Some of my friends have jokingly told me in recent days, “We hardly ever see you anymore.”
And they’re right.
There’s a reason for this, and the reason is: kids.
I’m not one to use my kids as an excuse, but I will say that they make going anywhere difficult. If we want to meet up with some friends at a park when the first rays of light splash across the horizon (which is when my kids wake on any given Saturday), we will pay for it on the way home. If we want to go grab lunch or coffee with some college friends while our kids play on a playground, skipping right past their nap time, we’ll pay for it on the way home. If we want to have dinner out with old (metaphorically speaking) double-date couples and keep the boys out past their bed time, we’ll pay for it on the way home.
You might notice a recurring theme here.
Most days, it’s just easier to stay home.
People often wonder why parents disappear for a time, usually that time period when their kids are young and incompetent and helpless to do anything but dress themselves, put on their shoes, and race out the door—and even that’s stretching it in my house. If I want to leave to go anywhere it’s almost certain that someone doesn’t have underwear on, someone can’t find their shoes, or someone is going to trip over the threshold of our front door and skin his chin.
Every Wednesday afternoon, we travel about forty-five minutes down a highway to get to a church and lead worship for a handful of teenagers. It’s late by the time we’re finished, and the kids have been cooped up in a church nursery for five hours, watching movies and eating unhealthy snacks and having everything at their disposal that they could possibly need to entertain them, besides nature.
This is a big besides.
By the time we get in the car, it’s way past their bedtime, and they’re so delirious they don’t even know how to act. This is how that trip back home typically goes:
Boys in the rear seats: Screaming their heads off, because they’re playing together. This means it’s mostly happy screaming, but I still wish we had volume control.
Boys in the middle seats: Trying to talk to Mama and Daddy, even though Mama and Daddy are trying to talk to each other. Talking soon progresses to whining, which progresses to very loud crying. One of them, the baby, is asleep, a small mercy.
Mama and Daddy in the front seat: Trying to have a conversation about the church service and what’s next on the week’s schedule. We’re not usually successful.
Over the course of the two years we’ve been conducting this excruciating experiment, I’ve captured countless conversations, taken copious notes on what boys do when they’re done talking (fart and sing is about it), and calculated, on average, how long it takes before a parent feels certifiably crazy in a car with children (only about 12.8 minutes, as it happens).
Here’s a typical sampling, collected this week:
9-year-old: You’re a skunk.
6-year-old: Okay, did you smell that toot?
9-year-old: Yeah, that’s why I called you a skunk.
6-year-old: Oh, I thought you were just calling me that.
5-year-old: Well, you are, kinda. You have white skin.
6-year-old: A skunk doesn’t have white skin. It has black fur with a white stripe.
5-year-old: Well, you have a black fur right there.
[He points to the chin of my 6-year-old, which I can assure you does not have fur on it yet.]
They all dissolved into hysterical laughter, as only boys who are brothers can.
Next they started telling jokes, which was excruciating.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting chicken.
Interrupting chicken—
[Very loud chicken noise.]
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interrupting cow—
[Even louder cow noise]
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting dog.
Interrupting dog—
[Dog noise that could shatter the windows.]
I thought it couldn’t get any worse.
And then they started singing.
My boys are actually really good at singing. This isn’t surprising; Husband and I used to be in a folk rock band before so many of them came along. We have three CDs in the archives and released a single a couple of years ago, because now that we have so many children it takes us four years to record one song. We’ll be ancient by the time the next CD releases.
So the singing doesn’t become a problem until the boys start fighting about which song they want to sing (as if they’ll ever agree) and who actually gets to sing it (as if they can’t all sing it at the same time). We suggested they sing their own songs, quietly, but the nine-year-old can’t stand this sort of thing. He likes order, not chaos, and truth be told, I do too.
But, hallelujah, it was time to turn off the interior lights, which meant they’d stop fighting with each other about who was going to pick the song they sing and would start fighting, instead, with Husband and me about how they just want to finish this one thing before the lights go out.
“It’s past bedtime,” Husband and I said. A thousand times, a billion times. By the time our boys settled down about the lights out, we sounded like robots. And I almost wished we were.
“I only had a couple more pages!” The nine-year-old tried one more time to get us to see his way.
“You can finish it tomorrow,” I said.
Actually, he finished it when we got home. He spent half an hour on the toilet reading.
By the time we get home from this weekly trip, Husband and I are usually all done with family togetherness, but still we’ll have to wrestle our twins into bed, put the baby down, and remind the three older ones that it’s bedtime, it’s bedtime, it’s bedtime.
Now it’s an hour past my bedtime, and I’m a little grouchy.
All that work is simply not worth it. Drop by my house anytime you want. You might have to brush some spiky blocks off the couches or step over the minefield of LEGO pieces carpeting our floor, and you might want to use the bathroom before you come, but you’ll always be welcome.
Just don’t ask me to go anywhere with these delightful little human beings.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
