Buckin’ bronco Tie o’ the Day and I managed to dodge the army of quarantined zombie bow ties, to slip undetected into the ladies’ reading room. I knew the hooligans would find me eventually. They always do. Every parent with a house full of children or bow ties knows this feeling: “I just need five minutes to myself. Please—just five uninterrupted minutes. I will sell my soul to the first power which will grant me five quiet minutes.”
But we parents also know we never get the whole five minutes. No, we get about thirty seconds before the first knock at the bathroom door, which is followed by childish attempts to turn the doorknob long after it’s clear the door is locked. We begin to grumble in our heads. We grumble quietly out loud. We wonder who had all these kids. We wonder why they can’t survive for such a short amount of time without us. We wonder a lot of stuff. Briefly, we wonder.
And then we get the teeny fingers under the door—clawing in our direction. That’s the nail in the coffin of our solitude. Our defeat is inevitable. We know there’s no going back now. We must surrender our sanity to the herd. We put down our unread books; we gird up our frazzled loins; and we head back into the loud chaos of those small beasts who love us as much as we love them.