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This morning, in the car on the way to our kids’ first day of school, my husband and I realized we were wearing the same hat. I had bought a cheap two-pack of trucker caps online for the purposes of keeping the sun out of my eyes while I run. They were hanging on wooden pegs by the front door with our tote bags and dog leashes, and we’d both unthinkingly slapped them on our heads before getting in the car. The hats are oversized and bright yellow. We looked like people selling solar panels door-to-door, or like players on a softball team for adults who have survived having a heavy object fall on their heads.

My husband did not want to take his hat off because we’d been in a rush that morning, and his hair was matted from sleep. I did not want to take mine off because it was sort of covering up the case of pinkeye I have in both eyes (courtesy of my other son, who started his new school two weeks ago). So, we went in.

This was one of just a few of small indignities we’ve experienced while having school-aged children. Here are a few more:

- After a near unbroken streak of non-participation, my husband volunteered to help with the Fall Carnival out of guilt and almost immediately smashed his body into a charity “wishing well,” which was full of water, and subsequently flooded the rest of the carnival area. Later, when one of the moms bought breakfast sandwiches for the volunteers, one was not allocated for him.

- My youngest son somehow lost one shoe and sock on the way to preschool, and his parents did not have time to go back home to retrieve a spare pair before they both had to be at work. That week, a terse email went out from the school that “children need to be fully dressed, including shoes.” This happened again to that same child at our other son’s Winter Festival, which took place in rare-for-Los-Angeles, 40-degree weather. Our older children did not want to go home, so we put a mitten on his tiny foot, which did not work very well, and he fell over, several times.

- A strange note went home to parents in our daughter’s first-grade class asking us to make sure our children had eaten breakfast and were being given enough food to take with them each day, because some of them had resorted to stealing food from their classmates, and other parents were complaining about it. I joked at pickup that the culprit couldn’t be my daughter, since we pack her two enormous, adult-size lunches every day, and her teacher looked me square in the eyes and said, “It is your daughter. Please feed her more.”

The one thing I hate about sending them off to school each year is knowing that I cannot save them from things like this, the random abject embarrassment that comes from interacting with others outside of the home. No one will escape twelve-plus years of schooling without a grand repast of humiliations to be remembered forever and replayed every night before sleep or at random in the middle of the Dallas airport. (You cannot escape indignity by being home-schooled either -- the moment you leave the house, people will laugh at you for something, like saying your grandma is your best friend, or not knowing what “gyatt” means).

I once told a therapist that while I get intellectually that no one is sitting around thinking about the stupid things I said or did once, I struggled miserably with the idea in practice. People have “their own things going on?” Not everyone is “going to like me?”Sorry, I reject that. I know people generally can’t be everyone’s cup of tea but I know that, I, specifically, really cannot be everyone’s cup of tea, because I am annoying and an idiot. However, I will never not want to be a universally likeable kind of tea, a tea so hot that everybody wants to fuck it. Sadly, my therapist was not on board, and moreover, did not buy the idea that I am more annoying or have humiliated myself significantly more than other people have. “Have you heard of a website called XO Jane?” I asked.

She ignored this and told me to “Name four people who everybody thinks are cool,” she said, which was supposed to be one of those therapist “gotchas,” but, I instead, I immediately named four people. Actually, more than four. I really do think there are lots of people everybody likes and thinks are cool. I bet you can name a few now. But she got visibly exasperated and said, “Don’t you think that there’s a kind of narcissism in needing to be liked by everybody?” It is one thing not to be liked by the cool parents at school; it is another entirely to realize your own therapist is probably going to tell her husband about how annoying you were today.

As of this writing, my youngest is officially a kindergartener, and my kids are now officially all “in school.” This is scary to me for many reasons, and one of the many gifts I’m trying to send them off with is that of not caring too much. I say “too much” because it would be disingenuous to say I don’t care at all. As you will hear of many women in their 40s who write essays, I definitely care much less than I used to. I once went on a weekend trip with a guy I’d just started seeing, and exclusively used the lobby bathroom instead of the shared toilet in our hotel room, and was so nervous about my snoring that I stayed up all night, every night, until one day at breakfast in a nice restaurant, I was so tired I farted. I was heartbroken when he dumped me a few weeks later, which I’m sure in his mind was “just enough time so she doesn’t think it was the breakfast fart.”

But one of the things about being older is that your emotional life naturally reorganizes around other things, like, say, terror of death. You can focus less on whether or not you go to enough dinner parties or have been wearing the wrong jeans for someone in your age bracket, and more on the fact that you’re now closer to 70 than 14. If you really think about that fact over and over, say, until your heart rate actually increases, and the moment you tripped and fell at the farmer’s market and your whole left breast came out of your romper will really recede into the distance.

I do not believe in parenting advice of any stripe. I equate “thinking you’re doing a good job as a parent to the degree that you feel you can help to others” with “thinking you’d be good enough at being in charge of the country to the degree that you’d run for President.” (Both of these types of people belong in that prison where they put the Joker.)

But, I do wish I’d somehow “skipped the line” with the caring less thing, because I did dedicate a lot of my twenties and thirties to this more useless form of fretting and ruminating. So much energy went into people thinking I was medium-sexy or had an impressive job, or just that I wasn’t totally unsexy or had an unimpressive job. Ultimately, trying to control the narrative about my own coolness is like trying to throw a football: I cannot do it.

As a parent, I notice that I go out of my way to point out to my kids when I’m failing or not living up to some basic human standard. For me this means doing things like screaming “I KNOW!” when they point out that I’ve run a red light, being noticeably bad with money, trying out a never-ending variety of haircuts and colors despite a very limited range of “what works” for my skin tone and octagonal face shape, keeping the house in a state of cleanliness that invokes one of those trash planets from the “Star Wars” franchise, etc.

I have no idea if this is helpful to my children or not, yet. For now, I’m sure it just makes them embarrassed by me as I was of myself when I was their age. But if I can take some of the pressure off them to be faultless and likeable, now or in the future, then I’m happy to lead, example by mortifying example. Sometimes I’ll be at the dentist with my adorable six-year-old and she’ll say something like “Why don’t you ever get your teeth cleaned, Mommy?” right in front of the hygienist, which is among the ten most judgmental professions. And, of course, I’ll be tempted to lie or remind her that I had my teeth cleaned three short years ago. But I’ll try to opt for the truth, for both of us and tell her the truth: that Mommy is afraid of the dentist, and maybe owes him a $35 copay and is too ashamed to call his office and settle up because the receptionist is a really handsome Italian gay guy who could model but for some reason is a dental office receptionist instead, probably so he can be frosty to the people who go a long time between cleanings and forget their copays.

So, to my children, I say this: embarrassment is inevitable. It may feel bad when you fall down in gym during an inexplicable unit on frisbee golf and that the fall makes your shirt go over your head, or when you mispronounce “epitome” in ninth grade and everybody laughs at you even though they only know how to pronounce it beccause of a popular Weezer song, and you just changed schools and you don’t know who Weezer is because the cool girls at your old school listened to Vanessa Williams like a bunch of 50-year-old office managers. It may take you a long time to make friends in your new class. I am not saying it won’t. But maybe you’ll think about it less when you come home to your filthy house, and to your messy mom with her beige teeth while she’s on the phone with Living Spaces because she burned a hole in it trying to put wart remover on your dad’s foot. Also, they’re both wearing the same hat. We are sorry about that, kids. We love you. Welcome back to school.