I frequently find myself conned by rose-colored memories of the days when Jake was my only child and things were just so easy. Sure, I cried frequently, often felt shut-in and lonely, and was already pregnant and too late to go back the first time Jake played by himself without demanding parental involvement about a day before his second birthday.
“Pshaw,” I tell myself from my wise old position as the mother of two. “That was a piece of cake. You were just too dumb to know it at the time.”
Which is all the more reason I was treasuring this morning’s plan for me and Lily to meet a friend at the downtown tailgate market while Mike and Jake headed out to enjoy graduation at Warren Wilson College. All the better that this friend was going sans her son — the one who, in combination with Jake, makes just hanging out with my friend a challenge. Except those times when we finally give up and plop the boys in front of the television, which you can’t do at the downtown tailgate market.
“Yep,” I thought smugly. “This is going to be fun. It’s going to be easy. Just like having only one.”
At least I was right on the first point.
I’m actually giving Lily a bad rap here, because she was not the source of any difficulties. In fact, she’s a pretty accommodating girl, as long as I am willing to follow her as she clutches my finger and does her drunken sailor polka across whatever surface I will allow her to walk on (i.e., not the parking lot no matter how much she screams at me).
What made it difficult was the hubris that went with thinking just one kid would be easy. Because I seem to have forgotten that one kid still requires diaper bag packed with wipes, milk, snacks, and the weirdly oversized case for the overpriced sunglasses to which I treated myself yesterday.
Plus, with two kids, the three-year-old can pretty well entertain the fourteen-month-old while I run upstairs again to pull out the hoodie for Lily that turns out to still be damp from last night’s laundering and that she actually didn’t need anyhow so I wasted a trot up the stairs. Instead, I put the ubiquitous Z Bar in Lily’s hand so I could dash around the house trying to put together all the things I forgot about when I airily told my friend, “I just sent the boys off, so I just have to get dressed and we’ll be ready to go.”
Dressing, packing, and even Lily-sunblocking took long enough to make me grateful my friend had a longer drive in than I. I figured we were running neck and neck. Until I looked for the keys.
I’m usually pretty good at putting my keys on the shelf by the front door on which I also store six or seven tubes of lipstick, the credit card removed from my wallet because I couldn’t be bothered to carry a purse to the grocery store, various pairs of sunglasses I invariably put on and then toss back on the shelf because I look so bad in them I’d rather squint, and anything else Mike might carelessly toss there because he is tall enough to see what is on the shelf while I must rely on my sense of touch.
This time, however, I was prepared not to find the keys in their usual spot. In fact, I knew I had left the keys on the dresser outside the bathroom door upstairs because I noticed them in the morning as I realized I had had a bizarre and more than a little bit frightening dream about losing my car keys while my car was in a parking lot next to what turned out to be a safe house for Ethiopian refugees. You know I can’t make this stuff up.
So up I went to grab the keys, time and Z Bar pacifier fast slipping away.
They weren’t there. They weren’t on the shelf. They weren’t in the purse I carried yesterday. And I was losing my mind. So I grabbed the valet key that I am always scared to use because it is the one thing that stands between us and spending $250 on a new key for the car if we manage to lose both of the others at once as we frequently do.
The thing about the valet key is that it does not unlock the doors remotely. Rather, it requires one to turn the key in the sole keyhole on the driver’s side. And then reach inside to unlock all the doors. Before walking back around to put the twenty-plus-pounds girl who has been resting in my by now aching left arm in her car seat.
“Oh, it’s going to be fun getting back in the car,” I mumbled as I pictured returning to the car hot and loaded down with vegetables at the end of our market trek. I got an extra jolt of annoyance when I had to move the seat up and realized that Mike had been in the car that morning and was very likely the culprit of the keys-no-longer-on-the-dresser-where-I-spotted-them-this-morning. At least I could be assured I wasn’t losing my mind, a fact of which I so rarely have any such assurance.
All was forgotten when my friend pulled up in the lane next to us on the way downtown and I successfully led her to a perfect parking lot tucked away across the street from the tailgate market. And, yes, we chatted with only moderate interruption from Lily, and then only after she got tired of being carried around and decided to strike out on foot with Mom attached by the finger.
So, truly, it wasn’t Lily’s fault how everything got harder. It was surely Mike’s because he is not here right now to defend himself and point out that he put the keys back on the shelf where they belong after using them and I should have looked harder for them. One thing is for certain. It’s not my fault.
All I know is that after my friend and I said our goodbyes, I headed across the parking lot, valet key in hand, with a plan to open the driver’s door, turn on the air conditioning, and settle Lily into her seat.
And then it happened. As I removed the key from the lock it slipped from my hand, flipping, as I watched with my none-too-great eyesight, in one of those what-are-the-odds moments, into the canvas bag in which I carried my paltry finds from the market.
Staving off the curse words that so easily could have issued from my mouth, I calmly slid into the seat, throwing bags but not baby on the passenger seat next to me in a feat that only someone who has spent the last several years distinguishing child in arms from inanimate objects in arms could manage.
This would have gone smoothly enough if we hadn’t been parked on a hill with a steep enough incline to create a force of gravity beyond the strength of the car door to resist. And so it swung shut on us — my leg and, at least according to her complaints although I didn’t witness this happening, Lily’s head.
So now I had a crying baby in my lap, a leg awkwardly sticking out of the car in an attempt to hold the car door open, and no key.
Still trying to hold it together, I reached for the canvas bag as Lily squirmed in my lap and decided she would like to climb over the seat, at least preempting her tears. I rummaged around inside. No key.
I shifted Lily and removed the meager contents of the bag — a filet of smoked trout, a bunch of carrots so tiny I wondered if they were really up to the task of adding color to the salad we are bringing to a pool party later today, and wads of used but still reusable plastic bags. As I discovered that the key was not there and contemplated the horror that was the prospect of going through the diaper bag, Lily spotted her milk and started yelling for it.
Mommy practicality finally rearing its head, I deposited Lily in the passenger seat with her milk, a partial solution to my present difficulties that she thought was just dandy. This did not, however, make the prospect of taking every last item out of every last pocket of the diaper bag any more appealing.
I was, in fact, so reluctant to embark on such a journey that I momentarily considered calling Mike instead and yelling at him about the plight for which I still placed the blame squarely on his shoulders.
Instead, I thought maybe, just maybe, it would be easier to look on the pavement under the car, even though I had not heard the key drop.
So I crept out and started my search, Lily still merrily hanging out in the passenger seat. And, yes, I found the valet key, its light gray body surely designed to blend with parking lot pavement, so really this story isn’t as bad as it could be.
Heaving a sigh of relief, I put the key in the ignition, got the air conditioner going — which makes every situation seem far less dire — and headed around to let Lily out of the passenger seat and strap her into her car seat.
As I pulled at the passenger door handle, I realized it was locked, the key was in the ignition on the other side of the running car, and Lily was waving at me happily in a way that just begged for the car to cruise off on its own leaving me behind.
Fortunately, it didn’t, and I managed to figure out the whole unlocking the car doors thing and to get Lily strapped safely into her car seat with a minimum of complaining that I silenced by handing her the pretty pink lip gloss I transferred from the shelf by the front door to the car some months ago. When we got home I even got her down for a nap without giving her a bottle, which has me pretty pleased or I wouldn’t bother mentioning it here.
And this, I guess, is all pretty much telling me that it wasn’t all that hard, this morning. In fact, title of this post notwithstanding, it probably would have been harder with two kids. But I don’t think it would have felt as hard.
When you know you are going somewhere with two kids, you are prepared for it to be really hard. Iron Man hard. Tears-hidden-behind-the-facade-of-adult-who-just-loves-being-a-parent-hard. The kind of hard that makes me long for the days when I was a lawyer in DC and not very happy but also beholden to no one but myself.
In other words, you are prepared. And therefore pleasantly surprised when things turn out beautifully, when you enjoy your kids and don’t mind not having had any time for yourself because you really didn’t expect to have it in the first place.
But pretend that compared to two one kid is EASY and you are setting yourself up for disaster. You are on a collision course with a lost car key in a hot parking lot and the fear that your bizarre-scary dream of losing the car keys in the middle of an African desert is coming true!
This is how life can be. Expect things to go swimmingly, and they won’t. Prepare for roadblocks and unexpected difficulties and when they happen you can more or less shrug your shoulders and say, “That’s life.”
The lesson, I think, is to embrace the bumps that we are constantly traversing, like the moguls some people love to ski for reasons that escape me because I am not a skier. But the analogy seems sound.
In other words, as usual, my daughter taught me about yoga. She taught me that our minds think we can control everything, predict what is coming, will it to be so. And our minds are usually wrong — going to the tailgate market with one child was not a breeze while entertaining two kids last Saturday while Mike was away for the day was surprisingly easy.
Life, after all, is what it is. And losing your car key is frustrating only if you let it be — at least if you find it again. Ditto being a parent. Because being a parent, if you stop being frustrated by those darn kids not doing what you expect them to do, is really pretty fun.
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