THE NARRATIVE ARC
Parent with Multiple Children, You Make Me Feel Incompetent
Teach me your ways
We are going to the playground.
It takes me approximately thirty minutes to leave the house, juggling a lukewarm coffee, a library book I won’t get to read, and enough allergen-friendly snacks to feed a small soccer team. I return twice because I forget things.
One of the things I forget is the 4-year-old child who wants to go to the playground.
As we reach the iron gate, just before us, a very pregnant woman presses open the lock and allows two children under four to enter before her. I say very pregnant because the only time I was that pregnant was when I was a week overdue and in actual labor. My uterus must have had the sense memory of her uterus and it got all tingly when she was in my general vicinity.
It is approximately a million degrees out. It feels like we’d all be more comfortable without clothes. Or skin.
The very pregnant woman is pushing a stroller, ostensibly for the two little ones in front of her, when I realize, no, there is another child — a third child under four, in the stroller. The woman is unharried and totally at ease, wearing only a bathing suit. (We are near the beach, so this is not an oddity, and also…
