Bad Mommy

I get a Bad Mommy award today.  It started at 11:30 this morning when I headed to the bus stop to meet Aiden's bus.  They've been training a lot of new drivers lately and using the kindergarten bus route to do it, so when the drop off time came and went, I wasn't all that surprised.  But 25 minutes later, I was getting frustrated. Then my cell phone rang.  "Hi, this is Becky from Brookwood.  I've got Aiden here in the office.....it was early release today."  Oh. My. Gosh.  I completely forgot.  That means my child saw that his mommy was not at the bus stop as usual and had to be driven away not knowing where I was or what was going to happen.

I ran back to the house, hopped in the car, and drove over to the school.  I walked into the school office to see Aiden sitting there, eyes puffy and red, his face soaking wet with tears.  I cried.  The amount of guilt in that moment - even though Aiden will probably grow to be a well-rounded adult despite me forgetting about early release - is more than any parent wants to feel.  The secretary tried to assure me that a parent forgets about Wednesday early release nearly every other week and that she's done it herself multiple times.  Good to know I'm not the only one, I guess.  But it didn't really get rid of how massively bad I felt about the whole thing.

Aiden cried a little more once we were in the car and I was apologizing profusely, but he said he understood that I hadn't forgotten about HIM - just about the fact that the bus stop time was different for that day.  After we were finished with Nathan's dance class (which we were almost late to because of the whole screw up), I took him to the store to pick out a new toy and get some cookies.  Then we went to the park for a little while and he got to pick out a movie to watch when we got home.  I was planning on spending the afternoon catching up on laundry and homework, but making up my mistake to my child was way more important.

In the grand scheme of things, I know we'll look back on it as "Hey, remember that time I forgot about early release and they took you back to school?  Ha, what a silly mommy thing to do!", but for today it was pretty traumatic.  I guess I still need to work on being at peace with the fact that I am human and I will make mistakes, and sometimes my kids will be on the receiving end of those mistakes.  As long as it's not happening all the time, I'll try to keep from beating myself up about it too much.  Now let's all hope I don't forget again next week.