Recently, Zoe and I attended a “back to school night.”  Jon picked up Avi from her after school activity, and I was in charge of Zoe. If you have more than one child you understand the whole “divide and conquer” mentality.

It’s how we get things done. I truly don’t know how single parents do it, and I admire them so much.

Everything was going smoothly. Zoe and I got to school on time, and I even remembered to put my phone on airplane mode. I didn’t want to be THAT parent. I didn’t want my phone to ring in the middle of a teacher’s presentation or be tempted to even look at my phone.

A couple of hours later, after the program, I glanced at my phone. I’d missed a ton of calls and text messages from Jon. Apparently, Avi’s darn backpack filled with books and homework never made it into the house. As a result, it had been sitting in my car, in the school parking lot, the whole time we were at the meeting. I knew she had a lot of homework to do. Yikes. It was getting late.

As Zoe and I walked out of the building, for some reason, we couldn’t find our car. We were talking a lot, and in-between our conversation, we would mention the car.

“That’s strange,” I said to Zoe, “I thought we parked over here,” and I pointed to where I thought we parked.

“No, we parked over there,” She said, and pointed to another area.

We were both confused, but soon found the car. I had driven to the school three times that day, and it was all starting to run together.

When we got home, I took Avi’s backpack out of the car, and noticed it was pretty light.

“She must not have as much homework as I thought,” I mumbled, in between our continued discussion about Zoe’s teachers and classes.

We went into the house, and Avi and Jon were sitting in the kitchen, books spread out all over the table.

“Gotcha!” They shouted.

Zoe and I were completely confused.

“Didn’t you notice we moved your car?” Jon asked.

“You did?”

“And the bag is empty,” Avi explained, “We went to school and got my books but left the backpack.”

Are we really so preoccupied we didn’t even notice the car had been moved? How scary is that?

Find meaning each day,

Dara