My car was disabled on the shoulder of a busy highway, my tire shredded to pieces, and her only response popped up in our group chat: Well, that’s not going to work for me.
That was Dana.
For two years, our carpool ran on a simple system: three of us did the work, and Dana offered a rotating menu of breathtakingly flimsy excuses. We covered for her forgotten pickups, her “emergency” yoga classes, and her sudden conference calls with non-existent London offices.
My flat tire, however, was a real emergency.
A genuine, roadside crisis that earned me zero sympathy, just a demand. Her selfishness finally gave me a gift: permission to stop being the better person.
Dana was about to discover the devastating cost of an opportunity that someone else, overwhelmed and terribly sorry, simply forgot to tell her about.
The Precarious Balance: The Looming Text
My phone vibrated against the granite countertop, a sound that on most days was innocuous. But on Tuesdays, it was a harbinger. Tuesdays were Dana’s day to drive the carpool, which meant my phone was a tiny, rectangular vessel of anxiety. I glanced at the screen, my jaw already tightening. The text wasn’t from her, not yet. It was from my husband, Mark. Dinner at 7? I’ll pick up Thai. A simple, lovely message that I couldn’t fully appreciate. My stomach was a knot of preemptive frustration.
Our carpool was a four-mom operation, a delicate ecosystem built on the flimsy promise that we would all, you know, do our part. Me, Maria, and Chloe formed the reliable bedrock. We were the pillars of timeliness, the high priestesses of the shared Google Calendar. Then there was Dana. Dana was the fault line running straight through our foundation. She was a black hole of forgetfulness, a swirling vortex where good intentions and basic responsibilities went to die.
I typed back to Mark, Sounds great. Can’t wait. But my mind was already fast-forwarding to 3:15 PM, the pickup time for our sons’ robotics club. Liam, my son, loved it. Jason, Dana’s son, tolerated it. The other two boys, Leo and Sam, were Liam’s best friends. The club was their sacred space, and the carpool was the rickety chariot that got them there.
Another buzz. This time it was the group chat: “Robotics Roadies.” My thumb hovered over the notification. Was this it? The 2:45 PM text? The one that always began with an effusive “OMG, you guys, I am SO sorry but…” followed by an excuse so flimsy it was transparent. I held my breath and tapped the screen. It was Maria. Just a reminder for everyone, the boys need their signed permission slips for the field trip next month. I’m putting a note on Leo’s backpack.
Relief washed over me, cool and immediate. False alarm. We were safe, for now. But the tension didn’t fully dissipate. With Dana, you were never really safe. You were just in the quiet eye of the storm, waiting for the other wall of wind and rain to hit.
A History of Flakes
Dana’s unreliability wasn’t a recent development. It was a core personality trait, as fundamental to her being as her perfectly highlighted hair and her Lululemon-clad devotion to a brand of chaotic-neutral parenting. In the two years since we’d started this carpool, her excuses had become a genre unto themselves.
There was the time she had a “sudden, can’t-miss conference call with the London office” ten minutes before pickup. She worked in marketing for a local credit union. They didn’t have a London office. We all knew it, but Chloe, ever the peacemaker, just replied with a flurry of supportive emojis and picked up the slack.
Then there was the infamous “lost keys” incident. She’d texted the group in a panic, claiming she’d turned her house upside down. Maria, who lived closest, had driven over to help her look, only to find Dana on her porch, sipping an iced latte, keys dangling from the lanyard around her neck. “Oh, silly me!” she’d laughed, with no apology. Maria had just stared at her, her expression a flat, unreadable mask, and driven away to get all four boys herself.
My personal favorite was when she’d completely forgotten her day, no text, no call, nothing. When I’d finally reached her at 3:45, the boys already a half-hour late, she answered, breathless and serene. “Oh my god, Brenda, I’m in the middle of a hot yoga class. It’s a silent retreat week. I totally unplugged.” She said “unplugged” like it was a sacred vow, a medical necessity that superseded all earthly commitments. I’d had to leave a client meeting, my face burning with embarrassment, to go get four stressed-out middle schoolers who were convinced they’d been abandoned.
We’d tried talking to her. Gently at first, then more directly. Each time, she’d turn on the waterworks, lamenting how “overwhelmed” she was, how we couldn’t possibly understand the pressure she was under. The performance was so convincing you’d almost forget that Maria was an ER nurse who regularly worked 12-hour shifts and I was a project manager for an architectural firm, juggling multi-million dollar construction schedules. We were all overwhelmed. The difference was, we didn’t use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card for being a decent human being.
