Tardy Again

My daughter’s favorite part of the morning is my desperate dash down Main Street in order to get her to school on time.  “How many minutes, now, Mama?” she asks.  “Three minutes.  What do you think?  Will we make it?”  “I don’t think we will,” she answers, matter-of-factly.  Most mornings we make it seconds before the 8am bell rings.  But there have been several mornings that we arrive just seconds after the bell has rung, and then I have to walk inside to sign her in as tardy.  These are shame-filled mornings. 

This morning was one of those mornings.  Today is Columbus Day!  A state holiday and a day off for me.  The principal stands outside the front door as a reminder that she is disappointed in my ability to get my daughter to kindergarten on time.  The secretary gives me a stern look as she writes my daughter’s name on her tardy excuse.  Today she even hands out a slip of paper explaining the importance of punctuality to late-comers.  It’s freaking 8:01!  I give Vi a hug and shuffle out of the school building, head hung in shame.  The principal is still outside waiting to shame the next late-comers with her sweet and sour smile.  Good morning, her smile says, I’m nice and friendly, but you are late, and I am disappointed in you.  Obviously you are not a very good parent, I imagine she is thinking. 

She fixes me with the sweet and sour smile, and instead of being cowed by her self-assurance, I smile right back at her and say good morning.  I’m not a bad parent.  And I haven’t done anything wrong.  I TRY to get my daughter to kindergarten on time.  But punctuality, especially in the morning hours, is something that I have struggled with all of my life, and that is just who I am.  Instead of being ashamed of myself and teaching my daughter that you should devalue yourself because you don’t meet others’ expectations of you, I try to show her that we try to do certain things because we want to (we choose to get to school on time because we want to learn, not because others say we have to), and if we fail, we accept the consequences, but we are still OK people.  Here are some of the things I tell myself my daughter learns from my tardiness.

1)     Everyone makes mistakes, even mama.  No one is perfect.  When I make a mistake, I will not be devastated because I know that it is normal.  I will accept responsibility and the consequences, and if it is important to me, I will brainstorm creative solutions to try to improve the next time.  She surprised me one morning by telling me, “I have a good idea.  You can get me to school first, and then come back home and get dressed yourself.”  I told her that was a great idea, but I did not tell her that if I did that, I would be too tempted to just call in sick and get back in the bed, or at the very least, I would probably not get in to work until about 10am instead of the 8:30 flex time my boss so kindly allows. 

 2)     People may judge you harshly for your mistakes.  But that does not mean that you have to accept what they think of you.  Mrs. Principal and Mrs. Secretary may have looked down their noses at me, but instead of being offended or getting angry and indignant, I chose to understand that they felt they were doing their job the way it needed to be done.  If they chose to believe that I am a bad parent because I am often a few minutes late and overlook the fact that I spend over an hour almost every night reading to my daughter and just talking to her about things in general, well, they are free to think what they want.  On the other hand, I won’t judge them for the few seconds I see them and smile and greet them genuinely. 

I once lost a job and was pretty upset, not because of the actual losing of the job, but because the job did not turn out how I had expected and hoped it to be.  One night while talking to Vi about it, I told her that one time my boss called me stupid because I stapled a stack of papers the wrong way (the staple was straight across instead of at an angle, and she had not even previously told me that that was the way she preferred it).  Vi looked horrified at me and asked me did I cry.  I told her, “No, I picked up the staple remover, took out the offending staple, and re-stapled it the way she asked without ever saying a word.”  I told her that if the woman chose to judge me harshly because of something silly like that, I was not going to change her opinion of me by arguing.  I didn’t like that she said that, but I most certainly was not going to get upset over it because I really did not care what she thought of me.  I was going to do my job the best I could, and if that didn’t satisfy her, well, she could let me go.  I told Vi I was sad that I lost the job because it could have been a really great job, but if I was going to have to work with a person who was so insensitive and mean, it was probably a good thing that I lost it because I would not have been very happy working for a person like that.  I hope that as she gets older and faces cruel teasing by classmates, this will give her the strength to realize that others’ opinions of her do not matter as much as her opinion of herself. 

3)     Instead of making up excuses for your mistakes, you acknowledge the true reason for your mistakes and work on correcting them the best you can.  The reason we have difficulty waking up in the morning is that we often stay up late.  We stay up reading, listening to music, dancing, talking, laughing, playing, coloring.  We enjoy spending time with each other, and that is priority over sticking to a set schedule and enforcing it militantly.  Sure, we have a schedule.  But we’re flexible.  And if we have an idea for something to do, paint a picture, conduct a science experiment, put on a show with her stuffed animals, well, bedtime can wait.  Last night, after she had gone to sleep, I just happened to stay up until four o’clock in the morning because I decided it was time to start the novel that I have been wanting to write all my life.  I work best at night.  Some nights, I stay up that late reading a book that I want to finish.  I try to remind myself to go to sleep by a certain time, but sometimes when I am engaged in something, I lose track of time.

Instead of doing everything the parenting articles say I should be doing, I do things my way, and in doing, teach my daughter it’s ok to do things her way, and not stress about always doing what you’re supposed to do exactly how you’re supposed to do it. 

People have asked me why I don’t homeschool since I am against conformity.  I’m not against conformity.  A certain amount of conformity is a good thing.  I’ll leave the teaching to the experts, the people who had the discipline to finish their schooling and get their degrees.  She can learn things from those people as well as from me.  The more variety, the more social interaction, the better.  This world has many different kinds of people, and none of them are perfect.  My daughter will grow up learning to accept people as they are, including herself, and including her mama, who ain’t perfect, but who loves her more than anything in this world and does her best.