Mama Found Ms. Rachel

As I write this, I am flying into O’Hare with a frog occupying most of my carry-on.

The frog is for my colleague Lindsey, who lives in Massachusetts but will be in Chicago at the same time I am, which somehow made transporting it from Florida feel reasonable.

From Chicago, I will fly to New York, then return home Thursday evening after three flights in three days.

The actual purpose of the trip is a Coffee & Commerce road show with events in both cities, plus meetings with SC Johnson in Chicago and Clorox and Disney in New York. These are serious conversations with major brands whose products are probably in your home right now. I assumed the Disney meeting alone would make me extremely impressive to my three-year-old.

It did not.

Somehow, Haisley knew Ms. Rachel was in New York.

I have no idea how she acquired this information. I certainly did not tell her, mostly because I did not know it myself. But once she connected those dots, she apparently concluded that my trip to New York included a meeting with Ms. Rachel.

Never mind the actual itinerary. Never mind the client presentations, the road show, the airport changes, or the fact that I would be in New York for approximately a hot second. In Haisley’s mind, Mama was going to New York, Ms. Rachel was in New York, and therefore Mama would obviously be meeting with Ms. Rachel.

Honestly, the logic was difficult to dispute.

Haisley understands that Mama has to work. She knows that when I am in my office, she cannot be in there with me, even if she has something extremely urgent to report about a dress, a dog, or the whereabouts of a tiny green alien. She knows that when Mama leaves for a business trip, Mama will be gone for several bedtimes.

What she does not understand is what any of that work actually means.

She does not understand commerce, client strategy, or why anyone would voluntarily fly into O’Hare one day, fly out the next, land at LaGuardia a few hours later, and then return to LaGuardia the following afternoon. Frankly, I understand the itinerary and still question it.

So I translate my work into her language.

Last week, after she had been extremely sick and we had spent several days torturing her with a Frida Baby nose sucker, I told her I had a meeting with the company that made it. Suddenly, Mama’s job was fascinating. The same plastic tube we had used to forcibly evict mucus from her nose had become her first meaningful connection to corporate America.

This week, I told her about Disney. I thought that would secure my position as the coolest working mother in PK3.

But Ms. Rachel was in New York, so Disney was immediately irrelevant.

After Haisley repeatedly asked whether I had talked to her yet, Jimmy suggested I send them an AI-generated picture of the two of us together. This is apparently where we are as a society and as parents; we now have the technology to manufacture evidence that Mama located a beloved children’s entertainer somewhere on a Manhattan sidewalk, and we are not above using it.

I uploaded a selfie. Artificial intelligence preserved my face, removed the airport bathroom behind me, placed me on a sunny New York street, and added Ms. Rachel beside me in her pink shirt, denim overalls, and headband. A yellow taxi in the background provided the necessary geographic credibility.

The result was alarmingly convincing.

I sent it to Jimmy, prepared to collect my cool-mom points.

Haisley looked at the picture and said, “Oh wow.”

That was it.

No screaming. No follow-up questions. Just the pleasant but measured approval of a senior executive acknowledging that the requested deliverable had been received. Mama had been assigned a task. Mama had located Ms. Rachel. Good work, Mama.

Meanwhile, two adults and an artificial intelligence platform had coordinated an interstate celebrity deepfake operation on her behalf.

This is not the first irrational thing we have done to create a little magic for her, and it will not be the last.

Jimmy hides tiny Toy Story alien figurines around our house so she can go alien hunting. Sometimes he hides them in public, expanding the operation beyond our property lines and presumably confusing anyone who finds one before she does.

We also spent an objectively unreasonable amount of time and money planning a mermaid birthday party for a child who may someday remember seven minutes of it. There were decorations, activities, carefully coordinated details, and enough undersea commitment to suggest we had received an official licensing agreement from King Triton.

This is what we do. We hide aliens. We build mermaid kingdoms. We create photographic evidence of meetings that never happened. We spend hours manufacturing moments that our children may not remember and then act surprised when they respond with the emotional intensity of a DMV employee.

The magic does not create itself, though. Somewhere behind nearly every enchanted childhood memory is an exhausted adult moving something after bedtime, driving across town, spending too much money, inventing an elaborate backstory, or quietly making sure all the practical pieces are covered.

Before I left for this trip, I remembered that Haisley was responsible for her classroom snack on Wednesday. My mom went to the grocery store so Jimmy would have one less errand to manage while I was gone. I made sure he knew how to feed Neyland, our bearded dragon, while also caring for one preschooler, three dogs, two cats, and the rest of the Patterson Wildlife Preserve.

Then I packed the frog.

That is the less photogenic side of making childhood feel magical. It is calendars, grocery runs, airport pickups, animal-care instructions, and people stepping into the gaps for one another. It is my mom handling the classroom snack, Jimmy holding down the entire house, Lindsey waiting in Chicago for her ridiculous amphibian, and me trying to keep all the plates spinning from several hundred miles away.

It takes a village, and I am profoundly aware of mine.

The village allows me to get on the plane. It makes sure Haisley is fed, loved, dressed, delivered to school, picked up, entertained, and tucked into bed while I move between cities. It keeps the dogs alive, the cats fed, the bearded dragon supplied with roaches, and the correct number of preschool snacks headed toward the classroom.

But at the center of all that coordination is a little girl who does not care what my title is or how important the meeting might be. She does not know which conversations require weeks of preparation or which rooms I had to work years to enter. She only knows that Mama works behind a closed office door sometimes, and other times Mama gets on an airplane and goes away.

Connecting my work to something she recognizes gives her a small way into that part of my life. She cannot sit beside me in the boardroom, but she can understand that Mama talks to the people who made the dreaded nose sucker. She can imagine that Mama’s Disney meeting involves Mickey Mouse. She can believe that somewhere between Chicago, New York, client meetings, and airport security, Mama found Ms. Rachel.

Maybe those stories earn me a few cool points. More importantly, maybe they make my absence feel less mysterious. Instead of Mama simply being gone, Mama is out in the world having adventures that Haisley can understand and bringing the stories home to her.

She may not remember the mermaid decorations. She may forget where Jimmy hid every tiny alien. She almost certainly will not remember the day Mama “found” Ms. Rachel on a Manhattan sidewalk.

But maybe remembering every detail is not the point.

Maybe the point is that, while her world is still small enough to contain hidden aliens, mermaid kingdoms, and the perfectly reasonable expectation that her mother can locate any celebrity in New York City, we get to make that world feel enormous.

I can walk into rooms with major companies. I can fly between two cities in three days, lead serious conversations, and carry a giant frog through airport security without losing my dignity entirely.

But at the end of the day, none of those titles matters as much as the one waiting for me at home.

I’m still Haisley’s mama.

And if she needs Mama to find Ms. Rachel, apparently Mama finds Ms. Rachel.