It’s August 23, a Friday, and where we live, the kids still have 10 days of summer vacation before they go back to school. I have to say that the kids have had a grand summer. Lots of time off, sleeping late, visits with friends for swimming and parties, soccer for the boy, sleepovers for the girl, golf outings for both, their first trip to Yosemite (before the fires). And a Mom (and Dad!) making it all happen. Paying the bills, driving the car, cheering them on. Good for them.
But a hard season for me.
Tired of being in the house. Tired of being in the car. Tired of being surrounded by bodies. When you’re a mom, any time your children are anywhere within earshot, a measurable portion of your brain is ALWAYS in monitor mode. It’s rather like being on call 24 hours a day, all week, every week.
As a basic introvert (the cool thing to be now if you measure all the attention given us recently), summer for me is one long, slow leak of energy as from a battery. Constant. Relentless. The drips of energy slowly draining the tank.
This is the reason moms count down the days till school starts, the reason moms like this one do a happy dance when the school bus pulls away from the curb on that first day of school.
It’s not that we don’t love our kids or enjoy being with them. Never that. (OK, so maybe when they’re whining or rolling their eyes at us we don’t necessarily LIKE them.) But when they overstep their boundaries, pervert their privileges, and need to be grounded, it’s as much a punishment for the parent as it is for the child. Maybe more so. When your parents said, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” they were right.
It’s tough to balance the daughter pulling away to spend more time with friends and the ongoing thrill of the first boyfriend and the son seduced too often by the ubiquitous screens – TV, computer, and any other flat surface with moving images, especially animated ones. (Some day, Bill Gates and the ghost of Steve Jobs will have to answer for creating a nation of zombies.)
So it’s no wonder some parents prefer going to work somewhere else. If co-workers roll their eyes or whine, you at least know you aren’t responsible for their bad behavior. You can chalk it up to their own bad parenting. (I’m convinced that we’d never have gone to war in Iraq if Saddam Hussein weren’t the victim of bad parenting.)
But it’s not just the kids that siphon off strength. It’s the additive effects of worrying about elderly parents far away, changes in job responsibilities, the dripping showerhead needing repair, and the dog commanding as much attention as possible to make up for all that was denied him last school year.
So on this Friday afternoon, when I’m so mentally tired I can’t string two sentences together coherently, the best I can do is slip into that space of escape known as the local movie theater. “We’re the Millers” won out over “The Butler” because I just didn’t want to think about class, race, and power structures, the things that go on in secret in the halls of power, even if the story involves the ubiquitous Oprah. Enough of mental gymnastics. I’ll leave those to my academic colleagues for now.
I wasn’t expecting much from “We’re the Millers.” Apparently, few others were either. There were only three of us in the theater this afternoon. The move presents a conventional story – a group of down-on-their-luck people who learn to become a loving family. Lots of plot twists, R-rated language (and gestures), and the seductive stripper scene where Jennifer Aniston proves she still has it. Not Oscar-worthy (despite the coy look Jennifer and Jason Sudeikis give the camera after a remark about the dual roles they play in the movie), but very clever, worth the price of a matinee. I laughed at the scenes and admired the finesse of the actors. As their story unraveled on the screen, so too did my dark mood, and that too was worth the price of admission.
So thank you, Jennifer and Jason. Thank you for reminding me that family life is always challenging, but not without humor, and that “parent” is a role, not a person.
Firefly 