Bad luck or a warning beacon?
On parking tickets and why I stopped going to therapy for answers
I’m only 4 minutes late, but there’s a yellow slip on my windshield.
It’s a crappy ending after a visit to the local children’s museum. Except when opening the envelope, I notice they issued the parking ticket at 10:52 am—42 minutes after I helped a grandmother with the meter machine while scanning the QR code with my phone to pay.
I stare at the sign, and then back at the car. My crane inspector father-in-law always said that 90% of problems are due to operator error, so I assume I’m the one in the wrong. Did I choose the wrong lot? Did I input my license plate or credit card number incorrectly? Should I have downloaded the mobile app instead of using the browser? There’s a receipt in my email inbox verifying payment—shouldn’t that be enough verification?
My daughter asks for my phone to play a game. I snap at her; telling her I need to focus and think through why I’m being asked to pay $65.50 in 15 days when I specifically parked in the lot instead of testing my luck with street parking. When my husband checks our credit card statement, we discover that the $5.50 fee is pending. Now I’m furious, having to waste time disputing a ticket when I followed the rules. Then my daughter apologizes, thinking she’s the one who made me angry, which only makes me feel more guilty.
What kind of mother am I for taking out my issues with a
meter attendant on a four-year-old?
Thankfully, the company reverses the charge. Even so, the incident weighs on my mind as I assume I don’t have preschool snack duty for the upcoming week, realize I do, throw an egg in my cake donut recipe even though two kids have documented food allergies, scrape the donuts directly into the trash bin because they taste awful, and cobble together something from my pantry with the hope I don’t need to make yet another trip to the grocery store—only to arrive at school and realize I forgot my daughter’s homework. Two days in a row.
Clearly, my distress has nothing to do with the parking ticket.
If I were discussing this incident with a therapist, they would probably ask me about the first time I got punished for making a mistake. I would probably say something about spilling my dad’s glass of red wine on the carpet, which links to the time my brother told me I was unplanned; and my mom supposedly cried when she found out she was pregnant with me (and they were not tears of happiness). That I internalized the belief that I’m a mistake and how that manifests into making actual mistakes and that would be as far as we get in 55 minutes, and I would drive home in a funk and talk to my husband and journal and fume about the disconnect between the upbringing I received vs. the one I felt I deserved and honestly?
The circle of blame is why I stopped going to therapy for answers.
So instead of fixating on the past, I focus on the present: creating a new memory for my daughter. Later in the week, we return to the museum—only to find the same private lot completely full. After a handful of expletives and circling the block, I reluctantly pull into a street parking slot. The entire time inside, I’m watching the clock like a hawk and even then, we’re 13 minutes past the allotted time. Immediately upon exiting, I see the police shuttle drive by and mutter another few swear words under my breath; mentally calculating how much this day is going to cost between the $44 admission price and this forthcoming parking ticket.
Except the windshield is empty.
I look around in all directions, convinced this is a joke because this time, I am clearly in the wrong. I glance back to my daughter, who is over my anxiety from the way from the way she stares into the distance with glassy eyes. Finally, she asks in her sweet little voice:
“Can we just go home?
I scan the perimeter while buckling her car seat, taking in the shabby buildings; the vagabonds that roam the sidewalks. It finally dawns on me that technically I am home, on a street I’ve driven down thousands of times before; between church and the library and piano lessons and the Fall I spent volunteering with Washington State Democratic Party. Visiting your hometown shouldn’t trigger this kind of anxiety. Yet here I am, wanting nothing more than to gun the accelerator and shield my daughter from going through what I went through—playing the part of a dutiful Vietnamese Catholic daughter while going to school with kids who were snorting cocaine in the bathrooms and plotting to murder their parents’ employers. Nowadays, the city struggles with an opioid crisis; and it’s not uncommon to buy a house and hear that a few doors down, someone was manufacturing methamphetamines.
Maybe the parking ticket from last week was just bad luck. Or maybe it’s a warning beacon, instructing me to never come back.
So I lean over to kiss the top of the forehead, answering:
“Yes, baby girl. We can go home.”
WRITE 👩🏽💻
In preparing for my upcoming interview with
next month, I perused through a copy of his book, How to Become a Successful Author. Even though I ultimately took the interview in a different direction, I was struck at how brutally honest he is about past failures. One of my favorite anecdotes is how he has no issue with watching terrible movies or reading bad books, because:If you spend all your time looking at perfect projects, then you don’t develop that skill as acutely as when you spend time analyzing projects that didn’t work. It is in seeing those flaws that we can make our own work better.
LIFE 🏡
If I seem a little more scatterbrained than usual, forgive me. Thanks to a trip to the Spirit Halloween store for costumes, my daughter’s been having nightmares and running into my bedroom at 3 am. (At least she stopped screaming bloody murder.) Thanks to other parents at my daughter’s school sharing similar experiences, I know this is normal brain development for her age; yet it doesn’t take away the sting of assuming I could finally sleep for seven consecutive hours a night. Which leads me to the following conclusion:
It doesn’t matter if your kids are seventeen years old, or seventeen days old—if you’re a mother, you will never sleep the same as you did pre-children.
BALANCE 🧘🏻♀️
So instead of dealing with my sleep deprivation by writing a book (heh), I’m trying to be extra kind to myself. That means playing catch up on all of the medical appointments I’ve put off in the last two years and treating myself to more beauty products than usual. (Psssst: I swear by this sea salt scrub.) Luckily, Substack is home to a lot of great lifestyle bloggers—I’m loving
’s recommendations at , which is such a refreshing change from the Gen Alpha kids at the bus who are rocking crop tops, plaid pajama bottoms, and claw hair clips as a fashion statement. To use their lingo, I do not “stan” any of this.Side note: Lynn recently featured me in her other Substack publication
. Check out the roundup of my favorite books, music, and media publications—all made by Vietnamese creators.READING 📚
The Hundred Loves of Juliet by Evelyn Skye. It’s a twist on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with an ending that leaves Romeo immortal and Juliet reincarnated as other women across time and continents before dying tragically. This time it’s Helene, a recently divorced journalist looking for a fresh start in small-town Alaska when she encounters Sebastien, a well-loved fisherman and feels an immediate connection with him—she just doesn’t know how or why.
STREAMING ⏯
Isn’t everyone streaming the newest *NSYNC single for the upcoming Trolls movie? Just me? To convert my daughter into a rabid fan, I played their sophomore album, No Strings Attached (and impressed myself by still knowing the lyrics to Space Cowboy.) She tolerated a few songs before asking for—wait for it—Peter Gabriel’s Panopticom. Clearly she inherited her dad’s musical tastes.
COOKING 👩🏽🍳
Roasted mushroom risotto. I made it vegan with a vegetarian chicken stock and vegan parmesan cheese (Follow Your Heart or Violife are the ones that work best for me.) After two parents at the school meeting demanded the recipe, I finally got around to writing it up. Whatever you do, don’t rush the process—wait for the rice grains to absorb the stock before ladling in more. Stir more than think is needed; it’s the key to the creaminess. And whatever you do, don’t make risotto on a deadline. It never turns out well.
Happy October,
Sophia :)
P.S. In case you missed it, here’s last month’s essay on how to handle a writer’s most dreaded question: “How’s the book going?”
I have such a low threshold for these sorts of “issues” these days - the effort to check the credit card, to make a follow up call, or appeal the ticket etc etc is just exhausting. I’m staring down a list of calls I need to make tomorrow and I just don’t wanna!! 😭
My teen has started playing *NSYNC & Backstreet Boys on the piano and it’s my absolute favorite and I will definitely be trying that risotto sometime soon!
Wow, what an ordeal. Sorry you weren’t having a good day. I think going through bad days helps us to have and recognize the ones that are better. Thanks for sharing. 🫶