feeling so familiar in Carla’s baby and toddler years, of being touched out and overstimulated and unable to have a moment to myself. It has reminded me of that first summer of Covid, when I was Carla’s sole friend, teacher, parent, and entertainment and I was ill-equipped for any of those roles and I felt like it was unfair that she was forced to have me as her mother when she deserved so much better. 

It has also reminded me of how joyful and creative Carla is: She is so full of laughter and singing and buoyant ebullient energy. She and a friend composed a song about potato chips, of all things, and it’s catchy and hilarious. She wrote a story (about the cat) for submission to Story Pirates. She created an absurd exercise routine she does in the pool, narrating herself spoof-gymfluencer style. She constructs elaborate lairs for the kitten out of boxes. She is a delight, still in many ways a little girl while in increasingly numerous ways a young woman, and I have a front row seat to the complexities and contradictions of this stage.

Right now, she wants to be with me. Yesterday, after we’d been looking up Truth or Dare questions for her sleepover (I’m writing them on slips of paper and putting them in a basket), and I needed to go do something, she called after me, “And then when you’re done, we’ll do something together!” As though we hadn’t been doing something together all day long. 

How long will this last? It won’t last forever; it can’t. The point is not to hold her tightly to me, it’s to stay here as she leaves.  

I never learn; I seem destined to repeat this lesson again and again. There is exasperation but there is also an urgency to preserve these moments in amber. The push and pull of parenthood, the resistance to and longing for closeness, the need for separation and the anguish that separation leaves behind.

* * *

We go around the neighborhood together, me on foot, she in her new rollerblades. She’s still a little unsteady, so she holds my hand. It is so hot, as hot as the summer she was born, when I walked endlessly around the block trying to induce labor; sweat trickles down my back, her hand is damp in mine. When the road gets steep, I pull her, even as an ache spreads across my shoulders; on the downhill side, she grips tight to my waist, her arms hot, her weight setting me off balance. 

There are places where the road is flat and smooth, where she lets go and glides ahead of me. So far, there’s always been another tricky spot that causes her to stop, wait for me to catch up, thread her fingers through mine. Any day now, she’ll discover she’s fine on her own. I hope she always reaches for my hand. At the same time, I hope she doesn’t look back.