Choking on Toast

I was a stay-at-home-mom, a privilege I appreciate now more than I did then. I had my children roughly four-to-five years apart, so for over a decade straight I consistently had a baby at home. I often described those years as “relentless.” There was just never enough time to get it all done.

My husband worked (also relentlessly) to keep us all clothed and fed, leaving me to do almost all of the parenting by myself, with three kids in three different stages of development- one infant, one preschooler, and one elementary-aged child (and so on), through the years.

I also volunteered at my kid’s schools every week, for every child, until they were in middle school.

I also ran several small-business side hustles, and taught fitness classes.

And somewhere in all that, there were pets too: a variety of dogs, the typical assortment of rodents- guinea pigs, hamsters, a hedgehog- some unfortunate goldfish and a pair of finches named, randomly, Kevin and Erlene (whose story ended tragically when their cage was caught in a draft because someone left the back door open and they succumbed to the common cold).

And while I do remember joyful moments, and my husband and I have plenty of anecdotes and special memories of the days when our kids were young, the overall emotion that colored my feelings about those years was: stress. I was stressed-out about everything, all the time: school schedules, work schedules, teacher conferences, homework, weird rashes, sports practice, doctors’ appointments, playdates, illnesses, bad dreams, neighborhood interactions, emotional development, tooth decay… you name it. Add in the random part-time jobs I always worked in addition to the aforementioned side-hustles I was running, and I barely had time to sleep.

But I was a helluva multitasker.

I never let a spare moment go to waste. I drove too quickly to get from one place to the next to save a few precious seconds, answered emails at red lights and waiting rooms, made to-do lists while on the toilet, checked homework while sitting on the sidelines at practice, threw in a load of laundry while cooking dinner and did paperwork while at the pickup line at school. And for roughly ten years of weekday mornings, I stood at the kitchen counter cramming in a piece of hastily buttered toast while feeding a little one, helping another one find his shoe, and urging the oldest to hurry up in the bathroom, all the while shrieking out time stamps every few minutes like a deranged rooster:

“7:20!”

“7:23!”

“7:28! We have to walk out this door in two more minutes so stop goofing around and get your coat on ka-CAW ka-CAW!”

And right at the critical moment between making it out the door on time and being late, I would choke on my toast. I never chewed it properly, you see; merely rammed it in half-eaten and chased it with a slug of cold coffee while crowing out the latest time. And without fail, the hunk of dry bread would slide perfectly down my windpipe, causing me to choke and cough and wheeze; all while still trying to get the kids out the door, all while gasping for breath with tears running down my increasingly red face, all while still trying to finish my toast. It happened like clockwork nearly every single morning for years. It became so commonplace that my kids wouldn’t even be concerned. They would just patiently wait while I finished my desperate struggle for oxygen and resumed barking orders at them.

 I often joked that that’s how I was going to die- choking on a piece of toast. I never seemed to learn my lesson.

Even after my kids were grown and gone, those “hurry habits” remained. I  could not simply sit in a waiting room and read a magazine, or stand patiently in line at a grocery store, or quietly work on one project at a time. I always had to be doing multiple things at once, wringing every bit of productivity out of every minute. Heaven forbid I just sat calmly and thought my thoughts or-egads! daydreamed and let my mind drift. I couldn’t not push, drive, strive and front-load each available moment with some important task or other.

I couldn’t stop cramming down another bite of toast, even when I couldn’t breathe. 

Last year, I started a new job as a manager. I was out on the road and was waiting for an important phone call from one of my assistant managers…but I had to use the restroom. I knew she’d be calling me any second and I really had to get some information to her, but I also really had to pee. I pulled the car into a nearby grocery store, made my way to the restrooms and scuttled quickly into a stall before I had an accident, hoping and praying that my young assistant would not choose that moment to call back.

I’d just finished- but not yet zipped up- when the phone rang. Sigh.

Go ahead and answer it, my Hurry Voice urged me. She’ll never know you’re using the bathroom!

Or… (my calmer, more rational Manager Voice countered), you could just finish up here and call her back from the car in two minutes?

Nah!! Insisted Hurry Voice. Why waste time when you can consolidate your tasks? You’re kicking butt and taking names! Time is money, baby!

Hurry Voice won and I conducted the business call while sitting on the toilet.

At the end of the call, as we were signing off, I stood up.

See? Hurry Voice said in a smug tone. You saved two whole minutes and no one was any the wiser-

That’s when the toilet auto-flushed.

The sound of hundreds of gallons of water whooshing into an industrial commode filled the stall, echoed off the tiled walls of the restroom, and blotted out the noise of a nearby military jet doing overhead maneuvers.

My young, fresh-faced, idealized assistant manager and I sat on the phone together- her at the office, me standing with my pants around my knees- waiting for the roar of The Flush Heard Round the World to subside. When it finally did, I spoke. I said the only thing I could: the truth.

“So, um, yeah, I was on the toilet. I had to go and I thought I could get away with it.”

We both laughed awkwardly and hung up.

Well, that was embarrassing, I thought as I pulled my pants up. But at least no one else heard it.

“That was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,” said a disembodied voice from the stall next to me.

Sigh.

My kids are now adults, and they tease me (yes, relentlessly) about those years. They don’t joke about how I read to them every single night from the time they were babies until the time they were too old (and too cool) to read with me any longer. They don’t share fond memories of me sitting up with them all night when they were sick or holding their hands when they were scared- all of which I did. They probably do remember those times, but their most impressionable childhood memories consist of me screaming like a banshee to-get-in-the-car-make-sure-you-finish-your-homework-change-your- underwear-and-no-you-may-not-bring-Duke-the-Hamster-to-school-take-him-out-of-your- backpack-this-instant, almost always while red-faced and wheezing because I was choking on a piece of toast that I didn’t take the time to chew.

Nowadays my kids assure me they had great childhoods and felt loved and cherished. Nevertheless, there are things I would do differently given another chance. That’s not unusual, I know. Many parents tell me they feel the same way. And the truth is, I was doing the very best I could at the time. I almost never phoned it in.

But that, ironically, is my main regret.

I often wonder what I missed in those in-between moments, had there been any. What wonderful, silly, magical things would have occurred if I had allowed there to be a few moments of empty space in our days and lives.

And as I washed my hands alongside the lady from the next stall (who was smiling at me sympathetically), a new thought occurred to me: my kids may be grown, but I’m still finding new ways to choke on toast. All in the name of saving time.

See my professional writing at Jai-Writes.com