Tempting The Gods

I honestly believe that judgment is just a way of thumbing our noses at karma. I think back to the times in my life when I have been judgmental about people or situations. More times than I can count, eventually I am faced with similar problems and circumstances. Despite my earlier proclamations about how I would handle things differently, most of the time I don't. To pass judgment is to tempt the gods.

In one of my first jobs I was the junior project director to a hot mess of a senior project director named Lisa. Lisa was a 30-something mother of two small children who worked because her husband had developed a habit of getting fired. She had planned to stay home and raise her children but things didn't work out. I was in my early twenties and eager to prove that I was worthy of my newly printed, first business cards.

I came to work early and I stayed late into the evening. I knew Lisa had arrived for work each morning when I heard her tires squeal to a stop in front of the building. She blew into the office with papers spilling out of her over-stuffed briefcase and another excuse for being late spilling out of her mouth. She never had what she needed for the meeting she just had delayed. It was always in her "other" bag. On one of her more harried days I noticed her sweater was on inside out and there was a glob of peanut butter on her shoulder. I shook my head in wonder at how something like that could happen.

Right after Peyton had made me a new mom, I was running my daily errand to Babies 'R Us. It had been a week since I had slept more than two hours in a row. As I walked into the store I looked down and realized that I had on two different colors of socks--one white and one black and had forgotten to change out of my slippers. I had showered earlier in the day but didn't put on make up or dry my hair. I had grabbed the wrong purse--the one from which I had just removed everything so that I could begin carrying a larger "mom bag." I was out in public with mismatched socks and nothing more than an old tube of lipstick that had been hiding in the small, "not a mom" purse. I didn't have a cellphone or wallet or a diaper or baby wipes. Thankfully Peyton was too young for peanut butter.

Right now I have a two-year-old who doesn't do well with the transition of me leaving the house each morning. Most mornings her long eye lashes are wet from tears. There are plaintive wails requesting one last hug and then another last hug. Sometimes she grabs my leg and presses her face to my "right out of the dry cleaning bag" pants. And sometimes she still has a bit of breakfast on her face. When I finally get to my commuter train into the city, never the early one that I had planned to catch, I find myself trying to remove lip prints made of oatmeal or milk or occasionally peanut butter.

Beth and I both like to cook. I like "big production" cooking--obscure ingredients, advanced knife skills, recipes where the minutia matters and prep can take all day. I'm not so good at the regular Tuesday night and the whole crew needs to be fed type of dinners. Mostly that falls to Beth. Before there were kids Beth and I considered chips, salsa and margaritas to contain enough of the food groups to be a decent dinner. Since we are trying to teach our kids better nutrition than we observe ourselves, week night dinners are considerably more involved.

Beth is charged with planning dinners that please all the participants while not always succumbing to the requests for chicken nuggets or mac and cheese. Peyton prefers a dinner of all fruits and vegetables. Emerson wants a dinner entirely made of meat. Ben will eat pretty much anything if it doesn't have a sauce. It makes sense therefore that Beth is more likely than I am to declare "cooks night off." It's that and I absolutely hate going out to dinner with a two-year-old. My two-year-old offers her own unique set of challenges but really I hate dinner out with almost every two-year-old that I've ever met.

Beth and I don't fight much. Sure we bicker like most couples. Hot topics for us are the usual things like money, cleaning the house and whose turn it is to get up in the middle of the night when Emerson falls out of bed. But nothing can get us going like a discussion about whether or not to go out for dinner or bring it home. Despite my many attempts, I cannot convince her that takeout Chinese actually tastes better when luke warm. She doesn't buy my theory that I am actually protecting her mouth from the inevitable cheese burns that come with hot pizza eaten at the restaurant.

Since my child-rearing induced dementia hasn't fully kicked in, I still remember being childless, sitting in a restaurant and making comments about how "those" parents needed to learn to control their animals. I remember making all sorts of declarations about how miniature humans shouldn't be allowed in public until they had grown a set of manners. I may have also made some loud comments about how if I wanted to hear unintelligible screaming I would bought tickets to an AC/DC concert instead of having dinner out. Judgment. It'll get you every time.

Not long ago we went to a casual dining restaurant. It wasn't fine dining but we didn't have to stand in a line and order at a counter. That meant it was a big night for us. We were seated in a lovely outdoor courtyard. Just as the waitress delivered our drinks, Emerson reached for her milk and knocked the pepper shaker to the ground and it shattered everywhere. In Peyton's attempt to help her sister, she upended the table and sent the drinks flying. I read the lips of the people seated near us. I'm almost certain they said we should learn to control our animals.

This year, for the first time in quite awhile, we decided to go out for Mother's Day brunch. Since the kids aren't yet old enough to take the reigns for a day of celebrating all things maternal, the planning, shopping, cooking and cleaning typically falls to both Beth and me. A friend of mine correctly described the situation when she said that Mother's Day is only relaxing if you're the oldest mother alive. I think she may have meant oldest alive in the world. This year we decided to brave the crowds and over-priced, mediocre brunch food and treat ourselves to a day off from cooking.

The restaurant was well staffed in the food preparation department and woefully understaffed with waiters. At one point I found a manager and asked if we were supposed to bus our own table and if so, could she kindly point me in the direction of the kitchen. Brunch buffet plates began to pile up in the center of the table. We had been served a thimble full of coffee when we were seated but it was long gone. Peyton was pouting because we were making her eat turkey or ham or roast beef and not just grapes and cantaloupe. It was as if Emerson had sprouted even more arms overnight and sitting next to her felt like taming an octopus. Bennett was complaining about a tickle in his throat that was making him cough. He didn't really need to bring it to my attention. It was a non-stop, nagging, hacky cough that made me want to puncture my ear drums for some relief.

I looked around at the other tables and wistfully admired their calm conversations. I wondered how many years it would be until that could be us. The table next to us was filled with a family of tweens and teens. Some were listening to iPods, others were playing handheld video games. One of the older girls attempted secret texting by holding her phone under the table. I was just about to declare that when our kids were older, we would demand an electronics-free brunch. Just then Emerson threw a cube of cheese across the table and it bounced into my coffee cup. Bennett broke the "don't you dare get out of your seat at a restaurant" rule to stand by my side and explain how he had just puked all over his plate. I swallowed my judgment about the table next to us and went about solving the problems of our table.

With absolutely certainty I can proclaim that I no longer look harshly at toddlers tantruming in a grocery store. I no longer look around for the kid making all the racket in church. I refuse to roll my eyes when a kid is wearing two different shoes. When I see a new mom or dad struggling with a shopping cart or diaper bag or door I am much more likely to help rather than to sigh about how they are inconveniencing my task.

Hopefully at some point I will figure out how to look forward with this lack of judgment. My goal is to be a little more patient with the older people in my life who tell the same story over and over and over. I will listen for new details in hopes that the story will be interesting this time in a way that it wasn't the past 19 times. I want to be interested when they tell me the details of all their medical procedures especially those below the waist that involves smells and sounds that are better left private. I can't make any promises but I will try not to explode when they drive by Braille and run into my car in parking lots. I want my heart to soften so that I can hear their stories about the good old days--you know the ones when people smoked and drank while pregnant and when most women were relegated to life of servanthood. And most importantly I want to never, ever laugh at their need for Depends because that is one area where I don't want to tempt the gods!