One Moment While Ironing

Tomorrow the little angel has a ceremony to go to for school. She has been bugging me to iron the flounces of her skirt to make them stand out prettily, and of course I keep forgetting. This morning, she left me a note on my laptop. Mommy, please iron my skirt. I wrote it down on my work list: Iron skirt.  And I remembered! I ironed it.

I got to the second row of flounces before I started crying.

There I stood in my basement, holding an iron in my hand, thinking about how proud I am of my girl who tries so hard in school. I also thought about the worry list she wrote on her playroom whiteboard, how she's been counting down the days to know if her team won, how the combination of that looming childhood worry combined with a school spelling bee this week has her seriously spinning.

She will be fine, of course. Competition is healthy. She doesn't play sports, so this is her opportunity to learn to be a good winner or loser, to look forward to things, to be rewarded for a job well done, to celebrate or mourn with a team. Sports are great and all, but they aren't the only teams in schools. 

So I stood there, trying to get all the wrinkles out and knowing because of the way the flounces were gathered I would fail, trying to keep Kizzy from burning his little black paws on the steam he so desperately wanted to touch, thinking how fast it is going and it will be like a roller coaster that took forever and only thirty seconds between now and when I'm steaming her high school graduation gown. 

I'm doing all I can do. She was so wound up she had a lot of trouble getting to sleep last night. I know tonight will be worse. We've scheduled some worry time for after ballet (not sure I wrote about how she decided two weeks into September that she can't handle the step-up to two nights during the school week, she still hates ballet, quitting at the end of the semester, and I will be very happy not hear a daily litany of how much she hates ballet after that). I'll work on PARKER CLEAVES while she's in class so I won't be sitting there at bedtime thinking how every minute ticking by is a minute I'm not writing before the 11 pm mental shutdown. I'll be fresh. I'll remind her what a good coper she is. We'll breathe deeply. And tomorrow, win or lose, we'll celebrate, of course after the ceremony and school and my trip to the blonde fairy that has already been rescheduled twice. I'd like to clear my calendar for her, but Beloved is traveling till Thursday and, well, dammit, I need my hair cut.

I'm not writing this for you all, I'm writing this for me, you see that right? I just realized it myself.

I can do this. I can stand by her through this excitement and anxiety all by myself sandwiched between two ballet sessions she hates and amidst taking out the garbage and carpooling and scheduling things ahead for Thanksgiving at work and laundry and cooking and writing. I will not let my own anxiety about managing my job and my kid and the house alone affect my ability to teach her to cope, because the better I cope, the better she will cope. 

Fucking hell, being a good example is SO HARD.