Cookie Mom: That's Not My Spiritual Gift

Identify Your NO NO List

When my youngest daughter Trinity was in kindergarten she joined a Girl Scout troop.  I did not do Girl Scout’s when I was a kid (I did Camp Fire Girls which I am not sure but I am thinking it is a complete rip off of Girl Scouts.)  When she signed up I was excited because it would help her create and maintain some new friendships and I like what Girl Scouts stands for.  It was all good.

Except for one thing.  You see, I didn’t read the fine print and when your daughter signs up for Girl Scouts, you sign up for Girl Scouts (the people who know me really well are laughing right now because they know where this is headed.)  Every year, the Girl Scouts hit the streets and start selling those addictive Girl Scout cookies.  I love to eat cookies.  If there was a job that needed to be filled by a Girl Scout mom to eat cookies, I would have signed up for that responsibility in a heart beat.  Turns out, they didn’t have a need for a mom to eat cookies, but the troop did need a mom to be what is affectionately known as “the cookie mom.”

The cookie mom oversees all cookie sales.  She picks up cookies, stores them at her house until they are distributed, and collects money from the little girl’s thin mint dirty hands at the end of the cookie sales season.  The first two or three years, a mom seemed to always volunteer happily to be cookie mom.  This was a huge relief  but I knew that eventually all eyes were going to land on me and the expectation would be crystal clear: it was my turn to be cookie mom.  

The troop leader also happens to be a good friend and she is, without a doubt, put on this earth to be a Girl Scout Troop Mom.  Shelley is a natural leader and I am starting to suspect she is also a vampire because I don’t think she ever sleeps.  She is, in short, amazing.  I knew that the day was coming where we would have to address the fact that I was not stepping up and volunteering to be cookie mom so I began to plan how I would explain the situation to her.  

I invoked what good, Southern women have been saying for hundreds of years.  No--not “bless your heart”--but that is one of my favorites.

I told Shelley “Cookie mom is not my spiritual gift.”

And it isn’t.  I wasn’t feeding her a line of B.S. It was the truth.  I have a rule that I try to follow when it comes to volunteering: I don’t volunteer for things that involve me handling other people’s money.  I heard a story from someone years ago about a woman who was on her way to make a deposit of a great deal of cash from a fundraiser.  The deposit was in her purse.  As luck would have it, she needed gas on the way to the bank.  

She stopped. Filled up. Drove away.

And her purse was on the trunk of the car.  With the cash in it. 

That story has haunted me for years because it sounds so very much like something I would do.  I can SEE this happening, in slow motion, and I wonder if that poor woman ran away and never came back out of sheer embarrassment.  

Handling money that belongs to other people is on my no-no list. 

A lot of people struggle with the word NO so I coach them to say “that’s not my spiritual gift.”  There is a follow up to that sentence though.  You must then be ready to say “This is my spiritual gift and when there is a need for it I am your girl/guy for the job.”

In the case of the Girl Scouts, I would be willing to bet that Shelley would tell you I never really plugged in my spiritual gift to our troop.  Don’t tell anyone but I am not a kid person.  Or a camping person.  Or a craft person. What I am trying to tell you is that I sucked as a Girl Scout mom.  I am happy to report though that my pantry has boxes of Girl Scout cookies in it and Shelley and I are still very good friends.  

I like to believe that I saved our troop from a lot of frustration by not volunteering to be cookie mom.  I know that the ability to say no is sometimes a better gift than taking on something you are not cut out for.  

Before I close, let me share with you one of my best moments as a mom.  Our troop held our meetings the first couple of years at a church near Trinity's elementary school.  Our girls had a brown sash that they wore to each meeting and every time they completed a task Shelley gave them a "badge" that was intended to be glued/sewn/staple gunned to this brown sash.

At the end of the year, there was a ceremony where all the girls lined up and one by one Shelley pinned something to this brown sash.  I was sitting in the church pew with the other Girl Scout moms feeling pretty sassy because a. Trinity actually had her sash that day and b. I had gone to Hobby Lobby and bought some fabric glue and gotten all those badges on there the night before. (where I glued the badges over the burn holes I created with the iron.) Trinity was near the end of the line and as Shelley made her way down the row we all smiled proudly for each girl and snapped a few pictures.

When Shelley was about two girls away from getting to Trinity I looked at my sweet daughter and to my horror realized that several of her badges were peeling off the sash and about to fall to the ground.  "Oh poor Trinity" I thought to myself.  "You don't deserve such a terrible, inept mother like myself."

I pointed out what was happening to the moms around me and got tickled knowing that when Shelley got to Trinity she would likely register a look of horror.  Her back was to us so if she did I did not see it.  The look on her face was probably more one of pity than horror knowing that sweet Trinity had the worst Girl Scout mom in  the history of Girl Scouts. 

I still have that sash and when I see it, I am reminded to not take myself too seriously.  Learn to say "NO" and have a sense of humor. Life is good.  I promise.