I have no one to blame but myself.

The 50th Anniversary March on Washington this past Saturday was the only commemoration that my 8-year-old daughter could hope to attend (since she will be in school on Wednesday, the actual anniversary of the original March). And I blew it.

On the Friday night before the Saturday march, my family and I spent a wonderful and long-awaited Shabbat dinner with friends…and I let my gluten-intolerant guard down.

I rejected a store bought product that wasn’t certified as adequately gluten free (since federal regulations over labeling don’t go into effect until August 2014). But I accepted ostensibly “gluten free” items made by two friends, based on their best intentions, and my denial and desire to be gracious. I ate an olive that came from a store’s open bin. I sprinkled feta cheese on a dish I’d made myself, without double checking that the feta didn’t contain some sort of added starch. Any one of these things could have been the culprit. So could have kissing my husband after candle-lighting, and after he’d (perhaps?) eaten a cracker with cheese. Who knows? But on Saturday, all I knew was that I’d been “glutened,” and I was out for the count.

The truth is that—glutening or no glutening—I was alone with my kids on Saturday, as my husband was on the bima at synagogue that morning, leading services.  Managing the kids at the march itself would have been hard.  There would have been complaints about the walk, and mad attempts (by my 4-year-old) to sprint into the crowd for extra fun. Knowing that, I’d agreed in advance to meet a friend at the National Portrait Gallery for a concert in celebration of the event, and its history, and then see what of the march we might “experience” afterward, with my friend’s extra hands and eyes on the job along with mine.  But even that first commitment at the museum—a quick Metro ride away—was not going to be possible. I was having trouble walking; having trouble keeping my eyes open. It would be the electronic babysitter until my husband returned home mid-afternoon.

The only silver lining is that I found live streaming of the event on the PBS Newshour website, and my daughter watched, start to finish, the speeches given by Myrlie Evers, Congressman John Lewis, and a 9-year-old student named Asean  Johnson, who appeared with (and was prematurely cut off by?!) AFT president Randi Weingarten. My daughter was happy, she was paying attention, and she asked questions. However our day might have  turned out if we’d gone downtown, particularly with her four-year-old brother in tow, I doubt we would have been able to claim that we’d really heard all of those speeches. I still feel like the ultimate “bad witch,” in my own eyes, for failing to give her the experience of that historic day. But I’ll take whatever crumbs from the table I can get.

As long as they’re gluten-free.