Since my kids became soccer-playing age, Saturdays are no longer days of relaxation for me. I used to sleep in–sometimes until noon. I was blessed with late-sleeping kids and so even post-kids, I could sleep until 9:30 or 10:00 some weekends. Now, I’m up between 7:00 and 7:30, then it’s shower, wrestle the kids into soccer clothes–shin guards, cleats and all, rush off to Wawa (local convenience store), get the 24 ounce coffee, bottle of water, banana (cause I never have food left by Saturday), then drive around to find the soccer field (it’s never the same one), plop into a chair, sip coffee and watch 5 year olds try to figure out which way to go. It’s pretty cute–but definitely not relaxing. After the 5 year old game, we have an hour until the 9 year old game which is much more exciting, but still not relaxing. When I get home, it’s laundry folding, ironing, grocery shopping, dinner prepping, flower planting, Halloween decoration putting up, collapsing in front of the tv.
Funny how you never see the soccer mom and the geek mom at the same time. They can’t possibly be the same person, can they? The soccer mom sits on the sideline and yells, “Go! Go! Go!” She worries her kids may be sitting out too much. She notices that she’s better-dressed than the mom to her left, but not the one to her right. She grimaces when the dad stands in front of her and blocks her view with his butt–and it’s a big one too. The geek mom, on the other hand, stares at her computer screen, shouts across the room to her colleague, “You gotta see this cool flash movie!” She worries she may be losing her tech knowledge by the minute. She thinks in acronyms–wiki, xml, html, pdf, php. She carries usb and firewire cables in her purse. She looks good compared to most geek women–and way better than the men who are really all that are around her anyway.
When she pulls into the parking lot at the afterschool care building, all of the acronyms fall away and suddenly, her thoughts are all peanut butter and jelly and Yu-Gi-Oh! She must wrap herself in these until Monday morning after the bus pulls away from the curb, its red and yellow lights signalling it’s safe to change identities. With the drone of National Public Radio for the 15 minute drive to work, she slowly metamorphizes into geek mom once again. She arms herself with her smartphone, which begins to beep for the first meeting of the day, and her iPod, which she uses to drown out the smartphone.
Sigh. And that’s just two of her identities.
