Kerouac style!

Well, not quite.  I flew on a plane, am quite sober, haven’t written stream-of-consciousness on a roll of paper, and am merely travelling for business. 

I do enjoy travelling for work, or at least the concept of travelling.  I get to eat food that someone else prepared (and cleans up!) on the company dime.  I get to eat, period, without being interrupted for get more juice, or clean up a spill, or make emergency PBJ’s when the creative, gourmet dinner I made has ‘em gagging. I get to read Kafka on the plane , complete a crossword puzzle and attempt a Sudoku.  During our descent I stuff the plane magazine into my bag so no future occupant of 17C realizes I couldn’t even complete an ‘easy’ Sudoku (at least I can spell it?).

I’m feeling pretty good about myself until I spot a child at the airport and his harried mother chasing him into a store, swatting his hands grabbing  toy airplanes off of their pegs, while the cashier gives them dirty looks.  Immediately I feel lost and alone-I ache for my kids.  Without them I’m just another traveller, lost in the world, making small talk with taxi drivers (about muscle cars of all things) and hotel concierges.  From my hotel room I get to watch ‘Bye, Bye Birdie’ uninterrupted, but I’m counting down the minutes until I can call home and say ‘g’nite poopy-doop’ to my girls.  I’ll probably get some distracted interpretation of what’s on TV, or they’ll hold the phone upside down and talk, or accidentally hang up on me, but at least I’ll hear their voices.

Earlier this week I had a day of completely brilliant frustration.  I was irritable, clumsy and altogether too snippy at my girls. They, of course, were acting like little cherubs, quietly playing with their tea set and feeding imaginary biscuits to their teddies and deserved none of my foul temper.  By the end of the day I was exhausted, weighed down by the fatigue hanging over me like a thick London fog.  The idea of making dinner, having to stand in the kitchen and hold utensils and move food about, had me in tears.  I collapsed down into a chair, whimpered like an infant and tried to catch my breath. 

Wait.  Catch my breath.  Something wasn’t right.  Sitting up a bit I attempted to take in a deep calming breath of fresh air.  I got about half way through and my chest painfully tightened up.  At first I was worried: why can’t I breath, am I sick, having a heart attack?  What’s wrong?

Then, like a piano crashing down on poor Coyote’s head, it hit me.  I was, at 5:30 in the evening, still wearing the high-impact compression sports bra that I’d put on at 7 A.M. that morning.  My chest was pressed flat against my ribs, bound in near-iron fabric for more than ten hours. Too distracted to change after my workout, (eww, stinky, I know…) I had spent the day in an oxygen-deprived fugue. Of course I’d been despondent- it’s a miracle I hadn’t passed out!

Isn’t technology great?  Keeping my boobs rock-steady during aerobics- $60.  Killing off brain cells by crushing my lungs all day?  Priceless.

THESE THINGS I LEARNED AS A CHILD:

* Acquiring a taste for burnt food usually nets you the first and last batch of cookies all to yourself.

* Sisters can’t keep secrets.

* Grown-ups always believe the first one to tattle.

* You have 12 years of school to learn everything you need to know about life.

* Dads are smarter than moms.

* The best meal includes a fried product, a baked product, gravy and dessert.

* Being a kid is hard because you have to follow all your parents rules.

* Being a parent is easy, you just have to watch your kids grow up.

* Boogers make good glue when hanging pictures on the wall.

* Moms smell good.

* Babies smell bad.

* Santa Claus doesn’t really skip the bad kids, he just holds on to the presents until February.

* Chocolate is a good investment.

THINGS I’VE LEARNED AS A PARENT:

* Kids will eat anything if they’re hungry enough.

* Sisters can keep secrets.

* A good tattler prevents many catastrophes.

* You will never know everything.

* Dads and children are the only ones who believe that dads are smarter than moms.

* Any meal is good if its prepared by someone else.

* Being a child is easy, all you have to do is grow up.

* Being a parent is hard because you have to make sure your children grow up right.

* Boogers freeze in your nostrils in the wintertime.

* Mom’s smell good because they must constantly wash up messes made by the children.

* Babies smell good.

* Santa Claus shops at Wal-Mart.

* Chocolate is a good investment.

I came home from work one night and found that Steve had taken it upon himself to do supper.  It was salad night!  I love salad night!  We try to have a big chef salad at least twice a month.  I’ve been fortunate in the fact that all of my children enjoy vegetables. 

I had arrived home late so it was just my husband and my oldest daughter still at the table.  Steve was digging into a huge mixture of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, mushrooms and radishes smothered in bleu cheese dressing.  Rebecca was doing her homework while munching on a big bag of popcorn.

‘Did you eat?’ I asked as I made my salad. 

She just made an ‘mmmmmhhhhmmmmm’ sound without looking up from her book.  ‘

‘A salad? Cos I KNOW that popcorn isn’t your supper!’ 

This time she did look up and she gave me one of those looks that teenagers give their parents when they can’t believe how stupid their parents are….

‘Popcorn is corn, corn is a vegetable, salad is vegetables…  I’m eating popcorn salad.’

Okay, I know when I’ve been beaten.  It took me a minute to shut my gaping mouth and then I just ate my salad in silence, trying to think of some intelligent remark that would support my belief that popcorn in it’s popped form wasn’t really a vegetable but nothing came to me.  I decided to let the subject drop in the hopes that she would not try to add a bag of corn chips to her corn ‘salad’. 

My kids are not like me at all.  They are better and worse at the same time… and for that I am afraid… I am VERY afraid!

I have a new nickname, a well earned one by all accounts.  “Momster”  It’s a combination of ‘mom’ and ‘monster’.

“Aw, come on guys, I’m not that bad!”

It started with my resolutions… for them.  And I sneaked in a new daily chore chart, complete with smiley faces.  Each rotation lasts a week.  The smiley faces are on the ‘Wall of Shame’.  Nobody wants a frowny face.  When the girls were sick with a stomach bug someone drew spew coming from their grease pencil frowns, complete with chunks.

So for the past 3 weeks my house has been somewhat presentable.  I am not running around like a chicken without a head trying to work 8 hours, cook and then clean up after 6 perfectly able bodies.  Now they actually help out, not for allowance, not for privileges, but for a silly little grease pencil smile on their circle and two dot face up on the Wall of Fame/Shame.  Money they know they just have to ask for, but they have to earn that upward curve and the bragging rights that come with it (especially when someone else neglected their duties).   I don’t even have to enforce it.  The siblings nag each other.

And yet I am the ‘momster’.  Oh well, so long as the work gets done and I’m not the only one doing it.