It wasn’t the worst morning I’d ever had trying to get the kids dressed, fed and out the door on time while simultaneously trying to do the same for myself. But it was one in which I had built in zero margin for error. And with my husband traveling, such reckless abandon was, in hindsight, unadvisable.
It was all going fairly smoothly until it was time to actually leave. The minute at which our Honda Odyssey tires must be rolling backwards down our driveway is inflexible; the bus pulls up to the stop to collect all of the neighborhood elementary school kids, including my daughter, at precisely 7:31 am.
Seven twenty-eight a.m. found me frantically pulling a wet-to-dry flat iron through my damp, poufy hair and yelling in the general vicinity of the first floor, “Socks and shoes on!”
“Okay!” My six-year-old daughter called back. And then shortly thereafter I heard my son. “I can’t find my shoes!”
Of course. Right? You saw that coming.
By now I was bounding down the stairs, simultaneously devising Plan B. I knew we had a hand-me-down pair of sneakers in our shoe basket by the door and grabbed those, which, you guessed it, he scowled at and firmly announced his disapproval. It was now 7:30 am and I ordered him tersely into the van. I threw the shoes in the back, figuring we’d just put them on when we arrived at his pre-school.
I got my daughter to the bus stop at the exact moment the bus was pulling up and barely slowed down enough to open the door for her to hop out. (Side note: I gotta say, as not cool as I am now that I legit drive a minivan, I totes love the automatic door feature). And then we were on our way! On time! I felt I had avoided a crisis.
Alas, I didn’t get off so easily.
When we arrived at my son’s pre-school I cheerily advised him that it was time to put on his super-cool “other” shoes. He promptly reminded me, “I don’t like those shoes!” (Just picture furrowed brows and clenched fists and a super adorable pout notwithstanding the brows and the fists).
“Well, we don’t have a choice,” I told him calmly. “You can’t go barefoot, can you?” I helped him put on the shoes and felt a familiar wave of guilt rush over me. They were a tad snug.
“Mom, they don’t fit!”
“Yes, they do,” I insisted, loosening the Velcro.
“I can’t wiggle my toes!” he wailed.
“Well, I can’t either,” I said lamely, glancing down at my four-inch, leopard print pumps. Totally not the same thing, I know.
The biting truth about this moment in which I found myself shoving my four-year-old’s size 11 foot into size 10 shoes because the sneakers that fit him properly were nowhere to be found when we (read: I, while barking out orders and balancing coffee, water, and protein shake in one arm) were rushing out the door is that it was totally my fault. It was the culmination of one simple thing: unpreparedness.
Unpreparedness, my friends, is the number one culprit of all so-called “mom fails.” Think about it. If you had laid out your outfit the night before, down to the accessories; if you had the coffee ground and waiting to be brewed in the coffee maker the next morning; if you had lunches packed and shoes laid out, wouldn’t you be less likely to experience the one thing the next morning that will inevitably go wrong and lead to at least four other things going wrong in succession?
Oh yeah. You betcha.
Like King Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes, I’m here to encourage you to learn from my mistakes without having to make them yourself. Plus, a day of not berating ourselves for what we coulda, woulda, shoulda sounds peachy, yes?
It’s so simple, really. If the bane of our existence as mothers is unpreparedness, then the solution, of course, is to be prepared.
I promise you this isn’t rocket science (which, candidly, I know nothing about but it seems really, really complicated). Getting off the Hot Mess Express and getting on the road to designing a life you love can begin with an act as simple as choosing your outfit the night before. Being prepared is so simple when we choose it. We just have to be on purpose about it.
Plus, you already took the first step when you started taking back your time. Compound that by choosing preparedness, girlfriend.
Next stop: taming the morning whirlwind!
Are you on this bandwagon yet? Get on it, girl!
