Tonight marked my triumphant return to the gym. There were no trumpets or fanfare, but I was pretty damn proud of myself for finally making time for a wee bit of exercise. Had I started months ago, I'm sure it would have been easy--what with my rigorous pregnancy workouts and having dropped off my big belly, exercise should have been a breeze. But since I've been making an art of couch jockeying after darling C. goes to bed (I'm starting to know entire evening line-ups for TV stations--YIKES!), I thought it was about time.
In order to go to the gym, I had to ask Nate to pick up Clementine from daycare. No problem, right? He's awesome, more than willing to do it and it's not really that out-of-the-way for him. I am, after all, the woman who prattles on and on about our egalitarian marriage/child-rearing game plan, so why would I make a big deal out of it? For one, I hate asking for help, even from Nate. I sometimes get caught up in this superhero version of motherhood and can't quite deviate. I remember these Charlie perfume commercials when I was little with the song in the background: "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and never once let you forget you're a man...." It's totally warped, yes, but these days I'm taking validation where I can find it, and for now it's that I hold down a job, drop my kid off and pick her up from daycare, cook every now and then and sometimes even manage to look groomed when I leave the house. SOMETIMES. The other reason I hate to ask Nate is that he works later than I do, which means Clementine is at daycare longer than she needs to be. I still have many, many conflicted feelings about daycare, and one of the ways I mediate them is by making sure I'm doing all I can to keep Clemetine's time there to an absolute minimum. This is also why I won't take her to the gym daycare, although it's free. It seems unusually selfish and cruel to pick her up from one daycare to drop her at another.
Hang-ups aside, Nate has picked Clementine up from daycare before with no hiccups. I don't know if it's a Monday thing, if I was off my game or what, but as I was driving home, I became totally convinced that he forgot to pick her up. Of course there is no reason to have thought that--except maybe that Nate has this forgetful professor thing going on sometimes. He is a brilliant engineer but can't remember a birthday to save his life; he builds cars that go and bikes that work, can wire anything and picks up musical instruments as if it's as easy as reading, but he often can't tell a story because he forgets names and details. These are things I love about him, don't get me wrong. But they are also the things that made me convinced that since we had a hectic morning getting out the door and hadn't talked all day that he may have forgotten to pick her up. Not that I thought he was neglecting her--he's a more devoted father than I can say--just that he may have totally forgotten I asked, especially after a terrible Monday of getting back into the deep, deep rut that is his life at work. (An aside here to my friend Karen who is no doubt laughing and talking about how I can never remember where I am supposed to be on a given day: it's a different kind of forgetfulness. I may forget I'm supposed to have dinner with someone next Friday; Nate may forget who that person is entirely or where the restaurant he's been to a thousand times before is. Different. And you know you think it's entirely within the realm of possibility that he might forget to pick her up, too.)
So anyway, the real exercise I had this evening was not calling Nate while I was driving home from the gym to check up on him (and see if he had the girl). I don't want to imply that it's exercise to trust him because I have never known anyone more worthy of my trust and esteem. I guess I'm just saying that motherhood has turned me into kind a control freak, sweating the details, unable to delegate gracefully, thinking for a whole 20 minutes that forgetting your kid is anything close to forgetting the name of some asshole you met at a party and hope never to speak to again. Of course Nate wouldn't forget to pick up Clementine. Exhale, Amanda. Geez.
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