Flappable
“Don’t be mad,” my eleven-year-old began.
“Mad” isn’t the right word for the reaction that followed. Resigned, perhaps. Defeated? If I’m being honest, there was even a trace of amusement. I walked into one of the most shocking scenes of my parenting career just minutes after having returned from the emergency vet with my dog and my teenager. Two hours prior to the “don’t be mad,” warning, I had received a “Don’t panic, but. . .” phone call from my oldest daughter. I was at the gynecologist for a pap smear—it had been and would remain the highlight of my day.
“Sophie and her friends left a bowl of grapes out, and Winnie ate some,” my oldest said. “I paid $95 for the ‘pet poison control hotline’ to help me, and they told me I needed to take her to the ER immediately because she could die. Like, we have to bring her right now.”
Reader, there are three things you should know:
- This warning was entirely inaccurate; the urgency of the dog’s arrival at the hospital was grossly overstated.
- I was twenty minutes away, having just removed my feet from the stirrups.
- My daughter, although a week away from her seventeenth birthday, still did not have a driver’s license.
I had to think quickly and logically. This has never been my strong suit. In my previous life—aka, two months earlier, before I had filed for divorce, becoming a full-time single parent overnight—I was not known for being unflappable in a crisis. I was anxious, tightly wound, and had undiagnosed ADHD, which is a recipe for what they call “emotional dysregulation.” This is a nice way of referring to moms who have been known to say, “Great, we just missed the fucking bus; I’m sick of not being able to find shit all the time; and Kids, you need to stop freaking out” while they themselves are freaking out. Let’s call it what it was: I was flappable.
But I didn’t have that luxury anymore, so I gave clear instructions: “Put the dog in the car and drive to the animal hospital. You know where it is. You’ve had your permit for a long time; you can do this. It’s a five-minute drive, and I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.” We were dealing with a divorce. My other dog had recently ingested my daughter’s lovey. We could not have a dead dog. Not today.
The closer I got to the hospital, the more unhinged my driving became. I peeled into the parking lot after having sped with my hazards on, windows open as I waved my hands, shrieking, “I’m having an emergency!” at irritated fellow drivers.
The dog was fine. After inducing vomiting they proclaimed her all clear and I followed my shaken teenager home, where we were greeted by three suspicious looking middle schoolers, apparently unremorseful after the unattended bowl of grapes misstep.
“Don’t be mad,” she repeated. “I’m just really tired of my Squishmallow collection, and we had a lot of fun doing this, and I’m not going to be sorry later, and I know they were a lot of money, but this was really worth it.”
Do you know what Squishmallows are? They are stuffies of varying sizes filled with a pleasingly textured squishy flush. My daughter had at least 50. They were no longer full of fluff. The girls hovered nervously as I walked down the stairs and opened the door to what used to be the guest bedroom. For the next nine months, we would refer to it as the Cloud Room.
The entire room was carpeted in a thick layer of white fluff. The limp carcasses of dozens of Squishmallows lay on the basement floor like the melted remains of the Wicked Witch. The girls, followed by both of my dogs, immediately dove into the white mess, which I would later learn surpassed glitter as the herpes of the craft world, as it would soon spread to every room in my house, including the backyard, clinging to one’s clothing and lingering nearly two years later.
When the other parents arrived to pick up their children, their horrified expressions, raised eyebrows, and furious admonishments were met by my own hapless shrug. What could I do? Tomorrow was the first day of seventh grade, and my daughter was two months into coping with a terribly disruptive, traumatic divorce. The basement was vacant after their father moved out. What did it really matter? Nobody got hurt. Nothing was permanently destroyed.
A week later, my oldest turned seventeen. The night before her birthday, despite also not having been the “puke parent,” I didn’t even flinch as I ladled vomit from her bathtub into a bowl. She cried so hard she threw up in the shower; I held her hair back, bundled her up, and called to her little sister for a ginger ale. I didn’t gag, grimace, or cringe as I mechanically wiped the tub. Hours earlier, I’d tended to my youngest after she hyperventilated into a brown lunch bag. I darted between their two crises with an eerie calm that felt inappropriate, otherworldly. I marveled over the fact that I was not losing my shit. When there is nobody there to pick up the slack, you tap into strength from the very bottom of your emotional ocean.
After the bathtub was clean and my children settled, I sighed heavily and headed downstairs to decorate for my daughter’s birthday. It’s a tradition, and I refused to let her down. I am terrible at tying knots in balloons and crepe paper is a sad, irritating mess that always overstays its welcome, so instead I numbly arranged bouquets of flowers and hung a pre-assembled rose gold curtain and banner.
The next day, I told the story to my best friend, another single mom, trying to ascertain if the “puke soup” was funny yet or if it’s still just a really depressing story. “How did I do that?” I asked her with wonder. “I mean, I just did it. I just kept going.”
“It’s grace,” she said simply, without any hint of cliché or religiosity. “We just do it. It’s the meaning of grace. You just somehow find the strength within yourself to do whatever you need to do for your kids.”
For exactly seventeen years, I had never believed I had that strength. I was too emotional, too anxious, too flappable. I’d never aspired to be the puke parent or the unflappable parent or the mom who calmly accepted the remodeled Cloud Room after encouraging an unlicensed driver to transport a grape-eating dog to the hospital. But I had become that mother. Stability had given way to chaos, but it left something else in its wake: transformation, strength, and grace.
About the Author
Stephanie Sprenger is a writer, producer, podcaster, and single mom of two teenage girls. She is the editor of Redacted : What Divorced Women Aren’t Telling You, an anonymous publication for women to share their divorce stories, and facilitates writing groups for midlife women at MidCircle. Stephanie is working on a memoir.
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