Madhouse Mornings Belong to Mom

It’s a morning routine that is exhausting just to think about.

Up before dawn, make six meals (three breakfasts, three lunches, not counting the bowl of Cheerios I wolf down), shower, dress and begin the rounds with three sleepy kids: Get them up, washed, dressed, fed. Collect shoes and backpacks, homework and lunch boxes. And somewhere in there, deal with the inevitable crisis du jour--a loose tooth or a runaway dog; milk spilled on homework or a missing button on a favorite shirt.

By the time we pile in the car for the five-mile, rush-hour run to school, we are already late . . . and my girls are in the back seat complaining that they’re tired of trying to explain to their teachers why they’re late for school today, again.

“Well,” I offer feebly, “you might tell them that at least you had a good breakfast.”

They groan and slam the doors as they get out of the car. But I drive away from school with a strange sense of satisfaction.

They may be tardy, wearing mismatched socks and with uncombed hair. But, my, they had good breakfasts this morning. And they’re carrying lunches Mommy made.

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Each September when school rolls around, I promise it will be different this year.

We’ll get to bed on time each night, wake in the morning early and refreshed, move leisurely through our morning routine and leave home with plenty of time to make the morning playground social hour.

But the reality is it doesn’t matter what time we get up, or how much preparing we do the night before. It doesn’t matter how fast I drive or what shortcuts I take on the way to school. We will still arrive after the bell rings.

I’ve tried all those things the magazines recommend: Lay out your clothes the night before. Pack backpacks and put them by the door. And I have finally accepted that whatever time we have in the morning, our routine will expand to fill it, then exceed it.

So we adapt, finding shortcuts to cover the steps we omit. There’s a bottle of lotion in the car for faces that didn’t get washed. Ditto gum for unbrushed teeth. I can fill out a permission slip while driving and fix a ponytail while waiting for a stoplight to change.

But what I can’t do to hurry my family along is the one thing my friends recommend: Dump some of that morning routine on the extra set of hands I’m lucky enough to have.

As a single mom, I rely on a baby sitter who lives with us, a charming young woman who picks the girls up from school, ferries them to soccer practice and makes after-school snacks.

So why not have her rise early enough each morning to free me from the kitchen chores? Let her pack their lunches and make their breakfasts.

And while I know that makes perfectly logical sense--and might even buy me an extra few minutes in bed--I’ve discovered in that morning routine an essential part of mothering that I can’t let go.

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I’ve worked full time all my children’s lives. And I’ve wrestled with guilt over all that I miss, all I cannot do because I’m not around.

I’m not there when they get home from school, to sit down and help with homework or serve them milk and cookies. I’m not there when they talk about the details of their day--who they played with at recess, what the Spanish test was like.

But I do know each day that they all sat down together for pancakes and waffles and hot cocoa in the morning. And they went off to school carrying a nutritious lunch. This I do, if I do nothing else right as their mother.

My lunches are not much to write home about. A sandwich, an apple, a juice box, some Oreos--standard fare. I don’t tuck in little notes with smiley faces or give them fancy meals like brie on sun-dried tomato bread.

But these lunches are the way I connect with them, in the morning when I prepare them and in the afternoon when they open them. It’s a sort of memento of my love that keeps me near them all day and feeds my soul as well as their bodies.

I remember years ago, as a new mother, facing the pity of stay-at-home moms when I talked about my search for a sitter as I prepared to return to work. “It must be hard,” they’d say, “to find someone else to raise your children.”

To raise my children? Then what would I be doing over the next 18 years?

As a working mom, there is so much I’ve had to relinquish to the sitters who’ve tended my kids through the years. And so I hold fast to the things I can do--those details of mothering that may mean nothing to the world, or even to my kids, but define my role as the person who loves them the most, and knows them the best.

Who else but Mommy knows that Brittany wants the crust cut off her bread and will only eat her turkey sandwich plain; that Dani is the only one who likes jelly with her peanut butter and the bread lightly toasted; that Alyssa’s apples should be peeled and cut in wedges and she’d rather have yogurt than cookies for dessert.

Who else knows and would indulge them this way?

I may miss out on much of their daily lives, but I won’t miss a chance to show them how I care. And rising early each morning--even getting to school late--seems a small price to pay to prove that to them, and to myself.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.