Parenting Failures Again, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and The Missing Packed Lunch
On a random Tuesday in April, I had a Ruth Bader Ginsburg¹ moment. Nothing to do with me serving as a Supreme Court Justice, campaigning for gender equality or being a civil rights pioneer. It was just a phone call. There was a voicemail.
“Mrs Sloan,” said the lady from the office, “Lydia appears to be without a packed lunch”. It was 12pm, quite close to lunchtime, could I give permission for her to have a school dinner instead? “I’ll ring your husband,” was her parting line as she abruptly ended the call. I detected a tut. Not only was Lydia without sustenance but her mother had also failed to answer her mobile.
I had an immediate surge of guilt. As I stood in a changing room, fresh from some self-care, dripping on the floor, quite a few miles from the house, in came a What’sApp update from Lydia’s other parent. He was relaxing at home beside the fridge where the forgotten lunchbox was currently residing. He hadn’t seemed to notice the huge, massive, ginormous, unmissable, blue Tupperware container each time he’d added milk to his coffee. The message was functional, unemotional, key facts only. The issue was summarised and satisfactorily concluded. “All sorted and nothing for you to do,” he said. It was an “I’ve got it” moment.
But, still there was the guilt. I continued to drip as I stared forlornly at my phone, feeling my child’s pain. How exactly had he sorted this desperate situation? “I can’t get there by lunchtime,” he’d typed. “Neither can I,” I thought, but I reckon I’d at least have tried. I’d have activated my supermum mode, found a substitute healthy lunch at speed, dashed across the country, arriving at the classroom, breathless but satisfied that I had saved my daughter from the distress of the canteen. I scrambled for alternatives. She has a debit card and a good sense of direction. She prepares that lunch every evening herself using sharp knives. Could they not just send her round the corner to buy a Tesco meal deal?
But he’d authorised the school dinner. I knew there would be repercussions. She’d be embarrassed, horrified at what she might be forced to ingest. At 3pm, as soon as she could switch on her phone again, there was an update, “I forgot my lunch today and was given dinners. The only thing I ate was half a carrot the WHOLE SCHOOL DAY”². Later, we’d hear in detail about the mouldy potato and the pink chicken.
“This child has two parents,” Bader Ginsburg told her son’s school when they called, yet again, disturbing her at work. “Please alternate calls. It’s his father’s turn”.
I know how Ruth felt. I could be in meetings, parallel parking, giving birth, climbing Everest. It would always start with, “Mrs Sloan, it’s nothing serious…”. But, nothing serious always meant abandoning whatever else I was doing. “Mrs Sloan, Ella has been sick in the corridor, “Mrs Sloan, it’s the school nurse, Lucy has been hit by a hockey ball”, “Mrs Sloan, Lydia is looking a bit flushed and she says her tummy’s sore”, “Mrs Sloan, no-one has collected Alice today”. When I worked with a team of women, one or other of us was usually either arriving in from or heading out to a parenting ‘emergency’.
Year on year, when it came to filling out those endless forms and providing a primary contact for both their educational and social lives, I always, always put my number first and for all four of them. I didn’t even think to divide them in two - you take half, I’ll take half. Most mothers do this. Our pen hovers, we consider it momentarily but then we wise up and think no, definitely not, it must be us. It’s our maternal duty plus we much prefer to be totally in control. No-one else would do it our way. We imagine terrible things could happen without our input.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a busy woman. Maybe her husband was a busy man. But both were equally responsible for their son. She, however, was willing to relinquish her control. Even though she might have made better ones, she was fully prepared to let Mr Ginsburg make decisions on alternate occasions. She had a specific philosophy around balancing her children with her career based on strictly allocating core hours to each. She described how she parented, then worked, then parented, then worked during the course of a day. Her preference was to keep her two roles separate. She said she deserved to be able to work in peace. She set boundaries around being interrupted by refusing to be the default parent.
She also refused to give into the guilt that strips the confidence of so many women and makes them believe they never get it right. “You can’t have it all, all at once,“ she famously said about trying to be the best mother and the best lawyer simultaneously. Each day demands its own priorities. Each day requires sacrifices. We can’t see it clearly until we look back. “Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough,” she added.
It was just one forgotten school lunch, but it taught me a valuable lesson. Sometimes, I am just not needed. Sometimes practical, tougher decisions have to be made. Sometimes, I have to let go. When September rolls round, I have choices. I don’t have to be the first contact³. I don’t even have to fill in the forms.
There was one silver lining though. “They gave me the dinner free,” Lydia announced, “it was a spare one, left over because someone else was off with Covid”. “How thoughtful and so unlike them,” I thought. A couple of weeks later, I was sitting on a hop-on, hop-off bus in Barcelona. I was pondering how Gaudí found the time. I presumed he had no children. I got a text message. My husband didn’t. “You have an overdue payment of £2.60 due for dinners. Pay online or call the office”. It was the Easter holidays. I paid up. £2.60 for half a carrot.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ruth-Bader-Ginsburg (external link)
[2] There were indeed CAPITALS.
[3] I am aware that not everyone has the choice to not be default parent and I appreciate how hard it is to be a single parent.
