My boys are fortunate to have two sets of grandparents who live in Texas. Their grandparents every now and then offer to keep them, in shifts, for the weekend, and they’ll take our boys all sorts of fun places and load them with sugar and feed them all the foods they’re not allowed to have in our house. They’ll let them stay up too late and deal with their whininess the next morning and effectively dismantle the schedule we sent them as a suggestion and then, two days later, hand them back to us with their eyes twitching.
“Here,” they’ll say. “You can have them back now.”
“You don’t want them for a couple more days?” we’ll say hopefully.
“Maybe next time,” they’ll say.
And we know there won’t be more days next time, because you know what? Raising six boys (even watching them for a couple of days) is really hard work.
On the way home from picking the kids up from the grandparents, the kids will typically tell us, in halting and never-ending fashion, about all the awesome food they had, which had sugar counts I don’t really want to know, and then they will, without even taking a breath, move on to all the fun things they did, like going to play golf and watching a movie every single night and swimming in a pool and swinging on a tire swing or digging in the huge dirt piles in their grandparents’ front yard and sleeping in their clothes instead of their pajamas and taking a bath all by themselves and having donuts for breakfast and going out to eat pizza and wearing their brother’s clothes instead of their own because grandparents don’t usually check labels and so don’t see that this crop-top belongs to the 3-year-old and not the 6-year-old.
Usually, while the boys are gone, Husband and I will work hard to clean up our house, which means that when we get home, the boys walk into a perfectly tidy, perfectly ordered house. Two minutes (or fewer) later, they will pull out all the stacks of artwork they did at their grandparents’ house and scatter the papers all over the floor because they think we surely want to see it all, even though it’s nothing new that we haven’t already seen. They’ll ask for dinner and go raid the fridge when we answer that it’ll be coming soon, and then they’ll have their first meltdown because there’s nothing good to eat in this house—at least nothing that compares to Lucky Charms and donuts and McDonalds and anything else that makes me sick just thinking about.
After this meltdown, they’ll progress into talking about how we’re the worst parents ever, because we never let them watch a movie or stay up too late or have donuts for breakfast, and we start going out of our minds trying to follow behind them and fix all the things they’re destroying as they’re walking around bemoaning the state of their life. We’d really like to start Monday with a clean house, but kids would really like to take that possibility and rip it into tiny little pieces we can’t see anymore.
We’ll move into the unpacking mode, splitting the shift where one of us unpacks and the other cooks dinner, but you’ll notice that both of these jobs leave few eyes to watch the melting down, tornado-like children. Dinner will be the worst dinner they’ve ever tasted, baths will be the worst time they’ve ever had in the bath, bed time will be the worst thing they’ve ever experienced in all their lives, and by the time the evening is finished, we will be the Worst Parents Ever.
There is definitely a detox time when it comes to handing off children to grandparents and then taking them back. We will have to detox their food expectations, their sleep expectations, their complete and utter lack of routine. We will probably be driven near out of our minds in the process. This adjustment period makes life feel like it will never be the same again. But eventually it will even out. And I will eventually be thankful that we took a weekend away and the boys got to have an opportunity to spend time with their grandparents for a couple of days.
On the surface, it might seem that the only reason a parent would want to send kids away with grandparents is to get a break themselves. And this is definitely one of the great perks of grandparent weekends. Husband and I have used our weekends to talk and actually finish a sentence. We’ve used them to cook dinners together that no one will complain about (although we usually have enough leftovers for an army, because we don’t know how to cook for two people anymore). We’ve used them to reconnect, dream, work, sightsee, and share a cup of coffee without a kid climbing on our laps (that’s not to say I don’t thoroughly enjoy my kids climbing onto my lap. I do. It hardly ever happens anymore, because no one ever wants to sit still anymore).
But what grandparent weekends also do is give two completely different generations an opportunity to get to know each other. Grandparents don’t have the burden of discipline like they did when they were raising their own children. They get to be fun. They get to be doting. They get to be the rule relaxers. This keeps them young—it’s been proven by science. Grandparents who take an active role in their grandchildren’s lives have sharper brains, more capable bodies, and greater heart health. (Keep that in mind, Mom.)
And kids get to experience their own benefits. It’s important that kids interact with another generation that is removed from their parents’ generation, because they can learn important things from their wisdom (like how you actually should wear deodorant when you turn ten). Kids get to experience the unconditional love of a grandparent who is not quite as concerned as their parents are over who they might turn out to be—because time has given grandparents perspective, and they know that everything irons out eventually. Kids get to be kids without someone continuously harping on them about picking up their dirty socks.
So while I start to dread the hand-off from a Grandparents Weekend about halfway into that freedom, I’m glad every single time that we sent the kids away perfectly calm and controlled and pick them back up crazy little wildings who forget what it means to brush their teeth and put away their clothes and do such things as after-dinner chores. I’m glad, because I know it’s all for everyone’s good.
My kids are currently climbing up the walls with their toe-knuckles. I’m currently scheduling the next Grandparents Weekend.
This is an excerpt from This Life With Boys, the third book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
