05/15/99 - Temecula, CA

The problem is, I'm a mother. As with any job one spends decades at, certain skills are acquired for good and ill. For instance, my friend is a cop trained in security measures. She has no fun at a grocery store because she always notices someone stealing. The rest of us move on oblivious, but with her trained eye, she returns home cynical about the world.

The same with mothers. Just through experience, and without any extra effort on my part, I can smell a lie a mile away. Behavioral scientists could outline, I'm sure, the subtleties mothers pick up by habit -- loss of eye contact, the crook of a mouth. Whatever it is, mothers have radars on lies. So, to sit in a parent meeting with a school district official explaining the principal we had known and loved moved on with his career, when we all knew he had been summarily dumped, was difficult to swallow. Strains of, "How many times can a man turn his head, pretending he just doesn't see," ran through my mind. I felt acutely embarrassed for this man, sitting there among mothers, spinning his thread to the emperor's new clothes.

Same with accountability. For good or ill, I have become accustomed to accountability in a world where I wield a lot of influence. Cries of, "He hit me," are followed back to the accountable taunting which really began the ruckus. Words of excuse and rationalization are rarely tolerated, at least not without pointed comment so everyone is aware the wool over my eyes has slits. Procrastination or downright neglect are met with consequences which bring results. So, it was again painful for me to hear the furniture salesman explain someone had made a mistake resulting in the wrong piece being delivered to my house when I held in my hand the order form with his writing and the wrong stock numbers and knew that "someone" was him.

Same with judgment, a task mothers undertake on a daily basis, but is abhorred in the outside world. When one spends their time checking each foundation of character in themselves, because their is nothing like having your flaws smack you in the face in the form of your child's misbehavior; and in their children; it is difficult to call wrong right and bad good, when one then leaves the doorstep.

Just like my friend who wishes for the naivety to shop in peace, I sometimes wish to take off the superman glasses giving me x-ray vision through the assemblings and dissemblings of the business world, to return to the innocence of face value.

But then, I'm a mother -- thank heavens Bill Clinton's passed on.