Road Trip Ranting

I am a bit tardy in publishing my weekly literary temper tantrum, but I have had a rough week and have a rougher few to come. Most of the turbulence is of my own design, but that in fact is a morbidly bad thing rather than good. You see, when someone else is imposing impossible standards on you, once you meet them, the demands, in theory, will end. (The exception being your mother or your children whose demands are neverending.) When the standards are self-imposed there is no escaping the demons in your brain, at least not without medication and this seems imminent with the insanity invading my every waking moment.

This coming weekend, I am headed on my first vacation since my eight-year-old princess was learning to walk. I used to believe that this lack of recreational escape was entirely economically-based, but I have actually concluded that by spending all of our recreation money on other things, my subconscious mind was reminding me that I hate packing and I especially hate changes in routine. This disgust for the minor hiccups in the mindless monotony of everyday has apparently been passed to my minions and it makes for several weeks of purgatory.

My past month or so, since the revelation that we were dragging all six children on an epic road trip, has been fraught with continuous fighting. I am going to use this moment to educate the populous that there is a difference between the words continuous and continual. Continual means that the activity lasts for a long duration with occasional lapse or pause. Continuous means that it continues for an indescribable and eternal duration with only minor decreases in the intensity of the anger-inducing mania. I quite purposefully used the latter. I am about ready to request refunds for all the tickets we have already purchased and invest in a half dozen straight jackets and ball gags. THEN we can worry about a road trip.

My husband was scandalized that I insisted on investing in an in-car DVD player. “We will just listen to audio books like we planned a month ago, we don't need to watch television the whole vacation.” His two hours of frustration between work and bedtime do not give him the adequate scope of hysteria that has gripped our normally difficult, but now IMPOSSIBLE offspring. I am sure that in our twelve-hour pilgrimage to his homeland, we are going to kneel and praise a higher being several times along the way for the blessed invention of the boob tube, which admitted dumbs the minions down, but puts temporary ceasing to the hostilities.

Additionally, the thought of leaving my home and packing (hopefully) has me trembling with crippling terror. I have a hard enough time getting six kids out the door with the correct ensemble and equipment to go to the gas station, let alone several hundred miles from home.

My girl-minion is the height of femininity. I would have to concentrate quite intensely to achieve the level of sheer glittering, prim divaness that oozes from her very pores. So, I have on several occasions taken her to have her fingernails professionally painted. On this particular occasion, she arrived at the technician's home studio and being so overcome with girly delight threw herself on the couch and flung her legs over her head. Her ruffly skirt gracefully flitted around her hips and revealed a shocking sight. My daughter was as naked as the day she emerged screaming into this world. If I cannot even clad my daughter in quintessential foundation garments for a trip around the block, I feel fairly defeated at the hope that all six minions will be adequately prepared for the jungles of a road trip.

The other thing that terrifies me is that we are visiting my in-laws. Many women have mother-in-laws that resemble villainesses from ancient fairy tales. I have a wonderful mother-in-law that is logical, organized, kind, pleasant, and completely quiet about my shortcomings. This kind of mother-in-law is infinitely worse because it leaves the wife (me) with an unexplained desire to appear infallible and confident, neither of which are adjectives that adequately describe me. When I brought home my first little bundle of joy, my physique and my brain quickly rebounded, but with each subsequent spawn, I have become a drooling, mouth-breathing mound of flab. I just struggle to hide it when in public. But, something about meeting with my dear hubby's parents, leaves me an insecure mess, who can't even dress herself competently in the morning, let alone a flock of little people.

Perhaps this anxiety also stems from the fact that my normally brilliant husband suddenly turns into a four-year-old when we are preparing to leave for something exciting and regresses several more years if his mother is involved. He only packs his most disgusting clothes, his under clothing with the biggest holes directly in the rump, T-shirts with the most offensive sayings that are seconds away from abandoning structural integrity entirely. Then his mother, did I mention she is a really kind and charitable woman, sees fit to shower him with gifts because he is so neglected. It is almost Oliver Twist/Dickensian in it's craftiness. I am not sure if it manipulatively orchestrated, or just a product of my own spousal insecurities, but still.

The cherry on top to our familial trek of terror sundae is going to be a trip to a Disney theme park. Now, being the mother of six HORRIFYINGLY active children comes with a paralyzing fear of going...well, anywhere public. So, knowing that we were scheduled to visit “The Happiest Place on Earth,” I issued a challenge to my young minions, who somehow become sugar-crazed fiends in the face of a retail institution. “This is practice for Disneyland so we can stay together and be safe.” Apparently, in pre-schooler language this means, “We are going to play a sadistic game of hide and seek in every clothing rack, empty shelf, large container, in every institution for the next month and only emerge when mother starts gasping for air and grabbing the left side of her chest while shouting obscenities.” In pre-teen/adolescent speak, the practice for Disneyland translates to, “Find offense in every time that a sibling touches you and then rather than use the diplomacy that has been instilled in you since you began speaking, SHOUT everything emphatically with several ridiculous insults and then grunt like wild swine and fold your arms with a great HARUMPH.” (Insert a high-decibel excuse to justify your behavior here).

Well, motherly whining vented in an anonymous venue. Hopefully, I will emerge rested and refreshed, but I fully anticipate that I am going to return with PTSD and a slight ocular twitch.

Magic Spray

I miss the days of boo boos and owies. I have found recently that I cannot truly be friends with someone whose children possess the self-preservation gene, because as a defect, all five of mine are noticeably without it. Being a mother of children with a complete disregard for life and limb means that I spend more of my days applying direct pressure than I do sweeping and mopping.

My second child is quite often the culprit, he is desperate to diffuse tense situations with humor and has little regard for the consequences. Additionally, I believe that the veil of understanding between what is reality and what is fiction is a little thin with this one. One afternoon a few years back, after watching his favorite superhero movie, he decided that if Spiderman could traverse a tensile thread, HE could scale a garden rake balanced precariously between two kitchen chairs. Two tentative steps from the launch pad, his feet slid to either side of his balance beam and he painfully straddled the wooden handle, his head punching through the drywall like it was tissue paper. (Did I mention that my children have freakishly large craniums also?) Careful application of a “poor baby” here and a kiss on the swollen lump attempting conquer his forehead, and he was back to blissfully playing.

My four-year old, who has as much courage as he lacks in grace, is the most wonderful example. At least two dozen times during my day, he approaches me whimpering or wailing with a battle wound. Countless times during the week I wonder if it is going to leave permanent physical damage. So, in answer to this, I developed my “magic spray.” I found a pocket perfume bottle and filled it with water. Each time he approaches me with an invisible wound, I give the affected area a little spray, and a kiss and he is miraculously cured, even down to the complete cessation of tears.

I am constantly amazed what the knowledgeable practice of Mommy Medicine can do, but as my children get older my magic spray is becoming less effective and in the case of my more cynical eldest son, he doubts its medicinal properties altogether. So, I am going to increase my arsenal of Magic Mommy supplies, for those moments when magic spray just isn't going to work.

Nair, is going to be the first addition. As the age of my children increases, the number of children who are popular by intimidation have also. Most of these kids have the intellectual equivalent of the contents of their lunchbox and base their entire self-worth on the fact that they are physically attractive. My oldest son has patiently faced such a child, her hair is thick and silky, her eyes are a captivating blue, her mother has dressed her directly from some name-brand catalog, and her over-sized-pre-teen teeth are nearly straight, which is a marked improvement over her like-minded peer group. Therefore she has become the self-appointed queen of the pre-pimple people. Being confronted with this sweet-faced she-troll on a fairly regular basis, I have pondered the medicinal benefits to my oldest child of just slipping a small amount of the hair-dissolving syrum in her shampoo and observing how quickly she is dethroned.

Bubble wrap will also be joining my fix-all arsenal. The same oldest son recently decided to abandon his use of peripheral vision, which is a very important God-given gift to people who intend to live past their teens. While kindly pushing a neighbor child on a swing set, he took one misjudged step backward into the path of my daughter's oncoming swing. The heel of her shoe connected with the bridge of his nose and he plummeted to the grass like a rag doll. (I must enter a side note here, that when I embarked on this mission of motherhood, I would faint when my children were given immunizations. I was marveled three years ago when I merely vomited after stitches at an ER visit, and am pleased to announce that I was only severely nauseated during this latest saga.) While we sat patiently and waited for his x-rays, I noticed several yellowing photographs of children engaged in different activities wearing protective gear, framed on their wall. One child was holding his baseball bat, poised in anticipation and covered with pillows which were duct taped to his limbs. Another child was running a relay race clad in full-plate armor. Yet another was playing soccer shrouded in bubble wrap. Since armor would be prohibitively heavy and pillows would just look paranoid and ridiculous, I have decided that bubble wrap is the way to go. His five stitches, eight nasal fractures and need for complete reconstructive surgery may not have been solved with a kiss on his boo boo, but would have been entirely prevented by a fashionable bubble wrap bavaclava.

Lastly, in the non-conventional motherhood first-aid kit would be chloroform, for those moments that no amount of hugging, soothing, comforting, talking or ice-cream can help. I have mentioned that a mere 20 percent of my offspring are female and though that brings me great longing it also brings me great comfort because no trip to the emergency room is going to mend her broken feelings. I have tried every psychological trick that I have garnered from my years of therapy, complaining about my mother the way that my children will undoubtedly grossly overpay someone else to complain about me. As the years compound, the number of hours spent soothing a broken heart increase and the conclusion to the session is more frequently a sobbing, “Mom, you just don't understand.” Therefore, since the conclusion will be the same defeatist declaration, wouldn't we all feel better with a good nap? You have heard the saying, “Get some sleep, you'll feel better in the morning.” I am just applying good old-fashioned wisdom that has minimally worked for centuries.

I combat my helplessness with sarcasm and humor, but I guess I am having a hard time acknowledging the passage of time. My eldest turns twelve this week, and I miss the days that Mom could solve anything with a kiss and a pat on the head. I really cannot pinpoint when life got so much more complicated for my little minions. My husband teases that I am “a mama bear on steroids,” but I have decided that the best medicine that I can employ is to be their coach--standing ringside with a towel, a box of tissues and a tub of ice-cream and ready to tag-team and fight the good fight when the situation arises.

Rhinovirus Rantings

I am oozing and post-nasal-dripping my way through this week's post. Last Thursday, every child in my house collapsed with a fever within the space of four hours and by Saturday afternoon, I realized that I had either been unknowingly hit by an invisible truck, or I was doomed also. So, I am going to briefly babble incoherently about being sick with minions and then...be sick with my minions.

So my aspirations as an amateur neo-classical interior designer are being overthrown by a strange combination of vapo-spewing, meets lotion-tissue, meets white sale vomited on the floor, meets essential oil bottles, accented with the occasional sticky squirty syringe and topped with a fashionable colorful thermomenter chic. I am renaming it Phlegm Eclectic.

This particularly violent virus came with an unrelenting fever that has had to be vigilantly monitored day and night. This means that my normally cluttered living room became carpeted in a mine field of little bodies. What is worse is that each little body is enshrouded in the complete camouflage of character-adorned bedding, so with each step comes the threat of causing serious bodily injury. Currently, crossing my living room is more perilous than crossing Death Valley. It is like some sort of sadistic game of Twister to walk across my living room this weekend. Right foot on Batman blanket (SQUEAL), nope lose 10 points. Left foot on Tinker Bell pillow, (OUCH!) advance immediately to right hand on yellow bean bag and left hand on treasured square of clear floor in a maneuver closely resembling a game of London Bridges, complete with the falling down part.

The worst part is that I inadvertently shared this viral gift from the gods with my charitable friends, who so kindly invited my disease-ridden offspring to play while I did the mandatory three-hour pilgrimage to ballet class. When I was a young mother with only two minions to train in world domination, I agreed to kindly watch the son of a family in our neighborhood who were in desperate need of a babysitter for their toddler son. At least every other week, the lady would deposit her son at my house with a flimsy excuse as to why his nose was bejeweled in green crust, or why he was covered in little blistery spots, or why he was bleeding from his eyeballs. Having not yet grown the spine and bitch switch that comes with the birth of a third of fourth minion, I would smile and take the infant into my home, not knowing that he was actually a means of biological warfare. My husband one day proposed that perhaps this child wasn't a child at all, but instead a little “Ebola monkey.” I scolded him through my pink-eye, while I slathered lotions on the kids' chickenpox. The nomenclature stuck however, and I swore that I would never be the mother of little carrier monkeys. So imagine my dismay when I retrieve four little boys all docile and snuggling in blankets on my friends' couch. It sounds benign, but if you know my kids, it is eery and ominous.

When my children are sick, the mass occupation of my sleeping space accelerates rapidly. I tried to set up a make-shift hospital ward in my living room. Each child assigned to their own color of bean bag and hidden under their own blanket, and me perched on the couch to oversee the administration of treatments. It sounded like a good idea at the time and saved a fortune on buying humidifiers for each room of the house, but what has ended up happening is EIGHT people puppy-piled on ONE couch. Add the radiating fevers, and I was ready to turn on the air conditioning in the middle of snow-crusted January. When the virus finally hit me, I wasn't sure if the muscle aches were from two nights of sleeping under approximately 300 lbs of children, or if it was actually the microscopic organisms succeeding in their attack.

I have also noticed through years of mucousy observations, that the minions get better approximately 12 to 24 hours before I am completely down for the count. (My afflictions also lasted a minimum of three times longer than theirs also, but that may be in inverse proportion to the amount of time I get to moan and sleep it off.) My four-year-old is the master of creating mischief—it glimmers in his lavender/blue eyes. Some people mistake his dimpled grin for a congenial and innocent smile, but it is truly just him imagining your face when he has achieved his planned level of chaos. Today alone while Daddy slumbered and I snorted and dripped through the basic routines of normalcy, he finger painted in numerous bathroom substances, he used the lotion-filled tissue as confetti, he robbed two piggy banks, unrolled an entire roll of toilet paper, raided the fridge and pantry, changed the password for the school laptop, stole two MP3 players and one set of earbuds, tied one of my balls of yarn to the cat, and systematically poured an entire pitcher of water on the kitchen floor through a series of tunnels and straws that managed to dampen every dining room chair. All the while, I am wiping my cherry nose, begging in a voice that is reminiscent of Droopy Dog, and chasing him in what seemed to be slow motion.

Which begs the question: what idiot decided that it was GOOD thing to make children's cold medicine NON-drowsy? I am completely flummoxed by a human being that thought that oozy, ornery, little mucous factories who are alert and running around touching and licking everything was a prime marketing point. I think that the ideal and most intelligent thing would have been to advertise that a medicine was EXTRA-drowsy. With all six monsters down at the same time, I want a medicine that has Snow-White-mythical-deathlike-coma-inducing cough medicine. Somehow, I don't think that is on the market, but it should be.

The worst part of being sick as a mother isn't nursing the children, it is nursing a husband. My husband is a burly and brooding sort anyway. A good friend calls him one of the “burnt marshmallows” of the matrimonial world. He is bitter, black and crispy on the outside, but that masks a creamy sweet inner layer. But that sticky layer sweetness is nearly non-existent when the slightest amount of prolonged viral discomfort is involved. My husband has an amazing immune system in that it only allows invaders exactly 24 hours after I am afflicted. Literally, when I get sick, I am on a tight schedule. I have ONE day to get from the onset of aches and pains to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed again. Right now it is 7 p.m., and I am trying to smile and breathe through my gritted teeth, (the breathing part is because it is an impossible feat to accomplish through my nasal passages) because the children (being slightly recovered from their afflictions, therefore not sick enough to be immobile, but not well enough to be congenial, self-controlled, and/or diplomatic) are doing some sort of combination of climbing the walls and arguing at obscene decibel levels. And where is the hubby? Snoring in the middle of the mayhem, while I try to direct traffic around his slumbering corpse.

Well, my moments of semi-lucidity have passed. I am going to go seek out the medicines with the highest advertised possibility of drowsiness and collapse under a pile of minions.