Travel Time

Family trips are fun. One of the most thrilling days ever was when my mom surprised us by saying, ‘Guess what! You’re not going to school today! We’re going to Disneyland instead!!’ Probably every child’s fantasy come true. It was a gigantic gift that combined the thrill of spontaneity with a splash of truancy naughtiness tied up in a great big Happiest-Place-On-Earth bow. Nothing imaginable could’ve been better until after we arrived at the park and found out, not only could we spend the whole day there but we would be treated to an overnight stay in the Disneyland Hotel followed by even MORE merriment the next day. An unheard of elation overtook my sister and me and words cannot express the pure joy we felt. We had journeyed to bliss and were going to stay the night.

               After a jam packed day at the park, it was time to monorail it back to our glamorous room to settle in before waking up early to beat the crowds the following day. I couldn’t have more than five or six but remember thinking it was a particularly lush hotel room. I also remember being extremely impressed with the white pads of paper and miniature-golf sized pencils to go with them. Bedtime came and we were all snugly tucked in, imagining the glorious day lying ahead when Disneyland opened the following morning.  A few hours must’ve passed because it was the middle of the night and I was wide awake, feeling the magnetic pull of those pads of paper and pencils from the side table. Seemed like a pretty great time to start playing restaurant. “Hello!” I announced with energy not suitable for the middle of the night. “My name is Lilli and I’d like to take your order!” My mother, if her sleep is interrupted, is a VERY surly bear. She mumbled something inaudible from underneath her pillow. “Hi!” I persisted, “I’m your waitress this evening and I’d like to take your order!” Only silence came from my mother so I wandered over to my father’s side of the bed, navigating my way in the pitch black darkness. “Good evening, sir! Have you decided what you’d like to order?” He didn’t say much but I jotted down some scribbly marks with a quick efficiency on my crisp pad of free hotel paper. Climbing back over to my mother’s side, I asked her again what she would like to eat for dinner that evening. “Lilli,” she seethed, “get back to bed. NOW!” I couldn’t possibly go back to bed when there was an imaginary short-order cook waiting in the fake kitchen for her order. “But, I’m your waitress and I need to take your order!!” My mother sat fully up in her bed and barked, “If you don’t go to bed right this minute, we are leaving this hotel and going home immediately!” I think I must have been a little bit retarded. Or maybe just hankering for a huge helping of danger with a side of crazy. I was in the ring with a woman who, when it came to messing around with her sleep, saw no humor and would take no prisoners. I poised the tip of my pencil to the white pad of paper and asked in my most patient voice, dripping with hostess-like sweetness, “Would you like to hear the specials?”

               I don’t think we actually checked out at the front desk. I do think we ended up stealing the blue comforter off of the bed because I remember about 4 minutes after trying to take my mother’s order for the umpteenth time, I was sitting in the backseat of her car, bundled in the blanket, on the road back home. My sister was blearied eyed with exhaustion but her look towards me of utter contempt, knowing it was me responsible for her having to skip town in the middle of the night and missing the extra day at D-land will forever be ingrained in my memory.  Ask her. It still burns and it’s been 30 years.

               Other family trips would follow and some were alright but we never seemed to go the traditional, tropical, glamorous route. My mother was terrified of airplanes so we generally could only go where the Amtrak train would take us and the destination was always a surprise. She would wait until it was the departure day before unveiling where we were going. One time it was El Paso, Texas with a side trip to Juarez, Mexico. In El Paso we all gathered around the one tourist attraction: an enormous plexiglassed trapped donkey statue wearing a brightly colored saddle. Juarez was only slightly more entertaining as there I was convinced I was suffering through a brain tumor and I was going to die right there in the middle of the desolate, dusty road.

               One year we hopped on the train and ended up in Denver, Colorado during what the locals were proud to boast was the worst snowstorm in over 100 years.  Getting there was half the fun, though. My sister and I had always had a ‘thing’, similar to that ‘two for flinching’ business. So crazy, we were. Here’s the game as only an older sibling can create: she would try to slap my face and if she succeeded, I’d have to stop wherever I happened to be and knock my head on the ground three times. Inventive she is, my sister! So, sure enough, while we were jostling about in the dining car of the train en route to Denver, my sister reached over to swat my jaw. Whoo-hoo!! She got me! So I knelt down in the aisle of the moving train car to dutifully knock my head three times at the exact moment a porter was balancing a tray of food. Yes, he tripped right over me, sending the entire tray of food, silver domes and all, crashing to the ground much to the horror and amazement of the entire railway restaurant. A metaphor for what was to come in Denver: snow up to our shoulders and my sister stuck in bed with the flu. I’m not saying she deserved it but she did make a train conductor trip over me and drop his tray on my head. Karma’s a funny bird.

These adventures have only solidified my absolute love of travelling with my own young children. So far my favorite trip this year was when my husband and I took our sons camping. We were in our cabin thinking that maybe the rat we had heard in the middle of the night was just a figment of our imagination. Until we heard a muffled crunch crunch crunch followed by a hurried scurry and then in a flash there was our 18 month old shouting, ‘Doggie! Doggie!’  while trying to chase a panicked rat around the room.

               With getaways as glamorous as these, it’s a wonder why we ever stay home.         

Rebellion

Most people rebel against their parents in traditional ways: tattoos, belly button rings, sneaking out of the house. I never did any of those things growing up. I was saving the real rebellion for when I became an adult. The first thing I did that really flaunted my independence was when I went to college and the first weekend I returned home (which, in and of itself is a bit of a stretch since my college was about 9 minutes away from my childhood home and that’s with traffic) I was wearing a brand new pair of never before seen Birkenstocks. It was a spur-of-the-moment purchase and one I knew would get me a fantastic reaction. “What are those on your feet!??!” my mother asked. “Oh my God!” My sister wanted to know if I was a lesbian. Enjoying every second of their shock, I paraded around in my new hippie-chic sandals with great confidence. I was on my own and didn’t need anyone’s approval to buy overpriced, hideously ugly, not terribly comfortable shoes. I didn’t even wear them with the benefit of a pedicure. I was all grown up.

               But shoe shopping couldn’t compare to the ultimate giving of the bird to my mother’s core belief structure. Because when my son started kindergarten and I became a room mother, I might as well have dyed my hair purple and joined a nunnery. To be fair, this was the final insult after a long history of locking fists over glorified maternal stereotypes.  It started when I was very young and I insisted on clipping beautiful, glossy coupons out of the Sunday paper. My mother ignored me at first, figuring I was brushing up on my cutting skills. Her eyes widened in horror, though, when I begged her to use them at our local market. I wanted to dress up like Samantha Stevens in white gloves on her way to visiting Darren at the ad agency and stop by the market to pick up a few things on the way. My mother was horrified at the thought of one of her pals thinking she was suddenly poor and looking to save 15 cents on Hamburger Helper, a product she would never in a million years even consider buying in the first place. She compromised by allowing it to happen ONE TIME by surreptitiously glancing from side to side before sliding over a few crumpled coupons to the checker she knew by name, apologizing under her breath while looking my way with an amused expression that translated to, ‘It’s her idea… the whims of a child. You know how it is.’ I beamed with pride. We were on our way to becoming the ideal mother of yesteryear.

               Growing up, we were taught certain undeniable truths: nursing babies was for hippies who didn’t like to bathe too often, mothers making school lunches led to wholly dependent, uncreative children and the idea of driving a station wagon was pitifully laughable as if the poor women who were forced to endure that kind of humiliation might as well be chained up in a dark basement with a bowl of water and no lipstick.

So, imagine my mother’s horror when she learned I was actually going to nurse immediately following the birth of my first child. She looked at me like I was one of those crazy freak women still dirty from Woodstock.  When the going got really tough and nursing proved one hundred times more painful than 20 straight hours of labor, and as often as I liked to scream at my husband that I was a formula fed baby and ‘I TURNED OUT FINE!!!’ I kept sticking that baby on my cowering boob just to spite the woman who thought I shouldn’t do it.

Then came the day a few years ago that it became painfully clear I’d have to disappoint my mother again when it was no longer feasible to haul three kids in and out of a smallish car. I knew I was supposed to think station wagons were sexless mobiles only handled by matronly old bags with bad hair and worse clothes. But, deep down, I knew that couldn’t possibly be the case.  Watching Carol Brady cheerfully zip around in her two-toned brown and green wagon seemed pretty hip to me. And who didn’t jump at the chance to sit in the way back of a friend’s mother’s ride?  The day I succumbed to the necessity of buying a beige minivan, my mother only shook her head and smiled in a way that only meant one thing: ‘You’ve become one of them. It’s finally happened. Sad.”  But look! The doors open automatically with a button on the remote! You can squeeze four, maybe five kids if they’re skinny into an array of rows that fold down if you want to put a bike in there instead! But I doth protested too much. My transition to total embarrassment was nearly complete.

               The final nail in the maternal coffin came on that fateful day when she knew I was gone forever. Joining the PTA was bad enough but becoming room mother was the ultimate failure in the school of “have I taught you nothing?!?” I couldn’t help but be pretty self satisfied at my pure act of extreme rebellion. “That’s right, lady. This is me. I’m going to organize class ice cream socials and be at the center of the infighting between housewives and working gals alike. I will tactfully assign food assignments for parties and be the bill collector people flee from at Christmas time. I will tsk alongside the teacher like we are special pals, sharing a bond that non-room mothers would never understand. I will keep a modest distance from my child during class time so as not to elicit jealousy and resentment amongst the other children. Oh, yes. I will be the suburban nightmare with no other hobbies or interests you warned me about. Watch me micromanage!”

               Rebellion is fairly exhausting. It’s still not too late to get a tattoo or tongue ring but really, what’s the point? It’s much more satisfying to say it’s my turn in carpool after wondering what I should whip up for Saturday’s bake sale.

My Helpful Sister

I think in every family with more than one child, it’s easy for siblings to fall into certain roles and it’s easy for parents to perpetuate those roles by learning quickly which one is going to get the job done and which one is going to be the headache. Growing up, I think my sister would agree that I was the one who was expected to be helpful while she, due to her clever manipulation or ease of wit, could be counted on to avoid just about every household task at hand.  We were never a chore-driven family. There were never charts full of stickers or organized allowances after finishing agreed upon tasks. Our jobs were more directly related to and in response to our mother flipping out about our hazardous, probably bacteria filled rooms and learning how to run and hide if she decided we were being lazy and needed a job to do.  I had a friend who used to moan and groan because it was her job to put away the silverware out of the dishwasher and to clean her bathroom once a week. I’m sure I would’ve hated it, too, but at the time I thought it sounded kind of homemaker chic to put on some yellow, rubber gloves and spot shine the sinks. I probably would’ve tied my hair back in a red kerchief like Rosie the Riveter just for full affect.

               But while our household tasks were minimal, when our mother asked us to do something, she never sounded like how so many mothers today do by ending every request in a soft spoken, ‘ok?’. It was expected that we’d better hop up and start working or there’d be a pretty strong price to pay. Which is why it’s a bit baffling yet impressive how my sister managed from an early age to outsmart our crafty mother and avoid working around the house at all costs. 

Soon after my sister got her own phone line installed, she really put it to good use. There was a day our mother asked us to go out to the car and unload groceries. We were in my sister’s room which was directly underneath our parents’ upstairs bedroom.  Immediately after our mother shouted down her request, we heard her walk across her room to go into her bathroom, close the door and then lock it. My sister didn’t even have to utter a word. She just picked up her phone and dialed the number belonging to the rest of the house. We heard the click of the unlocking bathroom door, followed by the pound, pound, pound, pound of footsteps across the upstairs room floor and then our mother’s voice answering the ringing telephone. “Hello??” we heard. Then a beat of silence. “Hellooooo?” Then nothing. We heard a terse, frustrated sigh and then the hanging up of the phone. Pound, pound, pound back to the bathroom. Door shutting, knob locking. My sister shrugging with a grin like it was her duty to have to do it again. Ring, ring. Door unlocking and opening, feet stomping, phone being picked up, “HELLO?” Pause. “WHO’S THERE??” Stiffled giggles from downstairs. “WHOEVER THIS IS, I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW I’M GOING TO CALL THE POLICE!!” Big slam down of the phone. Groceries still sweltering in the hot trunk of her car, so, clearly it was time to do it again. Inevitably by the fourth or fifth time she’d come bounding out of the bathroom, she’d stub a toe on her way to grabbing the phone and we’d hear a thunderous, “GODDAMN IT!!!!” She never caught on to the fact that it was always my sister torturing her from downstairs but I think this is why, to this day, our mother rarely picks up the phone and almost always lets it go to voicemail.

               Another fun trick was to watch my sister squirrel her way out of helping out on party days. Our mother preparing for a party became a thundering general on the front lines of bloody battle. No one was safe. You either followed orders, head down or quickly got out of her path of crazed terror. I was usually relegated to non-creative, chopping, stirring kinds of activities. My sister would often be asked to do the same but no matter what the task was, she’d  immediately say, ‘I don’t do that,’ and keep doing whatever she was busy doing in the first place. My mother would get irritated but not waste a lot of time explaining to my sister the benefits in learning how to be a good party-thrower in order to eventually land a husband. She was too busy worried about the party at hand so would make me absorb a lot of what my sister decided she simply wasn’t going to do. Once in a while, to throw her off track, my sister would agree to do what my mother asked of her. Setting the table fancy-style in the dining room was usually one job she could be counted on to do. The two of us would start laying out the silverware and a few minutes into the task, just when my sister got bored, she’d secretly take a fork and give it a good, solid lick down the back of the tines. Who got the lucky fork a few hours later at dinner? We wouldn’t know at the time and wasn’t that just the fun mystery of it all? But we both knew who WOULDN’T be dining at the fanciest place setting of them all. Neither of us, that’s who. And when we’d start laughing during dinner at the person eating with the tainted utensil, our mother never knew why.  More often than not we were laughing because whoever it was likely deserved it.

               And speaking of forks, the simplest, most elegant torture my sister inflicted upon our mother on party days was a tried and true method that was three-fold in that it never failed to drive our mother crazy, amused us to no end and was a brilliant diversion for my sister to avoid doing any kind of real work.  Just when the countdown to guest arrival was ticking and food items were getting last minute spice adjustments and temperature testings, that’s when my sister would quietly sneak behind our mother with a fork and ever so gently; very, very subtly, just press the fork a tiny bit into her backside and then announce in a confident voice, “NOT READY!!” My mother would whip around, shocked by the sting of a fork in her ass and start screaming at my sister while trying not to drop whatever huge roasting pan she was carrying to the table.

               I know I’m guilty of falling into the same parental trap as my mother did when it comes to raising helpful children. My eldest is always first in line to do whatever task I need fulfilled. Our middle, however, is a little more reluctant to do so. He’s not old enough to learn how to creatively get out of helping yet, hasn’t been receptive to learning the tricks of his auntie just yet, but I can see it starting. He can’t even get his entire excuse of, “I’m too tired to put my dirty clothes in the hamper,” before his big brother swoops them all up and skips the hamper step to rush them all in the washing machine instead.

               In time I hope all my boys will join me on party days in perfect familial harmony, preparing food and adorning the beautiful table but in the meanwhile- it’s a safe bet they won’t be getting their own phone line or handling the fork duties any time soon.

The Mighty Manatee

When it comes to our kids’ education, nothing fills me with as much inner panic or turns me into a version of my mother more than when our first grader comes home with a project, report or assignment other than his typical weekly homework packet.  It’s a twisted, cyclical, silent, one-way conversation that ping pongs between, ‘What more can I handle?’ to ‘Why should I worry about this?’ to ‘How can we make this the best Manatee report the teacher has ever seen?’ to ‘I’m so annoyed at hearing myself nag him to do it, I’m just NOT going to nag and see if he does it on his own! Let him fail! That’ll teach him!!’ But no matter how many times I fantasize about a 6 year old having the motivation to tackle this wide-ranging subject on his own, I know I will not let him fail and I will mercilessly harass him every single day until we are both so sick of the subject and each other we will have wished his teacher had stuck to the boring weekly assignment instead of trying to teach him the importance of research and deeper study.

               Just the mere mention of our son needing to write and present an oral report prompted me to conjure up distant memories of my own elementary school anxieties.  Recollecting one seemingly innocuous task struck me in the gut like an extra helping of a bad burrito. In 4^th grade, I received an assignment which was to write forty short biographies on forty noteworthy Americans. All I wanted was to go to the stationary store and pick out one of those pretty report folders in a bright red or green. The kind that paper neatly clamped in to, thanks to the three gold brads down the interior spine.  Maybe a white sticker on the front announcing the title in color coordinated ink. But here’s a glimpse into how I grew up: What felt clean, neat, organized and simple to me translated to boring, average, institutional and utterly soulless to my mother.  

So, faced with this assignment, I cracked open an Encyclopedia Brittanica (first mistake. There are always more interesting ways to research) and started writing facts about these famous faces in history. My mother saw what I was doing and announced a different suggestion. “Why not (SHOW YOUR TEACHER HOW SMART WE ARE) and write all those biographies in rhyme!”  I don’t remember putting up a fight or not. I think by 4^th grade I was probably used to the whims of my mother’s and figured four rhyming lines for each of the forty people was less work than writing a whole page. And it was likely easier than actually researching and regurgitating actual facts. But it was clear once I arrived at George Gershwin either I was getting punchy, bored or 100% lazy because here’s how I summed up this brilliant composer through the magic of poetry: “Oh Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. Porgy and Bess, Bess and Porgy.”

               I think because writing extensive pages on 40 Americans seemed like enough work at the time, an oral presentation wasn’t part of the teacher’s plan. Obviously our teacher and my mother didn’t see eye to eye on this idea either. I mean, folders of facts were fine for some people but these poems of mine were way too important to be suffocated inside a notebook.  They had to be exposed for the whole world (or at least my fourth grade fellow students) to see and learn from and be impressed by until the end of the semester. So, the day the reports were due, my work had to be, once again, different. I remember staring with envy as each classmate entered our room and stacked one of those pretty folders, one on top of the other on our teacher’s desk. I had to be the last one in because of the sheer size and weight of what I was going to turn in. Each one of those forty fabulous Americans were presented in enormous, life-sized paper dolls, each holding hands in poetic harmony, glued onto this heavy vinyl material akin to several thick shower curtains cobbled together.  It was like dragging miles of thick plastic and then nearly choking underneath from the weight of it, trying hoist it up and stuff it through the door of the classroom. Kids made way to let me and my mother pass, watching the two of us try and lift it above our heads so it wouldn’t graze the floor, all eyes on the creative team who made it possible. Even my teacher stood by, a little dumbfounded by the size of it, resigned to the reality that my mother wasn’t going to ask permission before tacking this monster-sized project over whatever he had originally, painstakingly written on the chalkboard. It was up for the whole class to see and be awed by. The masterpiece had landed.

               I remember moments after the murmurs and buzz had died down, one girl in particular, the cool girl who always had the newest Guess jeans and Swatch watches turned to me and asked with an obvious sneer, ‘God. Couldn’t you have just turned in a regular report?’

               The humiliation of not fitting in, of being different, of not being cool like the rest of the class with their portable folders… one would think it would have been strong enough to make an impact all these years later. To a certain extent it has- that embarrassment of having to be different still gives me pause- but there’s still that part of me who wants to push, too.  It must be genetic that when faced with my son needing to do an oral report, my first impulse was to go to the internet to look up a local store  that might sell a size 7 manatee costume. He would look so cute with his little face poking out of a big manatee body! Wouldn’t his teacher think he’s so creative for taking his assignment that extra step? Won’t his friends find it absolutely adorable? Maybe a kiddie pool could be dragged in there, too, so he can recite his facts while splashing around in the style of that thick skinned, gray and blue, friendly water mammal.

               I wonder what rhymes with ‘manatee?’