Nine o’clock on a dark country road. Out in Keystone Heights. On the way to a CVS or Walgreens. Whatever we could find at that hour. Desperate. Forlorn. Feeling like the worst parents ever.
EVER!
“How could this happen?” my wife asked. “What kind of parents are we?”
“It’s not our fault,” I comforted her. “It just turns out we’re not as smart as we thought.”
We were on a retreat with Memorial Presbyterian Church. Out on a lake, amidst the wilderness and great expanse of mosquitoes and spiders and other critters who bite you in inconvenient places.
We were unpacking when I heard my wife gasp. I felt the oxygen sucked out of the room.
“I can’t believe this,” she told my daughter. “You don’t have any underwear!”
A bear could have burst into the room carrying a flamethrower and it wouldn’t have had the same horrific drama, or intensity, or power.
Parent fail.
To make it worse, she also didn’t have any socks. And turns out, I didn’t have any socks, either.
We had everything else. We had dishwashing detergent — in case we had to do dishes — and flashlights and rain gear and gardening gloves for a work project. Stuffed animals and I think even an encyclopedia set.
But essential articles of clothing? NOOOO!!!!
My daughter shrugged. “Oh well,” she said. “Can I go play now?”
I pictured myself stitching together paper towels with dental floss to make primitive underwear and socks. “There go the Thompsons in their homemade undergarments,” people would say about us. “Someone should really help that family.”
We trooped out into the night in search of clothing. We passed raccoons on the lonely dirt road. They seemed to be laughing at us. “Dummies don’t know how to pack!”
I walked up and down the drug store aisles. My wife wasn’t too ashamed to ask, “Do you have an underwear aisle?” I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Do you know how ridiculous that sounds at 9 p.m. in the middle of nowhere? That’s the kind of story that gets told over and over. “Honey, do you know what these silly people came looking for tonight?”
We will never be forgotten. And we didn’t even succeed. “Think she’ll fit in these adult size 15s?” the cashier asked. It looked like a tent that would house a tribe of nomads.
The “sock department” was no better.
Embarrassed, we drove back with heads slung low.
Parent fail No. 2.
But kids rare resilient, aren’t they? They don’t mind. They’ll wear bathing suit bottoms and never give it another thought. Not like parents, who take it on the chin and expect Child Services to show up any minute to haul us away.
Maybe we can learn a thing or two from them. About going with the flow. About not letting it get you down or defining you. About shrugging it off and saying “Oh Well. Can I go play now?”
After all, that’s why we brought all those paper towels and the dental floss.