Did you ever think back to vacations you took as a child and wondered why when you got in the car to leave your mother looked like she had been working on a chain gang? Because she had been more or less. Only in the past five years have I begun to understand how the word "vacation" can be synonymous with "work my ass off for the week before making sure everyone else has what they need and then scramble in the last twelve hours to get my own act together". For the past few summers my husband, children and I have gone to the beach for two weeks and it could not have been harder to plan the attack at Normandy. I started planning, shopping and packing weeks in advance. My kitchen was wallpapered with lists for each member of my family except, of course, for me. It was only in the final hours before leaving I realized I didn't have a bathing suit that didn't have holes in the crotch.
God forbid the trip I'm planning involves leaving the kids (and dog) behind, then I really work myself into frenzied exhaustion. Not only do I need to pack myself, but all of their stuff for a totally different location - usually my in-laws. I also need to write out a list of instructions with such detail the person watching my kids will know how many times they'll breath in one day (but not if it's my mother in-law, she raised four kids she's the expert). And if the kids are staying in the house with the sitter for a few days, forget it. The place needs to be scrubbed top to bottom, food needs to be bought and every piece of laundry we own needs to be washed an put away (we know how that goes). By the time I'm done I look and feel like crap and it's all I can do to not punch my husband in the face when he asks, as he did on the plane to our babymoon in the Bahamas, "Why do you look so stressed?" Do you know why??? Because unlike you, I didn't just pack my own underwear, that someone else washed and folded for me, and travel-sized shaving cream, that someone else bought for me, an hour before we left and then breezed out the door. I barely had time to shower before leaving for the airport.
As you can tell, I am preparing to leave my kids for my brother in-law's rehearsal dinner and wedding on Friday and I am in full-on crazy mode. Every moment between now and then is accounted for, between the shopping and cleaning and instruction writing. The real problem this time is I actually have to look nice for both of these events so working like mad until the last minute, throwing on my Yankee hat and hopping in the car as I usually do when we leave for a trip won't cut it. Somewhere in all of this I have to find time to get my nails done - which means having time to let them dry so I don't have toilet paper from wiping my kid's butt stuck in them - and have my hair done - which means finding time when I won't have little claws covered in sweet potatoes grabbing at it. Why don't you just ask my to align the planets?
So dear reader, thank your mom for all she did to get you to the shore, the Catskills or Martha's Vineyard. I'm sure, even years later, she'd love to hear it. If you too are a mother planning a trip sometime in the future, let me be the one to say, you're awesome, you rock and don't forget to pack your own underpants.
No comments:
Post a Comment