“Kids, get in the car,” I said. But somewhere between the front door of the house, and the actual car, the portal of lost time happened. It was 9:28 am when I told the kids to get in the car. I buckled my son into his car seat, made sure both of my older kids were good to go.
I looked at the clock in my car. 9:43 am.
This couldn’t be right? How did I lose 15 minutes? Surely it didn’t take my little pack of minions 15 minutes to get in the damn car. Seriously, who takes 15 minutes to get into the car? I must have read the clock wrong. It now says 10:15 am and we still haven’t moved. What is going on?
The weekend came and needed to head out to the soccer fields.
“Kids, get in the car.”
Buckle, key in ingestion, check the time. 8:47 am. That is when I knew something was really off. There is a parallel dimension that is triggered when I tell my children to get in the car or otherwise, if things were normal, it would take us 2 minutes. Surely, my astute children do not mess around so much that we are always 15 minutes behind. That’s preposterous!
For the next several weeks, I watched the clocks when we left. Time always disappeared. At first, I thought perhaps my clocks were wrong so I made sure to set them to the same exact time. The next day we lost 20 minutes. Maybe I was having blackouts and running through the streets for that time every morning covered in peanut butter. Maybe parenting had cracked me. I checked the peanut butter–jar. Still full.
I ran experiments. I told my wife to get in the car so only her and I would go to the store. We lost no time. The clocks showed no lost time. I went to see a movie by myself and uttered the phrase, “Shannon, get in the car.”
5 seconds elapsed, not 15 minutes.
So the next day I said, “Kids, get in the car.” Boom, 15 minutes missing.
That’s when I knew about the portal of lost time that my children cause.
Now, I know that the unbelievers, the ones without any faith or humanity, would come up with something more simple than my explanation. They would point out that my older son never seems to ever put his shoes in his shoe basket and must look for them for an hour. At which point he will give up and say he can’t find them.
They may also say that my daughter must lallygag around the house the minute she discovers its time to go somewhere
And surely, my youngest son only poops in his diaper the moment he hears the phrases “We are running late,” and “Get in the car.”
Those are all very possible explanations as to why I lose 15 minutes telling the kids to get in the car. But there is one hole in that logic: it is not awesome and makes me look bad.
No, there is only one answer that puts the blame squarely on someone else’s shoulders. Our life is filled with some mystical dimension that lies between my house and my car. Some strange and mysterious place that saps 15 precious minutes every time I tell the kids to get into the car.
That is the only logical answer that explains why I have to constantly tell people why we are late. Every. Single. Time.
Our life is filled with dimensions that must be overcome, quests that must be taken, diapers that must be changed but only when we have to go somewhere. Our life is about overcoming impossible challenges, to see the obstacle, conquer it while eating bacon AND sausage for breakfast because there is always time for that.
That is our life because that life, the one that we choose to live in, is way more interesting and fun. In that life, I always know exactly what I’m doing and that the missing time portal is right outside my door.
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Previously Published on Hossman at Home
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