Robo-mom’s on the warpath again
Auto ‘momisms’ only go so far in land-of-the-living family.
Itoasted my cheese bagel just about perfectly and poured myself a cup of coffee with some Coffee Mate and I was probably unnaturally excited about enjoying the ensuing moments of inner peace that only a combination of caffeine and carbohydrates can bring.
The kids had been sent off to school, the sun was shining through the kitchen window where I had decided to set up my laptop for the day. Everything was coming up Shannon.
Upon checking my email, I noticed a few matters that needed my urgent attention.
Ten minutes later, with explanatory emails sent and received, I reached to pick up that tasty little bagel. Gone! It was gone. I was aghast. I stared at the empty plate and, I’m embarrassed to say, I felt abject misery.
I had really been looking forward to that bagel. I had eaten it. Or rather, my nemesis, the email-reading, textmessaging, PDFing automaton known as Robo-Shannon, had eaten it. And it shamed me. It really did. I have a million excuses for it — the baby vomited no fewer that 15 times in the middle of the night last week. I had crazy deadlines. My seven-year-old had been waking up with nightmares about drowning, and my seventh-grader was turning into a teenage insomniac very thoughtfully waking me up to tell me he can’t sleep and then walking right back out of the room to leave me sitting up in bed feeling equal amounts of pity (poor kid can’t sleep!) and rage (why the heck did you have to wake me up to tell me THAT!).
But justifications aside, fatigue and a hectic schedule was turning me into Robo-Mom.
And while I wasn’t exactly a parental Optimis Prime, I wasn’t going to get any endearing roles as a sweet and sensitive, maternal Disney robot either.
And there had been several “auto-incidents” over the past several weeks previous to my zombielike breakfast behaviour.
There was the “autopilot” episode when I picked up the two oldest children from school and then, turning into the driveway, my son disdainfully said, “Mom, you forgot Sam and Mali.”
There had been the myriad of highly inappropriate “autoreplies” as well.
For instance, my epic autoreply failure when I said, “Sure, that sounds good.” To which my son said, “It’s good that it burns when I go pee?!”
The other night I bathed my baby on “auto-wash,” performing the perfunctory de-crumbing of all creases and crevices and then quickly drying and dressing her without taking a single moment to savour a splashy fit or the giggles that come when I pour water from one cup to another.
Luckily, there is a great disabler that eventually overrides all the auto-momisms in the household. It is Manual Dad. A little hands-on fathering can often compensate very nicely until mama gets her groove back.
And while he might slip into autofunction occasionally, he is largely wholeheartedly unplugged.
I’m grateful for this because when I’m Robo-Mom, I’m missing the moments that make parenting beautiful.
So when I slip into RoboMom mode, I’m thankful for Manual Dad who (sincerely) laughs at all the right places when the kids make jokes and who drives their lunches to school when Robo-Mom malfunctions and sends them to school sans food.
And often when I choose to check out, Manual Dad moves in. Last spring when we got a late snowstorm that left us all feeling a little bummed out, I decided to fire up Robo-Mom to use the seclusion to finish up some work, but Manual Dad drove home from work to build one last snowman for the season — a snowman fondly remembered in our family as Filthy the Snowman.
So yes, occasionally my eyes glaze over and my focus on family slips.
But there’s always another cheese bagel.
And, thankfully, there’s another opportunity to disable Robo-Mom and join Manual Dad in the land of living in the moment.