“She LOST her daughter’s shoes!”
“NO! HOW do you LOSE your child’s SHOES?”
“I KNOW!”
Then, much head-shaking and eye-rolling and tongue-clucking from the two women conversing, and some squirming and glaring from me. I didn’t feel like getting into this conversation, particularly to explain that I lose shoes, my own and my children’s, fairly regularly.
I also kept quiet because this conversation was fascinating me.
Two women I had just met, both with small children, were discussing their “friend,” a mother of three children, from infant to elementary age. Their “friend” had just gone back to work, and she was struggling. Sounds like a good time for someone to swoop in and help her out–OR, tear her to shreds in front of strangers at a cocktail party.
There’s more:
“And my neighbor babysits for her, and she actually had to call her mother to find out how to start the dishwasher because it was so full of dirty dishes that she couldn’t even find a plate to give the kids their snack! And she has TWO dishwashers! BOTH full of dirty dishes!”
(They are horrified at dirty dishes; I am horrified that a teenaged babysitter cannot figure out how to wash a dish.)
“And the other night she had the kids up at 8:00 pm making cookies because she feels all guilty for missing out on stuff with them and they didn’t even do their HOMEWORK!”
“And she keeps leaving work early to try to see them before their bed time!”
After a night of meeting lovely new people (and finding out later that some of them hated each other because some people’s brothers had affairs with other people’s sisters while married to someone else’s twin or something like that-also fascinating), the night was over, and I grabbed my baby, who was stashed behind a couch, asleep in his car seat, and went out to my car.
As I was driving away, I fervently hoped that somewhere in this city that woman was making cookies with her children at an inappropriately late hour, while crumpled, undone homework sat in the corner amid some lost shoes and both dishwashers were full . . . but she didn’t care because the cookie-making was just what she needed.
