Mr- Mama is supposed to watch the Bear on Tuesday afternoons. It was HER idea to take a regular day, back when I was headed back to work. I believe she decided this simply because the Bear was going to the J-Mama's house on Wednesday afternoons and she didn't want to get lapped in the Grandmother 500.
Y'all know I've always had dinner with my mom on Wednesday nights - which is the night for Mr. J's sailing league. He leaves well before I could get home from work, so Mr. J drops the Bear off with his grandma around 4 or 4:30 so that he can get to the river, and they hang out for 90 minutes or so until I arrive from work. We had a few kinks to work out of this system when we started it back in February, but since that time it's gone very smoothly. J-Mama - who works well over 40 hours a week as a rule anyway - doesn't schedule meetings or classes or anything else after 4 pm on Wednesdays so nothing interferes with her time with the Bear.
Mr-Mama is supposed to take the Bear by 2 pm on Tuesdays. Again, this was HER choice. Mr-Mama answers to absolutely no one but herself when it comes to her schedule. She has no boss and no obligations. Yet in the past six months, I can't even count the times she has dropped the ball on poor Mr. J. She's made doctor's appointments for 3:30 pm on a Tuesday. She's been out of town for the weekend and decided to stay through the middle of the week. Today, she's playing golf. Mr. J has a dentist appointment scheduled at 2 pm - a drilling, not a cleaning. She thinks he ought to just take the Bear with him to the dentist and she'll come over there to pick him up whenever she gets done at the country club. Seriously? Seriously.
Ugh, this woman. At any age, a child should be able to count on his parent to do what he or she has promised to do. That should be a given. While Mr-Mama is probably a lost cause - after 55 years of unfettered self-indulgence - I hope that she is driving Mr. J sufficiently nuts that he will squelch his own flaky tendencies and become more reliable himself. Character is not a constant: it can be changed. As the J-Mama told me many many times while she was engaged in the laborious process of raising me by hand, "It may be how you are, but it's not OK to be that way."
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