Moms helping Moms (and saving teen's butts)
Here are some shameless cliches to set up this story:
It takes a village.
All people have different talents.
Moms have a vast array skill sets; varied core competencies if you want to get all corporate about it. As a tribe we are hard-wired to help each other out. Most of us are over-committed and mired in the self-imposed hell of multi-tasking (and apparently excessive use of hyphenated words in my case). If we see a mom in distress, we try our best to use our talents to help them, and their kids, out of a jam. Here are two scenarios:
Scenario #1: Mom #1 is an OB/GYN. Mom #2's daughter is leaving for Israel on a weekend flight and remembers late the night before she is leaving that her prescription is going to run out while she is overseas. Mom #3 (are you still following?) is a pharmacist and knows a late night pharmacy that can fill a prescription. Mom #1 writes the scrip and Mom #2 goes with her daughter (who she would like to smack upside the head for being such a lamebrain) to fill it and all is well with the world.
Scenario #2: 6 months later. Mom #1 (the savior in Scenario #1) calls Mom #4 (that's me!) in a panic that her son, who is in college on the opposite coast, has lost his wallet and needs to get on a plane home the next morning. Of course it is Friday night (why do they always discover these things at night). Mom #1 comes to my house, I scan the kid's passport and email it to him where he has it notarized while listening to his very cranky dad tell him to remember to shave and wear respectable clothing before he goes to the airport to beg security to let him on the plane.
Is it me, or did our parents make us wing it? Whatever, we raised them this way and for better or worse we bail them out. Or our friends do it for us.
We all have our 'girls'. The women who pick us up, dust us off, fill us with chocolate and sympathy and solve our worst dilemmas when we think there is absolutely no solution to the situations we, and our kids, find ourselves in. Without them we would surely never come out whole. Here's to the combined resources of the Mom Machine, the most well oiled piece of human resource equipment around.
