Did You Want a Snickers with that Character Assessment?

My daughter decided to go out for spring track this year. Her new school – the one she started virtually during the pandemic – has a much more viable track team than her previous, much smaller school. Her new school actually has a track! And home track meets! Practice started on Valentine’s Day, and is supposed to run from 4-6 pm after school.

The first day after practice, I showed up to collect her. She wasn’t at the main entrance to the school, but she was messaging me every few minutes. I was talking on the phone, so, I wasn’t closely tracking the time. But after about twenty minutes of occasional messages about picking her up, that were not followed by the appearance of a kid, I started to get irritated. Where was she?

My messages: I am at the main entrance. Come outside, I’m here, got no response. So, where was the child? Frustrated, increasingly irritated, and suffering from that sneaky underlying panic that stalks all moms—Where is the kid? Why is she not where she is supposed to be?—I pulled up the Life 360 app that I often forget I have, and checked it. Life 360 put her at the football field, where the track is, rather than inside the school itself. Which makes sense, but she had not told me that pickup was at the field rather than the school. Brimming by now with worry, I drove back out to the road and down to the football field/student parking entrance. She was sitting at the ticket booth, waiting with two coaches.

I had tried to regulate myself, on the two-minute drive from the school’s main entrance, but it didn’t work. I got out of the car upset and scolding: “Why didn’t you respond to my messages? Do you know I’ve been waiting for you for twenty minutes? You didn’t tell me to pick you up here! Why do I pay for a phone for you if you never respond to my messages? Why didn’t you tell me where you were?”

“I don’t get good reception out here,” she pleaded. “I wasn’t getting your messages, and mine weren’t going through!”

“Just get in the car.”

It occurred to me, belatedly, that I had an audience. Chagrined, I introduced myself to the closest of the two coaches. “Are you Coach Burton?”

“No, I’m the Assistant Principal,” he said.

Well, great. I just lined out my kid over a miscommunication that wasn’t entirely her fault in front of one of the school’s assistant principals. So now he’s going to think I’m that mom—and that is entirely my fault, for letting worry and irritation and impatience at the end of the afternoon, before supper, get the better of me.

I’m not always impatient, irritated and hangry. Sometimes I’m a better human than that. In a world that sometimes seems to consider putting your grocery cart in the cart corral the defining prosocial behavior, I often go one better.

My daughter—the one on the track team—is a wheelchair user. She has a hang-tag to use when we’re out together that lets her park closer to the curb cuts she needs to access many public spaces. For convenience, the tag stays in my car, but in fact it is hers, and can travel with her – when she spent a week with my parents, she took it along, and they were able to park in the accessible spaces for her. When and if she gets her own vehicle, she can be issued a license plate with the accessibility symbol (the wheelchair symbol), but until then, she has a temporary tag that mostly hangs from the rear-view mirror of my car.

I started dating a guy, and one day early in the relationship we went out together, just him and me, in my car. We stopped at the store while we were out. I bypassed the eight open accessible spaces, and parked beyond them in the unmarked spaces.

“You don’t use your tag?” he asked, indicating the hang tag.

“It’s not my tag,” I said. “It’s my daughter’s. I don’t need the additional accessibility.”

“That wouldn’t stop most people,” he said. He seemed impressed. Maybe as impressed as if I’d put my cart away in the cart corral. I seemed to go up a notch in his estimation, anyway.

You can’t always predict what encounter is going to form the basis of someone’s assessment of your character. It might be the day that you’re out of sorts and snappish, or it might be the day that you do some ordinary thing that just looks extraordinary. The lesson, I suppose, is twofold. When I’m impatient, irritated, and hangry, I need to take two steps back and remind myself at least not to act like it. And when I encounter someone else who is impatient, irritated, and possibly hangry, maybe I should just offer them a Snickers, and assess their overall character on a different day.