In My Prime

I'm trapped inside parental perfectionism and can't see a way out.

I’ve observed Lent maybe three times in my life, but dang if I don’t have plenty I need to unload this year. I could have reasonably given up twenty different things, and my life would be better for it. But, after a week of consideration, I decided to give up Amazon Prime.

I’ve already failed at Lent.

I failed on Day Three.

I’ve been addicted to Amazon Prime for longer than I care to admit. I was in on the ground floor in the early oughts, long before 70% (!!!) of American adults paid $139 for “free” delivery on everything from TikTok-trending “dupe” leggings to Bounty paper towels. Back then students were granted free accounts with a university email, and even working as an English TA, I could afford free. At that point Amazon sold almost exclusively books. I remember thinking how convenient it was when I no longer had to traipse to the university bookstore for overpriced textbooks. Amazon Prime was innovative and brilliant. What could go wrong?

Hopefully we all view Amazon with a little more skepticism these days. I know, for example, how they treat their workers, what the shipment model does to the environment, how they drive independent bookstores out of business and how they transformed both the way books are printed and what kinds of books are printed. I know all of this, and many of Amazon’s sins particularly destroy those things I care most about.

But—and I’m not using this word carelessly—I need it.

Let’s go back to Lent Day Three. Like most modern families, ours shares a complicated, color-coded digital calendar. Blue is personal, red is my work, green is my husband’s work, pink is family, orange is kids.¹ A few days out, I’m in the habit of surveying what’s ahead and, specifically, what I need to buy for those things. Teacher gifts, birthday presents, meal ingredients, school supplies, school snacks, sports equipment. There is always something. No, there’s always a list of somethings.

Here's what I realized when I started paying attention: I’ve been looking ahead 3 or 4 days on my calendar because that’s my Prime window.

Do I have to shop online? Of course not.

Could I maintain our family’s pace and position and presentation if I didn’t? Of course not.

So, Day Three. I scanned the calendar. Upcoming on Thursday: Little League baseball team photos. Upcoming on Friday: Dr. Seuss Day for my two kindergartners, on which they were expected to dress like a Dr. Seuss character.

For the baseball photos, my son had 8 of the 9 uniform components but lacked navy baseball socks. I had a choice. I could spend my entire afternoon driving to and from Dick’s Sporting Goods in the trafficky-est part of town, where they may or may not have in stock navy baseball socks that would fit a six-year-old, or I could do the little tappity-tap and guarantee arrival of the highest-rated, most precisely-sized navy baseball socks in America.

One option felt like feeling my way blindly through a maze; the other felt like being picked up and placed at the finish.

It was either eat lunch, or go to Dick’s.

I made myself a sandwich.

Then there was the issue of Dr. Seuss Day. Years ago, when our twins were maybe two years old, I borrowed “Thing 1” and “Thing 2” decals from a friend in anticipation of the Dr. Seuss Day I knew was coming. Borrowing the decals would save me a little money, I reasoned—and then I proceeded to lose them, find them, lose them again, find them again, and pack and seal them in a cardboard box when our family moved. At the new house I lost them, found them, lost them, and found them again. The point is, I have the cussing decals, so yes, my twins would be dressing as Thing 1 and Thing 2 on what was finally the designated Friday.

But to look like Thing 1 and Thing 2, they would need bright blue wigs to accompany their decals. Maybe I scanned through my brain for an easy way to make them homemade, but probably I did not. It would slow me down, and I didn’t care enough about Dr. Seuss Day to slow down. For this occasion, I had zero chance of locally sourcing not one but two blue wigs in the style of the inimitable Theodore Seuss Geisel.

Tappity-tap.

Just Day Three, and I knew: if I wanted to give up Amazon Prime, I was going to have to give up a whole lot else along with it.

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What happens, in 2023, if your kid shows up to baseball pics wearing his big sister’s black soccer socks instead of the requested navy? In 1990, when I was six, team photos were always a little motley, a little mismatched. Mine were taken after softball practice when we Georgia kids were already pink-faced, our sweaty hair falling from ponytails tucked into those cheap, oversized trucker hats. Instead of the slick (and forgettable) Instagram-worthy photos² we take today, ours had a dash of charm.

But what happens if you buck the trend of gloss and shine? I will tell you, because if you are not a mother of six-year-olds in 2023, you will not believe me.

A parent will complain about you. To the coach. Who will admonish you, likely in a passive aggressive email. Sometimes they will do this because that’s the game, that’s the expectation, and no matter how silly they feel about it, it must be done. After all, they searched for the confounded navy socks, so why shouldn’t everyone? For other parents who reprimand you out loud or silently, the Kool-Aid of participation has been drunk so often, it has started to taste good.

And what happens if you don’t dress your kid for Dr. Seuss Day?³ Nothing, technically… but my kids’ school has a photographer on staff who takes photos of each class on days just like this one, which are then posted to Schoology and shared with the entire student body and their parents. My kids are so accustomed to smiling for photos, they cannot be blamed for believing “all the world’s a stage, and all the boys and girls merely players.” The irony of dressing my children as “Thing” 1 and “Thing” 2 strikes me just now; that objectivization (if only semantic) seems about right. (Mea culpa.)

Other parents judging my unadorned children in photos for a made-up holiday celebrating a children’s author who was vaguely racist? If I had stopped to consider it, I can honestly say it wouldn’t have bothered me. I know my kids are loved and fed and bathed, so what? I even feel mildly smug about their presumed smugness.

But I didn’t stop to consider. Not having the right socks or the right costume? It just… doesn’t happen.

Yet of course, it does, for parents all over America, all the time. Parents who have neither the time nor the energy nor the Amazon Prime account for bright blue wigs their children will wear exactly once. Because of my own (ethically dubious) choices (private school, exclusively white middle-class neighborhood), those parents and their children are largely hidden from me. Mea culpa, take two.

Not shame on me, though, for tappity-tapping on the yellow button that makes all our Perfect Parent Award dreams come true. Because everything (everything!) in 2023 conspires against mothers like me: consumerism, social media influencers and their BS tableaus of perfection, in-group expectations, late-stage capitalism and the resulting environmental destruction, advertising that has brainwashed us into thinking more is better and faster is better and cheaper is better instead of thinking better is better.

I can do better. I should. But I don’t, and you know why?

Because constantly swimming upstream makes your arms tired.

And it makes your brain tired.

And it makes your friends and teachers and baseball coaches tired, because who is going to explain why you can’t just play by the many, many rules? Who is going to almost certainly race to Dick’s Sporting Goods on your behalf before the shutter clicks, thereby rescuing the six-year-olds’ team photo from the error of your child?

Unless I get off the grid and out of the game, someone is going to feel compelled to fix my “mistake.” I don’t blame her (let’s face it, it’s a her)—the pursuit of perfectionism is the air we breathe. We don’t know what happens if we quit breathing, but it sounds unpleasant.

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So maybe my three-day Lent wasn’t a total waste. I was able to forgo the new ink pens I wanted, the 6-pack of toothpaste when the kids were running low, the markers and drawing pads we’d want on our spring break trip next week.

But what my comically brief Lent experience really did was get me thinking about that question: What, if I wanted to give up Amazon Prime, would I have to give up along with it?

I have friends who have gotten out of the game entirely. Most of them homeschool. Some parents think the responsibility for a child’s education is an incredible added burden, and it overwhelms me, too. Homeschool or alternative school parents, though, are not buying blue wigs for their kids to wear around the breakfast table. For sure, I get the appeal.

Some parents enroll their kids in schools with lower financial and extracurricular expectations. This too, has its pros and cons.

I am not ungrateful for the effort that goes into making school a happy place for my children. (I pulled my kids out of their last school because it felt institutional. They had to march on the blue track that lined the hallways, and I like to leave room for just a smidge of good trouble.) My kids love going to school, and that is worth a lot of trips to Dick’s.

It does seem, though, that more and more often for parents, the middle degree of participation—the one that includes mistakes and omissions—does not exist. We sideline ourselves (and our kids), or we play by the rules.

We play by the rules of constant accessibility via phone and email, constant purchasing, constant snack preparing, constant surveillance of our children, constant activities and to-dos, constant attention, constant monitoring of everything from nutrition to technology use to our children’s interior lives.

Constant improvement.

So little freedom.

I grew up Baptist, so I’m no Lent expert. But it seems to me that, at its core, the practice is about freedom. It’s not hard for me to see how little of that I (or any of us) have at the mercy of corporations and machines in our Brave New World. If you don’t believe me, stick around.

Maybe what’s so pernicious about our bondage is how invisible it is. No brute force, just that nagging Next Thing nipping always at our heels. Just the synthetic pinks and blues of our calendars and Instagrams flashing against our lids even when our eyes close. Just the theoretical exchange of currency inside virtual shopfronts. Just the fog of overwhelm.

Just that feeling that we are paying attention to everything and to nothing.

I don’t think my failure at Lent was ultimately a matter of my willpower versus Amazon Prime. I think the failure happened long before that, in a thousand choices I made and didn’t, in a world hostile to freedom and a culture that will keep us paying for its opposite.

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I remember thinking the pandemic might provide a necessary disruption to the patterns of spending and striving. I even wrote about it in those early days of idealism. But American advertising promptly rose to the occasion, convincing parents that school spirit days were just what children needed to return a “sense of normalcy” to their lives.

I don’t know what it feels like to be anything other than a mother of four elementary schoolers in 2023, but I’d imagine some version of this applies regardless. Maybe your calendar isn’t precisely coded and shared, but if you’ve managed to escape the onslaught of do-betterness, I want to hear from you.

I am trying to buy convenience so I have time to do the things I really care about. I am trying to buy my freedom.

The problem is, convenience rises in tandem with expectations.

The problem is, the price of freedom goes ever up.

Well, when it comes to Lent, I suppose there’s always next year.

In the meantime…

Tappity-tap!

1. My calendar is called “KEEP IT TOGETHER LINDSEY.” Because it made me laugh, but also it makes me cry.

2. In my opinion, all these Instagram-worthy team photos posted by moms (I do this too) are, ironically, so identical to every other child’s team photos they are invisible. You did not just show me anything about your Charlie, who probably has a singularly delightful personality. I have seen it so many times before, I did not see it.

3. The teachers, for what it’s worth, are as tired as the parents.