Parents have long made sacrifices for their children.
This process starts with us mothers on the day that we give birth to them. There is nothing, other than the health of our young, which would ever compel any living, thinking being to go through this process, yet every species does it.
It’s a well-known fact that those who have already given birth spare the details to the other young women among us who are aglow with the anticipated happy event.
Those of us who are limping our way through the challenging teen years of our children and secretly wondering whether those species who eat their young may have the right idea also keep that piece of information to ourselves when confronted with the joyful, hopeful and oh-so-naive expectant parents.
I’m sure it’s simply part of nature’s plan.
Parenting is all about sacrifice. But at 4 a.m. on Friday, as I was standing in an endless line at a Bangor department store aimlessly pushing along my goods with my toe, I thought that perhaps I had stumbled upon my sacrificial limit.
My 16-year-old daughter stood beside me, bright-eyed and chatty as if the fluorescent store lighting and the thousands of shoppers surrounding us launched her into an orbit that apparently I was not part of.
I was blurry-eyed, overtired and a bit cranky. OK, check that. I was a lot cranky.
This was my worst nightmare, and to top it off I was determined to keep my distress to myself because other than saving a few dollars, the real goal of this outing was to make a pleasant memory for my daughter.
She’s a shopper. I’m not sure where that gene wriggled out from as she was being formed in my uterus, but it happened just the same.
I hate shopping. Shopping makes me sweat. My throat gets sore and constricts. If I were ever ridiculously wealthy, my first course of action would be to hire a professional shopper so that I need never again step into a department store.
Last year my daughter roused herself out of bed and went with another family to the 5 a.m. “early bird sales.”
I felt dejected when she came home with glorious tales of her outing with another girl’s mom, who apparently “got it” and “was with it” and “normal.”
So this year I dutifully studied the sales fliers that came in the Thanksgiving Day paper and actually found a couple of deals that might make an early morning shopping trip worthwhile.
My daughter urged me on.
“Let’s do it,” she said. “I’ll go with you. It will be fun.”
“OK,” I thought. “Perhaps I can get a good deal and have a little one-on-one bonding time with this 16-year-old alien who is my daughter.”
At 3 a.m. I knocked on her bedroom door.
“Do you still want to go shopping this morning?” I asked sheepishly while silently praying that the warmth of her bed might lure her back into slumber.
But alas, while a 6 a.m. wakeup call on a school day is met with grunts and grumbles, she enthusiastically assured me that she was awake and ready to greet the day.
I tried. I really did.
When we approached the Stillwater exit and found traffic backed up into the driving lane of Interstate 95, I swallowed my sighs and frustrated murmuring.
When an obnoxious driver behind me tried to cut to my left to get farther ahead in line, I silently inched the van over into her path. She honked her horn angrily at me but couldn’t get by. In my head I knew that it was wrong to take such smug satisfaction in that.
Once inside the store, 30 minutes after leaving the interstate, I realized I was out of my element. Men and women scurried around me. They had cell phones and walkie-talkies. They knew what they were doing, loved it and were clearly going to tromp me and my nonshopping butt into the ground.
They would be cashed out, having saved hundreds of dollars, and onto the next store before I picked up my first item.
I limped along, desperately searching for the three things I wanted. I snarled at my daughter to hit the toy department as I headed for home decor. When we met up a few minutes later at the very back of the store, I was pleased we had found two things.
Then I furrowed my brow as I saw the line.
“Hmm. I wonder what this line is for,” I said aloud.
“I think it’s the checkout line,” my daughter said.
I smiled.
Clearly she didn’t understand that the cash registers were all up at the front of the store. We were way at the back of the store. We still had the men’s department, home décor, little girls, big girls, toys and the women’s department to get to the front of the store.
The women around us heard our conversation and smiled knowingly at me.
“This is the checkout line,” one said.
Two hours later I handed a nice young woman my Visa card and she politely told me that I had spent $190 but had saved $50 — as long as I don’t forget to send in my rebate and use the $20 gift certificate I got for spending a certain amount of money.
We then hiked across the parking lot to our awkward parking space, wormed our way into exiting traffic, headed home and dove into our beds for a bit more sleep.
I’m not sure a whole lot of mom-teenage daughter bonding occurred, but she laughed at my frustration, seemed to finally accept my shopping handicap and I think actually appreciated my effort.
I’m guessing that by 8 tonight we may be snuggled up watching a movie together and dozing because that truly is something we still on occasion can enjoy together.