The last couple of months I have attempted to organize things.

In general, this is not a good idea—a truth I had, in my amazingly deluded self-confidence, completely forgotten.  

I have been dumbstruck throughout my life when friends and relatives, helping out at my home, manage to find a place for everything and everything in its place.  

My daughter does the dishes in my weirdly laid-out sink with its misshapen drying rack, and my kitchen counter transforms from a trash receptacle into a high-end designer restaurant, lacking only fancy drinks served in Mason jars.  

A friend comes to watch our six- and three-year-old boys, while my husband and I are off giving birth to our girl. When we get home, our children’s bookshelf has been alphabetized and arranged by Flesch-Kincaid reading level.    

People seem to instinctively recognize I just don’t have that organizing gene; they stop me to give me directions. On the street I live on. 

Before undertaking any plans, I should have remembered those trips I tried to arrange. The mom-and-son trip to D.C.,  when, good tourists and citizens that we were, we visited the U.S. Congress. My oldest son was quite into guns and therefore particularly unfond of a decades-long advocate for gun control, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.   

Happenstance arranged that on our visiting day, the only action in Congress was Sen. Feinstein giving a speech to a chamber bleakly empty but for roaming security and bored journalists. To make up for that disappointment, I tried to show him the infamous “Exorcist” stairs in Georgetown, but I couldn’t find them and it was raining very hard. 

On a different mom-and-son trip, I lodged my other son and myself in what had sounded online like a pretty nice and affordable hostel, with free resident BBQ evenings. We got a bit lost on the T trying to find it, but eventually discovered our hostel in a rancid and questionable part of town. The closest thing to a free BBQ was the decidedly unfree Hooters restaurant the hostel was on the second floor of. We did not partake of its offerings. I did, however, take him to a highly recommended and popular restaurant that I hadn’t understood only served seafood. He doesn’t eat seafood. 

I did not think of any of this when, my usual local “ladies who lunch” organizer being unavailable to make the plans, I stepped into the breach—we hungry few, we band of eaters—with some restaurant suggestions. My selection landed us on a chilly blustery day on a sidewalk in front of a very closed restaurant. An open bistro across the street had no free tables.  We ended up in a bar, probably the only people eating. The food was great and the waitress was a riot. We had a lovely time. 

While our local trivia hangout was on hiatus, I was excited to be invited to a limited-seating trivia night. We needed six people to make up a team and fill a table, so we asked two couples we had played with before. But I forgot to confirm early with the host. When I messaged him the morning of the event, I found he had filled the room up with other, cooler, younger people. So at the last minute I had to cancel dates with people I wanted to get to know better but who now know me for the flibbertigibbet I am. Had hoped to keep that from the people I’m meeting here a bit longer. 

The children, I am happy to say, did not inherit or pick up my incompetence. As my oldest child has comforted me, “Mom, it’s OK; sometimes you learn even more from a bad example.”