At the Playground

I'm not prime Mommy material. I adore my children, and always liked taking them to the playground when they were small...for about the first ten minutes. Then I began to feel antsy and irritable: you can't read or really talk to anyone, because you're constantly scanning to make sure that Little Gumdrop hasn't stolen some other child's sand toy, or been eaten by a dog or carried off by a pedophile, isn't pooping in the sandbox, hasn't decided to jump, head-first from the top of the jungle gym... From about fifteen minutes on at the playground I had this interior dialogue with myself:

"God, isn't she ready to go yet?"
"Calm down, she's only been playing for ten minutes."
"But look! She's found the only piece of glass in the park, and is about to stick it in her eye!"
"No, it's okay, we took it away from her."
"Yeah well--" (turn to answer comment from far better adjusted mother who treasures every Hallmark-enriched nanosecond with her cherub, whose name is probably Madison. Am saved from further conversation by having to go over and remove Gumdrop's neck from Madison's clenched hands, while her mother murmurs blandly, "Now, Maddy, what did we decide about hostility, sweetie?" The inner voice picks up again)
"God, you think she's ready now?"
"Not likely. She's met someone new to play with."
"What, the one who's hitting her with his shoe?"...

And so on.

So now that my children are basically beyond the playground age, what happens? We get a dog. And every weekday I take Emily for what the family refers to as "an epic drag," as opposed to a squeeze. A Squeeze is a walk intended to render all available fluids and so forth from the body of the dog. An epic drag is at least an hour, plus walking transit time to and from the park, and is intended to exhaust the dog into compliance for the rest of the day. It mostly works. And weirdly enough, I find myself having the same inner conversation with myself. And the dynamics are startlingly similar: the owners or walkers who think all their dogs are gentle as pie despite evidence to the contrary; the overprotective hovering ones; the toys that get run off with; the messes to clean up; and the half-focused conversations with other "parents" at the park. I've made some friends there--Tom, the dog walker from New York (we can dish about how weird San Francisco can be); Kathleen, who lives down the block from us, and worked for the Parks Department for 25 years or so; and Kathy, whose beautiful pitt bull puppy, Jasmine, is one of Emily's favorite pals. We swap dog-parenting tips and discuss the best parks for our various pets (because my favorite park is going to close for the winter when the rains really kick in). It's an interesting social scene. And I'm getting better about not taking out my watch every five minutes to see how much longer we need to stay.

And I have to say that Emily is far more compliant than either of my children about Going Home Time.