Blacklisted from the PTA (11 page)

Are We There Yet?

 

T
HIS YEAR
I
BOUGHT AIRLINE TICKETS FOR
A
UGUST IN
A
PRIL
. That’s how far in advance I planned our summer vacation. Not exactly spontaneous. As I confirmed the reservations, I wondered when summer vacation morphed from something that exemplified pure freedom to just another obligation. When had it become a mere set of squares on the calendar to coordinate?

When we were kids, the last day of school and the first day of the next school year may as well have been decades apart. All we knew was trips and reading lists and sleeping in. We had waterslides, watermelon, and trout fishing. And the end was too far away to imagine. Just like those long car trips where we could not help ourselves but ask, “Are we there yet?”

By the time we hit the more permissive middle school years, we had traded jumpers for bikinis. Summer meant drinking ulcer-inducing quantities of Diet Coke, watching MTV until our eyes bled, and taking sex quizzes in Cosmo—all while baking in the sun under a healthy coating of baby oil mixed with iodine. We were all pink cheeks and blonde streaks, earned honestly at the seaside or pool. In high school we had summer jobs and summer loves. We sneaked out and drank wine coolers until dawn. The college years brought more of the same, only legal this time. Those became the summers against which all future Junes, Julys, and Augusts would be judged. If ever we were there, that was the time. And we thought it would last forever.

But it didn’t last long. We grew up and went to work and packed up summer vacation with our varsity jackets and mix tapes. Highlights were acquired at the salon, and the rosy pink glow came courtesy of Cover Girl. The closest we came to liberty was sneaking out of the office early to hit Happy Hour, and maybe a week off for good behavior. The sun still brought fun, but even when business was slow, there wasn’t much difference between summer and the rest of the year. Days were spent in cubicles wishing we were anywhere but there.

Then we had kids and their summer schedule dominated ours. Simply taking care of them during non-school hours became a challenge. Working parents scrambled for childcare and their stay-at-home counterparts scraped at their own fragile sanity in a house overrun by children. There was tennis practice and drama camp, the junior botany club, and something down at the library with Elmer’s glue and sequins. Summer seemed more like a prison sentence than a get-outof-jail-free card. Even the pool was a chore. We knew that SPF 50 was probably overkill, but a kid’s sunburn might get us hauled into Child Services. Weeks zipped by on the calendar faster than we could pencil in a day at the lake and a trip to grandma’s house.

It was our children’s turn to ask, “Are we there yet?”

Soon they will have their own jobs, and cars that carry them away for frighteningly long stretches of time. If you’re like me, you can’t help but wonder what you’ll do when your little birds fly the nest.

I can tell you exactly what you’ll be doing.
Working.

Someone’s got to pay for all that fun. And you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you? It’s the natural evolution of summer. The result, however, is that the next time you can expect to have anything resembling the carefree joy of your youthful summers will be sometime after 2030.

Meet me at Happy Hour and we’ll gum some corn chips and suck down a virgin margarita.

Are we there yet?

Camping, Anyone?

 

I
T WAS THE HOTTEST DAY OF THE YEAR
. N
ATURALLY
,
WE DECIDED
to camp. But first, for added amusement, we spent the entire ninety-plus degree day on the lake with friends. All day we soaked in the sun and its glare off the water. Grownups quenched thirst with beer while kids gorged on Cheetos and orange soda. We all got sunburned. As the hour got later and hotter, friends questioned our choice to sleep in a tent. But we truly believed it would be fun.

Around six, when everyone else docked their boats and headed for the air-conditioned Nirvana of their suburban homes, we trailered up and parked ourselves at the campsite. A friend waved goodbye, saying “I’ll be thinking of you tonight, when I flip my pillow over to the cool side.”

But we knew. We KNEW how to have fun. Not like those wimpy homebodies. We had hotdogs and ‘tater salad and all the makings for perfect s’mores. First, we built a fire. My husband thinks of everything. Never mind it was ninety-five degrees without a breeze. How else would we cook the hotdogs? While the fire blazed, the kids complained. Even the lake—by now one huge bathtub—offered no comfort. I gave my children ice from the cooler, which they rubbed on their reddened skin. The dog hung his head.

“It’ll be fine once the sun goes down,” my husband reassured.

But he was wrong. Somehow the temperature increased after sundown. Even melted chocolate and marshmallow could not lift our spirits. In the darkness, we sat—around the place where the obligatory campfire had been. When it got too hot to expend the energy necessary to make up stories, we went to bed. And by bed, I mean the ground, cushioned by a generous layer of nylon tent floor. Our spacious four-man (yeah, right) tent offered the added benefit of trapping the now liquid air.

The children and I whined and feverishly fanned ourselves with paper plates. Finally, we pleaded with my husband to go home. He wouldn’t hear of it.

“It wouldn’t be so hot if you quit complaining, you pansies.”

Our protests affect the air temperature, apparently. But you know what they say: pick your battles. So I sucked it up and persuaded the kids to do the same. We suffered in silence until I felt I might actually suffocate. I sat up and pressed my face next to the tent “window,” hoping to get some oxygen through the nylon mesh.

“What are you doing?” my husband asked.

“Oh, nothing, Babe. Just breathing.”

That’s all it took—fear of spousal asphyxiation—to convince my husband it was time to go. The kids leaped into action. In the dark we packed the boat in record time. Our quickness was fueled by the joyful anticipation of sweet, cool A/C. I swear the dog smiled.

Five minutes out of the campsite the air temperature dropped ten degrees. But that was nothing compared to the icy cotton at home, on the flipside of my pillow.

Could Be Worse

 

B
LOODY
,
BRUTAL
,
BONE
-
CHILLING
S
QUIRT LEVEL HOCKEY
. T
HAT
’
S
what compelled us to drive five hours in the snow. We’d made good time to St. Louis, without so much as a missed exit, and checked into a Holiday Inn just off I-55. I took credit for that. A check of the coach’s email confirmed we only had time for a quick pee before heading to the ice rink so the nine- and eleven-year olds could skate to certain victory—or at least a consolation medal. With fifty pounds of reeking hockey gear, we headed to our first game.

Note: Good hockey moms Febreeze (yes, that’s a verb) and/or launder hockey clothes and equipment weekly. I prefer a good scrubbing annually. Call me green.

We piled into the Dorito-littered car, mapped the route on my handy i-can-quit-anytime phone, and headed north on I55.

“What did we do before we had GPS?” my husband asked. “We called people on the phone and they said things like, take the 54th Street exit and turn right on Maple.”

No need for unreliable human contact now. I had a Super Phone.

“It could be worse,” I told my family when my husband took the wrong ramp—the one that led to the graffiti district in downtown St. Louis. “It could be dark.” No one appreciated my joke.

After a quick tour of rundown factories with barred, broken windows, colorful wisdom sprayed onto the walls, and too many one-way streets, we found the highway that led to the Illinois suburb hosting the hockey tournament. (Yes, our game was in a different state than our hotel.) We had barely lost five minutes; my baby girl, the star defenseman, and my son, super wingman, would make it to the game on time.

Though my husband wasn’t saying so, I know he thought the wrong turn was my fault, and maybe it was. Sure, I was navigating, but he was the one turning the steering wheel. At least the phone battery was charged and the little blinking ball that represented our car on the map was back on track. It could have been worse.

“Are you sure this is the way?” my children asked six hundred and forty-seven times.

“Of course I am.” I held up screen with the digital image of the map. “See.”

Twenty minutes later we were lost again. This time it really was my fault, or rather my phone’s fault. The GPS missed a turnoff that led to Fairview Heights. We were headed to Chicago. I called the rink for directions to I-64 and our exit just before the coach called in a panic over the absence of his two star players.

“We’re almost there,” I told him. “Exit twelve, right? Off sixty-four?”

“Uh—I came in on fifty-five, so… not sure.”

“Okay, well, we’ll be there A-S-A-P.”

We were at the exit in minutes, within a mile of the rink. And with ten minutes to spare. We would have made it with no problem, if some genius hadn’t put the hockey rink too close to the shopping mall. In the crawling Saturday afternoon traffic, my husband’s face grew tighter and grayer at the eternity of each stoplight. He changed into the right lane, only to have the left move faster.

To diffuse the stressful situation I screamed toward the backseat, “Stop talking!”

“We didn’t say anything.” “Whatever,” I said. “Quit complaining. It could be worse.”

In the ensuing quiet, my synapses fired. I-55, really? Coach got here on I-55? Because according to my virtual map we were nowhere near I-55.

“That would be funny,” I said, thinking out loud, “if we were going to the wrong rink.” The crease in between my husband’s brows grew deeper. The kids groaned. I doublechecked the email with the rink address and reassured everyone, “We’re totally going to the right place.”

We found the street the rink was on. It was a dead end. However, we could see the building through the trees just yards away. My husband looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“I’m going for it.”

He jumped the curb, burned around a couple of trees, and bounced into the parking lot like a triumphant Clark Griswold pulling up to Wallyworld. I told him to pull up in front, unload, and I’d park the car. Just as my family had taken out the last of the hockey bags, the coach called again.

“How close are you?”

“We’re here,” I told him. I looked at red letters on the side of the rink. “US Hockey, right?”

Horrible silence filled the line.

“Uh—no. We’re at American Hockey.”

Of course they were.

“Didn’t you get my email last night?”

“No, Coach, I didn’t get your email.” Behind the car, frustration turned to anger. Gear thudded back into the car, doors were slammed, and the look on my husband’s face was—not good.

With the smelly bags and players reloaded, I hit the reverse route button on the mapping app and we headed back, rolling south on I-55 through downtown St. Louis, back the way we had come, with the Gateway Arch as a backdrop. This time it was getting dark; this time we didn’t get lost. I called the coach and told him we’d try and make the second half.

“Get dressed,” my husband told the kids. “We didn’t come all this way to miss these games!” They wiggled into their gear in the back seat.

My husband was not finding the humor, so I tried not to laugh. Tension in the car was high, but it shouldn’t have been. Who wants to watch four hockey games in one weekend anyway? So we were late to one game? It’s not a real problem, not like washing your favorite jeans with your best lip plumper in the pocket, or having to drive the Lexus when your Mercedes is in the shop.

To be a hockey family is to be privileged. The rink fees, the gear, the camps—it’s not cheap. And to travel on top of it? We spend a fortune going to other cities with their hotel rooms and overpriced breakfast buffets only to watch our kids get pummeled by host teams who only organize tournaments to subsidize their huge winning trophies. And it’s always the home team that wins. So what if we missed a game? It could be worse.

One of the other dads called to tell me we were up by two, as if, after getting lost three times and spending nearly an hour on the road, we cared about the score. We cared less even when we found out that the right rink was not only not in another state, but actually only five minutes from our hotel.

“Love to be a fly on that windshield,” someone joked when we arrived “It’s like that movie, right? Vacation or something?”

Exactly, except that in our car, unlike the movies, there are no punch lines—only clipped responses and deep cleansing breaths.

“At least we got to see the Arch,” my husband said. “Twice.”

On the ice, my son scrambled back from the box because he forgot his gloves. My daughter scored an assist in her first two-minute shift. I got to yell at a corrupt referee, “Does that whistle even work?” And that night our kids played harder at ‘wrestle hockey’ next to the pool at the hotel than they did on the ice. It was no surprise we didn’t win the championship. But we did come in second. And for that we got—

“Just…” my husband said with a sigh, “…ribbons.”

But it’s not about winning. We do it to create memories our children will carry into adulthood. Good memories, we hope. Maybe a happy childhood will cushion some of the pain of adulthood. I suspect though, that the memories they keep will have little to do with the thrill of a goal or the rush of a win, and more to do with those moments of screaming in the car. I just hope that in retrospect, like in the movies, they make them laugh. Because it could be worse. Our troubles could have nothing to do with botched directions and frustrated parental venting. I hope my children someday know that, and realize just how good they had it.

I also hope they remember their dad’s screaming more vividly than they remember mine.