The blind date. The man and the woman are set up by a mutual third party who thinks they will ‘hit it off’ and should ‘totally meet’ and could have ‘great potential’.
You never hear of a mediocre blind date. The blind dates that build legends either become epic relationships or epic failures.
I should have seen it coming I think. My dad kept mentioning this ‘really great’ mom who was also a teacher and we had ‘so much in common’ and she was ‘so nice’ and our girls were a similar age. It was practically a match made in heaven.
A blind-mom-date-match-made-in-heaven.
We scheduled a time to get together via facebook message which has to be the least intrusive way to talk to someone. Then one of our girls got sick and we had to postpone.
To be honest, I was relieved. I was in the ‘now what?’ funk after having quit my job and we were living with my parents and I didn’t really feel like trying to explain my brand of crazy to someone new. I was content-ish at home.
We rescheduled and then I forgot. That’s another thing about the facebook message – easy to ignore, easy to forget.
But she was diligent. Seeing this as a favor for my dad whom she greatly respected, she wasn’t about to let this date fall through the cracks.
When I didn’t show up at the scheduled time on the scheduled day, she gave me the grace of mama time. You know, the number of kids a mom has times the inverse scale of their ages divided by the square root of how much time everyone slept last night and you just expect her to be late. And kind of welcome it because it gives you a few more minutes to put on a clean shirt, microwave your coffee again, and make sure there’s toilet paper in the bathroom.
Not having my number since we hadn’t actually met yet, she called my dad, who then called me just before she had a chance to call me.
Shoot, now I had to admit I had forgotten. That I was merely laying around my house and simply couldn’t be bothered to put something on a calendar.
So I got myself and my baby girl ready to go and headed over to her house mostly to get it over with. I mean, her opinion of me had to be set. Late, inconsiderate, needs her daddy to get a friend. And since it was my first real play date, I didn’t know about snacks or sippy cups or any of those things.
Real quality friendship material right there.
But we totally hit it off. She is one of the genuinely kindest people I know. And she has helped me freeze peaches after an emergency appendectomy and been a great model for talking to and teaching my own kiddos stuff.
So this blind date was not an epic failure. It was an epic opportunity for me to try something new.
And I even enjoyed it.
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