Well, it finally happened... I over scheduled myself and the result: “Mommy Guilt.”
I have a calendar, actually I have multiple calendars and I have tried hard to meld them all together. I have two electronic calendars on my PDA, one for work and one for personal and then I have a paper calendar that I keep on grandma’s desk at home. The one at home is like the master calendar, I try to update it with everything; my work stuff, personal stuff, the kids stuff, and grandma’s stuff. My husband’s work schedule is ever changing so it doesn’t get added to the family calendar. It is just so much to keep track of and this last week proves I am doing the best job keeping track of it all.
I think it all started two weeks ago when my husband and I were cleaning up the home office because we had invited people over for Superbowl. We shredded all the old statements and bills, filed the others and cleared all the paperwork off my desk. It looked great!
Monday after the Superbowl, I received a text from my husband asking me if I knew where my son’s the parent teacher conference paperwork might be. I gave him a couple possible locations and told him that the conference paperwork was not due until Tuesday so, if he couldn’t find it I would look for it when I got home.
When I got home I could not find the conference paperwork. I checked every place I could think of and I couldn’t find it. So, I figured the right thing to do was to call my son’s 2nd grade teacher and take responsibility for misplacing the paperwork. I called his teacher and explained the situation and explained that my son had remembered the paperwork and had intended to return it that morning. She was very understanding and we discussed a couple possible times that would work for both of us. She said she would send a sheet home with a finalized conference time.
In the meantime, I continued to schedule a few reading appointments and other things, after work and before I pick up my daughter from school, during that same week. I squeezed as much as I could into the week and I still felt I had plenty of wiggle room. WRONG! Wiggle “room” would imply there was “room” for some thing else.
It would figure that mere days before my grandmother's referral to the pain specialist was due to expire, I would get a call to schedule the appointment. Of course, the only appointment the clinic had available before the pre-authorization expired, was on the afternoon of the one day I had left open for my parent teacher conference. So, I took the appointment and then tried to work everything else around it. I called my husband to ask him to help me coordinate getting grandma to the clinic and making sure both of my kids were picked up from school and the bus.
Just when I thought it was all under control, guess what happened? A couple of days later my son comes home with my parent teacher conference time and it is 45 minutes before my grandmothers appointment and right in the middle of one of my reading appointments. I felt like such a bad mom. I want my son to know he is important to me, that his progress is important to me and I really wasn't doing a very good job of showing it. First I had misplaced the original paperwork, then I offered my son’s teacher a window of time, on a particular day to setup a new conference and I managed to schedule right through that time.
I wrote an apology email to my son’s teacher and explained my situation. She was wonderful, she told me she understood what it was like to be overbooked and gave me another date and time, based once again on a window of time I provided in my email. It’s on my calendar now and I had better make it.