Although my oldest child went to England to attend college, our other two are in the United States now. Suddenly I get it. Before, they always enjoyed a healthy extracurricular life of sports and school clubs, but never one that overtly conflicted with my career or social life — on the contrary, in Brussels I did some of my best networking at the local playground cafe, which served chilled bottles of Pouilly-Fumé and Stella Artois to half-watching parents. (Why push a swing when you could sip a drink?) In Paris, my children had only a half day of school on Wednesdays (the norm in France), giving them an afternoon free for ballet classes, music lessons or circus school, which made it easy for me to compress into one day the delivering to and fro.

I now look back appreciatively at my daughter’s early morning field-hockey schedule in London. The team practiced three mornings a week from 8 to 8:30 a.m., with the odd game taking place from 4 to 5 p.m. every other week, weather permitting (it usually rained).

Now our entire adult life revolves around the children’s activities. The last two weekends alone, my daughter was in three performances of the school musical, had softball practice, a state solo ensemble competition (that ended at 12:30 p.m., a 40-minute drive from the musical, which started at 2 p.m.) and a forensics tournament. My son had the musical (he manned the spotlight), a baseball practice and a Science Olympiad contest (with a 6:30 a.m. bus departure).

It is hard to look forward to summer, because we have already been told our annual August vacation with the cousins can’t happen because “preseason” for both of my children’s fall sports starts in mid-August, and in my daughter’s case, will consist of both a morning and an afternoon training session. (I plan to pack her a picnic and leave her there.) Not only has my gas bill grown astronomically because of the chauffeuring, but my waist size has also multiplied from walking less and eating more. (Who has time to cook when the clock says it’s pickup time again?)

And don’t get me started on my lack of an adult life. I have become an expert at reselling concert tickets, canceling dinner reservations and missing work deadlines. My social life now consists of sitting next to a friend at a college counseling meeting, chatting to my daughter’s Spanish teacher during the spring choir concert or cleaning up with another mom after our daughters’ end-of-season sports dinner. In France, I never saw anything above the first floor of my children’s school, except the time I mistakenly went upstairs in search of the drop-off for a permission form allowing them to take my 5-year-old to overnight pony camp for a week (a school trip that horrified my American friends back home).