Don't call CPS

It finally happened.  After years of giving my mother a hard time for it, I forgot to pick up my kid at school.  Before you call CPS, there were a few extenuating circumstances.  She usually goes a full day and this day I was to pick her up at the half way mark for a play date.  So it wasn't like I had a drunken binge and left her alone.  She wasn't standing outside the school gates, back pack by her side, looking up the street for any sign of me, in the rain. 

It wasn't like the it was the late 70s at 6:30 at night on Christopher St. in New York's West Village where one can learn at a very young age that sometimes boys like girls, and sometimes boys like boys, and sometimes girls like girls, and sometimes boys like to dress like girls and like boys.  That was my childhood, which for all it's faults, was very life-skills educational.

But being the last one at school or day care or after care was at least a bi weekly event growing up and when I was old enough to sense irritation in adults - such as the ones who had to watch me, and only me, while we waited for my mom to come - it made me very uncomfortable.  It's something that I have feared putting my own kid through since the first day she started school.  And despite, at times, a rigorous production schedule I have been able to avoid it.  Yesterday, though, whilst I did nothing more important than watch "Pregnant in Heels" and look up stats on my blog (hello to all the people who got here by googeling "irish hooker") my pregnancy brain failed to register the fact that my little girl was sitting at school waiting for her mommy.  What's it going to be like when I'm working on four hours of sleep?  When there's another person I have to bring with me to pick up?  How many times am I going to rush out of the house and realize I forgot to bring him with me?  Do I have a lifetime of moronocity ahead of me just because I decided to have a second child?

Courtesy of Glam-o-mamas.com (http://glamomamas.com/2011/05/mummy-brain-urban-legend-valid-condition/)

In the end I was only 20ish minutes late and it meant she got to have a little birthday celebration with one of her classmates.  But I can tell you I raced to that school like a NASCAR driver.  White nuckled and chanting over and over "please don't let her be crying, please don't lether be crying."  Thank God there weren't any police officers out that day because I don't think I'd get to take traffic school so close to the last ticket I --- Oh crap, I forgot to do traffic school!!!