My crazy life Open Thread

I had a peaceful day planned, one that included a lot of blogging.  Then real life intruded.  Things started off well enough when I got a lovely hair cut, which is always a happy experience in my day.  Then, my Mom asked me to take her to a doctor we saw a couple of weeks ago.  As I discovered later, I ought to have inquired further.

I picked Mom up at her home, which is always a slow process, and got her to the doctor’s office, which is another slow process.  The receptionist was surprised to see us.  It turns out Mom’s appointment isn’t for another six weeks.  I knew about the six week appointment, but when Mom called and told me she had to go to this doctor today, I just assumed that she’d made herself another appointment because that’s what my mom does.  It was no harm, no foul, just a bit of lost time for me.

What was fascinating, though, was watching my mother deal with this problem.  First, she denied the error, until she was shown the appointment screen on the office computer.  Then she denied that she could have made a mistake entering it.  When I suggested that her failing vision might have caused the error, she conceded that this was a possibility.  During the car ride home, though, she said it was also possible that the receptionist wrote the date down wrong when she gave Mom the original appointment reminder slip.  I agreed that this too was possible.  By the time I got Mom back to her home, she stated with certitude, “It was those girls.  They gave me the wrong information.”

Wow!  How we got from possibilities to certainties, I do not know, but Mom quite obviously needed the psychological comfort of being far removed from the error.

When I got home, my daughter got me in a stranglehold and said “You have to drive me to my internship interview because the traffic’s really bad and I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know where to park and I’m scared to drive to a new place for the first time when I don’t know where I’m going and I’m going to be late.”  I’m Germanic about punctuality and I understand the new driver’s nervousness about a new location on a short clock, so I agreed.  The round-trip was unexciting, but time-consuming.

Homeward to dinner preparations and eating.  I was then again besieged:  “You need to help me with my homework!”  My kids refuse to believe me when I say that, having been through high school once myself, I really don’t wish to relive it again.  Or more accurately, while I’d love to have the youthful part back, I don’t want to re-live the homework part.  Still, I wouldn’t be a middle class Marin helicopter parent with high expectations for my children’s academic careers if I didn’t pitch in.  True to type, I pitched.

So, here it is, 10:00 at night, and I’m finally ready to call it quits.  I’m too tired to blog and I keep getting called away, since one of my kids is dealing with a social crisis that, from an adult’s perspective is “meh,” but from a kid’s perspective is “Oh, my God.  This is awful!”  I remember that teenage perspective so, once again, I abandon my keyboard and heed the “Mooommmm” bleat.

I’ll be back tomorrow, God willing and the creek don’t rise or the earth shake.  In the meantime please feel free to amuse yourselves — and keep me informed, enlightened, and entertained — with an Open Thread.