“Are you kidding me,” I mumbled as I clambered into the car, realizing my teenage daughter’s car was blocking the driveway—and my car—and I was in a hurry to get her siblings to school on time. I only needed a second before my brain alarmed me to the fact that she was not home, nor were the set of spare keys.

“Great, Mom,” said ManCub, my teenage son. “Now what?”

“Woot!” said Peach, my fifth grader. “Looks like we get to STAY HOME.”

“Get in and buckle up,” I said.

“We are stuck. We’re going to be so late. We’ll never get around her car,” the kids protested.

Thanks to my college years of living in a building almost always under construction, I had learned out of pure necessity to back my car through impossibly small spaces so as not to miss class when the tradesmen were nowhere to be found. “I need the painters to move their vans, ASAP,” I would shout through the building. “HVAC! Your trucks are in the way.” “Plumbers, you are killing me!” This would sometimes draw the attention of other workers, those who didn’t have access to the keys to move the offending vehicles.

“There is no way you’re getting out this time,” they would say. And as deep into my memory banks as I can muster, I always backed around the other vehicles and made it to class in the nick of time.

I hushed the children—this level of concentration required silence, I said—and eased my car between the landscaping rock, the front porch staircase, and my darling daughter’s cute little gray car. It was swift. And we were on schedule to make it to school on time.

“I can’t believe that just happened,” said ManCub.

“I don’t even know what just happened,” said Peach.

“What just happened is I backed around the car. You can’t let challenges paralyze you,” I said. “You have to find a way to your goal.”

A couple weeks later, ManCub texted from school saying he had forgotten his football uniform at home, and needed it for the game. I texted back, assuring him I would drop it off to school in between meetings. “Thank you so much, Mom. Please don’t forget. Love you.”

As I sat in a meeting around a packed conference table discussing an upcoming event with the sponsors, my phone vibrated from my bag. And it continued to vibrate. Over and over again. I slyly reached into my bag and turned the phone screen toward me, to rule out an emergency. It was ManCub. I had remembered to drop off his football paraphernalia, he should be good to go, I thought. But the phone continued to vibrate. I excused myself from the meeting, stepped outside the conference room, and clicked to accept the call.

“I am so unhappy right now,” I said. “This better be good.”

“MOM! Why didn’t you drop off my uniform? The bus is waiting for me! Coach is not happy. What am I supposed to do?”

“Your uniform is in the office, I’ll see you at the game. Love you, goodbye.” He carried on, in his panic, as I hung up the phone and returned to my meeting. My boil-over point was too close for comfort, but I kept my cool.

On the way home from the game, I expressed my frustration with the uniform scenario. My angry energy was quickly matched by his. “You always text me to confirm, Mom! How was I supposed to know?! I thought you forgot.”

I pointed out that he let his panic paralyze him. “You need to exhaust all possible options, all of the time. There were things you could have done, that you didn’t do. You should have backed around the car.” He laughed, but struggled to make the connection. “Remember the car? If I had stood there and panicked, or blew up your sister’s phone trying to locate the spare keys, you wouldn’t have made it to school on time that day. You may not have made it to school at all. Do everything you can to ‘back around the car.’”

That has become a thing at our house: “backing around the car.”

“Mom, you would be proud, I backed around the car today,” one of the brood reports weekly. Working while the kids are on summer break presents some unique requests: “Mom, trying to make a smoothie, the frozen fruit has jammed the blender.”

“I’m on deadline, I need you to back around the cat,” I texted.

“Oh, we are backing around the cat now, too?”

“The cat, the car, back around it. Don’t blow anything up. I’ll be home soon.”

As Spokane experiences opportunities—and adversity, too—I challenge us all to keep working to find solutions and resolutions, to not allow ourselves to be gridlocked or paralyzed, to keep “backing around the car” or the cat. Let’s just not blow anything up.

We are Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living, and we are Spokane. Please find me on Facebook—and hop over to “like” the Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living page—to stay connected between press dates, and share your thoughts, stories, and life in real time.

To unstoppability in us all,

Stephanie Regalado

[email protected]