Abandoned in a Parking Lot

Newsletter 2024-05-20

I made a vow that I’d never parent shame anyone. Today, I’m going to come very close to breaking it. This story will be hard to tell without making one person in particular sound like the bad guy. This isn’t even my tale. It’s my wife’s, but she doesn’t have a newsletter, so you’ll have to settle for hearing it from me. She told me this saga over a series of frustrated texts and phone calls, then repeated it again last night over a well-deserved bottle of wine. I’d like to say I’ll retell it here with journalistic integrity, but that’s not really my jam. I’m sure any inaccuracies will make the story better. This is the kind of narrative that generational traumas are made of. Buckle up, and, please, withhold your judgment of any potential villains, even if it seems like they totally deserve it. Lola made me promise to be nice.

I get most of my oldest daughter’s friends mixed up. All of their names rhyme with each other. When Betsy tells me a story about them, it sounds like she’s quoting Dr. Seuss. There’s one kid, however, who stands out. Let’s call her Augusta, mainly because I don’t think there’s anyone in real life who has that name. If you’re reading this and your name actually is Augusta, I regret to inform you that you don’t exist. At the final choir concert last year, Augusta was one of the only kids to attempt a solo. She’s an amazing singer, but halfway through her performance, she lost her confidence. Alone on stage, she started to cry with an auditorium full of people looking on. Through tears, she finished the song. I was mortified for her but also impressed by her grit. That’s the kind of moment that either makes you a stronger person or gives you nightmares for the rest of your life. She chose the former. This year, she took on another solo but upped the difficulty: She sang while playing piano. She crushed it and got the biggest ovation of the night. Augusta is going places. Unfortunately, one of those destinations wasn’t her own birthday party.

Like half the kids in America (and half of my own children), Augusta was born in May. Why is May such a busy month for birthdays? If you go back on the calendar forty weeks, you’ll find the Fourth of July, the most romantic day of the year. Fireworks plus freedom equals pregnancy. Augusta’s birthday party was Saturday at a trampoline park in a distant suburb forty-five minutes away. It doesn’t sound like much, but any experienced (or jaded) parent will recognize that as a huge logistical hurdle. It means pick-up and drop-off each require an hour and a half round trip, unless you stay for the two-hour party in between, which turns the afternoon into a three and a half hour ordeal. Nonetheless, I told Betsy she could go since I say yes to everything. Someday, she’ll learn her limits, but it won’t be from me.

After much negotiation and a little parenting calculus, we figured out a travel solution to make the day more manageable. By sheer coincidence, there was a llama walk scheduled near the trampoline park. Sadly, the llama’s wouldn’t be on the trampolines, but there’s a million dollar idea if anyone wants to go for it. Instead, the local 4-H club had llamas at a landscaping place and let kids help guide the animals through an obstacle course. Obviously all four of my girls wanted to go. I’ve taken them to state parks and nationally renowned museums, but I had yet to give them the culturally enriching experience of llama parkour. Lola said she’d take our crew to the event, then drop off Betsy at the party. Betsy just needed to find a ride home from one of the other parents. I, meanwhile, would stay home to partake in the infinite amount of yard work adulthood has to offer. It was either that or paint the columns on the front porch, which is the task currently at the top of my procrastination list. I never have to do it if I die of old age first.

The llama walk went off without incident. That’s not entirely true. A llama spit on a kid and his mom, but neither was related to me, so I missed out on a good story there. My kids soon grew bored of the llamas and the local shops for which the llamas served as customer bait. Lola decided to take Betsy to the trampoline park a few minutes early. It was a ten minute drive from the llama extravaganza. She pulled into the strip mall parking lot at 2:45 p.m. for a party scheduled for fifteen minutes later. Betsy asked Lola to wait with her until the party started. It was the most fateful decision of the entire day.

Betsy started texting her friends. Correction: She’s a teenager. She never stops messaging them. She verified in her group chat that she was the first one there but that the others were on their way. Most of them, anyway. One group of three who were carpooling together said they’d be a few minutes late. Not the birthday girl, though. She was still at her house, forty-five minutes from the trampoline park. Her mom wasn’t home. She had left for a hair appointment at 10:30 that morning and hadn’t replied to Augusta’s calls and text messages since. Augusta was starting to panic.

As her distress grew, she spilled the tea in the group chat. Her mom is chronically late, and Augusta hates it because it makes Augusta look bad. She’s hyper organized to compensate. Augusta had to book her own party. Her mom simply paid. That’s how the event ended up at the most distant trampoline park in the city rather than the one that was twenty minutes closer. You can’t expect a literal child to plan things perfectly on her first try. Props to her for getting it together at all. Most fourteen-year-olds would be too timid to call a business and schedule their own party. Many adults, too. The only thing Augusta couldn’t do herself was drive there. That crucial step is where the day fell apart.

While those texts were flying back and forth, Lola was still in the parking lot with all four of our kids. The girls watched Despicable Me on the built-in DVD player. I thought that feature was pointless in the age of smartphones, but it came through in the clutch. The mom with the carpool of three girls dropped them off without checking to see if any other adults were at the trampoline park. Lola didn’t find out until after that parent had taken off. She sent Betsy inside the trampoline park to retrieve the kids and bring them all out to our van. Betsy came out with four other girls instead of three because another one had been dropped off in the meantime, also without that mom checking for the presence of adults. They all crowded into the van, putting them one over the vehicle’s capacity of seven. The eighth seat was at home with me.

Betsy called Augusta and put her on speaker phone so Lola could talk her through what to do. Augusta’s mom still wasn’t answering anybody’s calls or texts. Lola told Augusta to call the salon directly. Surely they had a business number. Lola was worried that Augusta’s mom was in a serious car accident or had a medical emergency. Why else would she be late to her own daughter’s birthday party without communicating with anybody? Augusta also tried calling the trampoline park to reschedule the party but was put on hold. Lola offered alternatives. She suggested that they abandon the trampoline park and meet at a regular city park closer to home for presents and cake. The cake was still at a grocery store in yet another suburb. Lola figured she could pull me off mulch duty if necessary to retrieve it. Augusta thought that all sounded like a good idea. Unfortunately, Lola didn’t have enough seats to get everyone there.

She reached out to my father-in-law, Bob. He’s the same guy who rebuilt our porch with the columns I still haven’t painted. As always, he managed to be exactly where he was needed. He lives a mere ten minutes from the trampoline park. Lola called him and said she needed him to drive our three kids in his car back to our suburb. She would take all the teens to the city park party she had thrown together on the fly. With military precision, she made everyone contact their parents to get permission for her to transport them all over creation. One mom called her, freaked out that her child had been dropped off by the aforementioned carpool three zip codes away without anyone verifying the host was present. Lola did her best to calm her down. Then she went inside the trampoline park to tell the manager the party wasn’t happening. That’s when all the plans changed again.

The manager said they’d just gotten off the phone with Augusta’s mom and that the party was back on, but for 5 p.m.. That would be two hours later than the scheduled start time and two hours and fifteen minutes after Lola first arrived in the parking lot with our four kids. She went back out to the van. Augusta’s mom finally called her. The other woman apologized and tried to offer an explanation. Her hours-long hair appointment had some complications and delays. The most charitable way to interpret the situation is that Augusta’s mom was born abroad and perhaps didn’t understand how seriously Midwesterners take birthdays, being on time, and not abandoning teenage girls unsupervised on the other side of the city. In defense of that mother, nobody is owed a trampoline party. It’s pretty generous to spend hundreds of dollars so your kid can bounce around with her friends. We’ve thrown Betsy exactly zero trampoline parties and zero parties with her classmates. She doesn’t even get her own birthday party. She has to share the triple one with two of her sisters. But if you tell your kid you’ll throw them a trampoline party (that they have to plan and book themselves), you absolutely, positively have to follow through. You can’t make them two hours late to their own party, and you can’t abandon all their friends in a parking lot without sending any updates. That’s the absolute bare minimum of acceptable behavior. Apparently it’s still asking too much.

Luckily for that mom, Lola is a much nicer person than I am. There was no big fight over the phone. Lola simply buckled down and watched the kids. She sent our younger three with her dad to his house and took the teens into the trampoline park. The park agreed to give them wristbands and let them start jumping at 4 p.m.. She spent the next hour in charge of somebody else’s birthday party without the birthday girl present. Augusta and her mom finally showed up around 5 p.m.. The mom’s hair looked spectacular. Her daughter didn’t appear to be doing as well. Unlike a certain children’s shampoo, she clearly hadn’t been tear-free that day. With that, Lola was finally relieved from duty. She sped out of the parking lot, taking a detour to pick up our own children from her parents’ house before returning to our own suburb. She and our girls were a full hour late to a cookout we were supposed to attend that evening. As an added bonus, her minivan started making a terrible noise every time she turned left. I suggested that she limit herself to right turns from now on. Instead, I’ll be calling mechanics first thing Monday morning. All my best ideas are rejected for the greater good.

Betsy came home two hours later, returned safely by another mom with a minivan. In the not-too-distant past, Lola and I wondered if we were taking advantage of other parents by asking our kids to carpool with them to far-flung parties. After Lola’s ordeal Saturday, we’ve balanced the scales. If anything, the parents of four other girls now owe us infinite favors. My most radical opinion is if you invite a bunch of kids to an out-of-town activity, you should also line up transportation for everybody. Asking multiple other parents to make an hour or more round trip twice in one afternoon is too much. From this day forward, I’m a single-issue voter on that platform. As for Augusta, she has my full sympathy. The silver lining is in just two more birthdays she’ll be able to drive herself. Once she has her own car, I suspect she’ll never be late again.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time. 

James