Dad misses all the fun of orientation

Lori Clinch Are We There Yet?

Lori Clinch
Are We There Yet?

As a loving mother, I have had many occasions to attend childbearing seminars and learning sessions.

It all started with Lamaze and prenatal classes, and then I enjoyed “How to Bathe Your Baby.” It was a lovely presentation that was conducted by a 22-year-old nursing student who made it quite obvious she had never held a child.

I have also been fortunate enough to attend sessions on teething, toilet training and kindergarten roundup. I have learned two very distinct things at these seminars. First, they always make it sound much easier than it is, and secondly, these seminars and parent meetings are not as exciting as one might think.

My husband is not a parent-seminar-attending kind of guy. He yawned through “Your Infant and You,” fell asleep during the lecture on colic, and flat-out refused to go with me to the Pre-Pubescent Knowledge Night because he felt it lacked luster.

Even though I’ve gone stag to countless parental training sessions during my parental career, I was not happy about attending my son’s New Student Enrollment Day at the university all by myself. Although I pleaded with him to join me, my husband of many years told me that he would have been happy to accompany me except that, and I quote, “Someone has to bring home the bacon.”

So I loaded up my 18-year-old son and headed off to the university.

You should know that I am not a needy person. I don’t have to have people all about me to be happy. I’m comfortable in my own skin and can manage to get through an entire day answering my own questions.

Yet, I loathe the idea of walking into a large auditorium with thousands of people in attendance as a party of one.

Although I did enter the building with my eldest son, he was instantly swept away to enjoy a fun-filled day. Meanwhile, I attended seminars, I listened to lectures and I watched skits, and I quickly understood the moral of the story: “Your child is grown, now let him go. But make sure he does his homework and, oh look, here’s his tuition bill.”

I walked from session to session alone. While other parents sat and held hands, and women chatted with their close friends, I walked around with an “L” on my forehead and a large imaginary sign hanging around my neck that said, “Has no one.”

To add insult to injury, I knocked over chairs, tripped down the stairs, and was forced to succumb to a loud sneeze during the lecture on “Keep the Stories of Your Glory Days to Yourself.”

If my car hadn’t been parked a bajillion miles away, I would have eaten lunch elsewhere and avoided walking into the cafeteria alone. But since we were asked to leave the family sedan in a parking lot located in another time zone, I had no choice but to eat in the campus cafeteria.

As I walked into the large and crowded room, the lights did not go black, a bright beam of light did not fall out of the sky and follow me to my seat, and the crowd did not turn, stare and whisper, “Who’s that woman who has to eat alone?”

But it certainly felt like it.

You should know that it’s not easy to act as if you’re enjoying lunch when you’re all by yourself. I pretended to be engrossed in my veggie wrap. Then I tried to busy myself with my purse. I took time to clean my cuticles and counted my fillings with my tongue. I was doing my darndest to make it appear as though sitting in the middle of 700 tables all by myself did not bother me one iota.

The folks next to me were engrossed in a serious conversation. A group behind me erupted into laughter, and I was tempted to walk over to a table in front of me and say, “Hello, everyone! I don’t know if you know this or not, but I have people too. I really do. In fact, back in my hometown, I have friends, and doggone it, they like me!”

As I walked out of the last seminar of the day, I saw my eldest son, Vernon, approaching me with a smile. He had a bag full of goodies, was sporting a No. 1 foam finger, a tan, and I swear he looked as if he had just disembarked from a cruise ship.

“This was the best day ever,” he said as he slapped me on the back. “Next time you should bring Dad.”

Lori Clinch is the mother of four sons and the author of the book “Are We There Yet?” You can reach her at www.loriclinch.com.