I said yes to the playdate before asking my son

I accepted the invitation while standing in the school parking lot. Another parent asked if my son could come over Saturday. I said yes because we were free.

Then I got in the car and told him his plans.

He said he didn't want to go.

I asked why. He said he wanted to stay home. I asked whether something had happened with the other boy. He said no. I asked whether they were still friends. He said yes.

By the third question, he had pulled his jacket over his knees and was looking out the window.

He's nine. I arrange transportation and talk to other parents. I had somehow let that become the right to accept every invitation addressed to him.

The embarrassing part is that I wasn't defending a precious friendship. I was defending my own yes. I had been friendly and decisive in the parking lot, and now somebody was making my easy answer inconvenient.

I told him it would be rude to cancel. He asked why I hadn't checked before saying yes.

There wasn't a clever answer to that.

We didn't have tickets or a reservation. The other parent had offered an afternoon at home. I could have sent a message ten minutes earlier saying I needed to ask him. Instead, I tried to make the delay his fault.

I texted that I had answered before checking with him and that Saturday wouldn't work after all. I didn't tell the other parent he was being difficult. I didn't invent another appointment. The response was “No problem, another time.”

All that resistance, and the world absorbed it in six words.

We talked later about how invitations and accepted plans are different. He doesn't get to abandon every commitment because the couch looks appealing. But I can't call something his commitment when the entire agreement happened between two adults while he was nowhere near it.

Next time I will still handle the messages and the driving. I will also ask the person whose afternoon I'm offering.

The parking lot is going to require a new sentence from me. Apparently “Let me check with him” is harder to learn than I expected.