Thankful

It’s a beautiful, story book fall day and I could care less because I’m fighting with my freezer. On Mondays, there are about 45 minutes in between getting the girls from school and Harper’s ballet class. Get home, empty backpacks and lunch boxes, get a snack, start homework, put on a leotard – tights first, Harper, then the leotard – hair in bun, grab your shoes, let’s go.

But Hadley’s ordered what feels like 2 million dollars of Clare’s Gourmet for a school fundraiser, and all of it must be kept frozen. Our freezer is about the size of a DSW boot box, and it’s already stocked. I don’t have room or time to put away corn dogs, cookie dough, and frozen pizzas.

I hate school fundraisers, I think as I pour out 101 pounds of ice into a bucket to stuff another hundred pounds of pretzel rolls into. I should’ve told Hadley no, but I couldn’t because she loves her school and she thinks that buying 2000 pounds of cookie dough will make a difference.

So we’re walking down the sidewalk that’s blanketed under the most colorful leaves and the ones that have fallen make that great scratching sound on the cement when they’re swept up by the wind or kicked by Hadley or Harper.

“C’mon, enjoy this,” I tell myself. “This is all so pretty.” But I tell myself to can it because I have pizzas the size of hubcaps on my kitchen counter that I need to find a place for before all that artificial cheese thaws and I don’t know, becomes nuclear.

Harper practices her plies and leaps while she waits outside her classroom door. Her black leotard is a tad small but I couldn’t find one in her size, so she has a bit of a wedgie each time she moves. Her ballet bun looks more hipster than professional and as I watch her dance I think I should’ve shopped for a leotard earlier; should’ve taken more time to do her hair.

Another mom whose daughter is in the class asks how Harper likes it. “She LOVES it,” I say and regret it immediately because the mom’s face falls slightly. “What about your daughter?” I ask and feel terrible that I don’t know the girl’s name. She’s told me several times but I’m about as good at remembering names as I am at finding places for 500,000 pounds of Clare’s Gourmet Chocolate-Chocolate Chunk cookie dough to go.  But she knows Harper’s name and it’d be nice if I allowed space in my brain for other people besides myself.

“She doesn’t like it,” the mother says, and I enter a conversation with words like, “strict, regimented,” and “not fun.”  I nod. I was in ballet for about five minutes and quit when I found out I couldn’t wear a tutu and the teacher kept insisting I suck my stomach in so that it felt like it’d drip down my spine.

And I won’t go so far as to say I think Harper has talent, but she loves ballet. She loves the technicality and precision of it, she loves the vocabulary. She loves the prancing.

I’ve read about ballerinas. I know a couple ballerinas well enough to understand both the damage and the loveliness in the dance. I don’t know if Harper will stick with ballet long enough to get wrapped up in it this way, but I just don’t want to think about all that right now. It’s not so much that I have 44 billion pretzel dogs stuffed in my freezer, though that doesn’t help, it’s that I’m tired of the fact that I can’t just enjoy that my daughter likes something and that can’t be enough. I have to think of the next thing. What does this mean? What’s next? Should I push Harper to get to Level 3?  I’m so bored by this kind of thinking. I have 235 apple dumplings that are sitting in the trunk of my car and I don’t think Jesse will buy it if I tell him I forgot they were in there (though the days are getting colder so maybe they’ll be fine).

My head hurts. It’s 4:02 and the ballet class hasn’t started yet. All the little girls in their black leotards and pink tights are prancing around the reception area and I think the ladies at the front desk are getting ready to tell them to stop. I make a move to get Harper so they don’t have to reprimand her, but stop when I hear a little boy roaring with laughter around the corner.

“Oh my goodness!  Oh boy! Oh man!” he says between bursts of laughter.

Harper pays no attention but Hadley and I both look to see what’s so funny. He makes eye contact with both of us, but fixes his eyes on Hadley when he says, yells really, “You’ll never guess what I just did!”

Hadley takes a step forward, smiling, “What?” she asks him.

“I forgot to read the sign on the bathroom door and just went in.” He slaps his thigh and howls with laughter, and Hadley’s smile gets bigger.

“Turns out,” he says, “I used the girls’ bathroom and not the boys’!”

He holds his stomach and Hadley’s giggling now.

“Also?” he says, holding up his hands, and I’m thinking, Oh no, he’s going to say he saw someone’s butt and I don’t think I’ll be able to not laugh.

“I didn’t wash my hands!” he says and laughs again. It’s the kind of laughter that, when it happens to you, you think you ought to stop but that only makes it worse.  Or better, depending on how you look at this type of laughter.

Harper’s ballet teacher opens the door and Harper sachets towards her, then leaps over the threshold. “Bye, Mommy!” she calls, and I wave goodbye and turn towards Hadley.

The little boy is gone. I guess his class started, too.

Hadley and I walk back home, to the 22,000 pounds of Clare’s Gourmet I need to put away, but we re-enact the scene the entire way.

“You’ll NEVER guess what I just did,” Hadley says, giggling.

“Also? I didn’t wash my hands!” I add, and we are howling and holding our stomachs.

The walk home is short, but by the time we’re home I say, “Maybe we should have those pizzas for dinner tonight.”

“And the apple dumplings for dessert?” Hadley asks.

“Why not?” I say.

And then we are in the house, and Hadley’s helping me find room for all this food, and we are going over the scene again, laughing and getting louder and more animated the more we say the words of the little boy who will never know how he turned our afternoon around.