Good God. I am being held hostage in my own home. My captors are like drug addicts: prone to wild mood swings, tears, and violence. They're demanding, complaining, and entitled. And then they suddenly pass out. I cannot be the only parent to small children who is frantically hash marking off the days on the calendar like Casey Anthony in jail until my unholy brats...erhem, angel children...return to school. I've been traumatized. Picture me, hollow-eyed and wrapped in an Army blanket as I type this.
Okay, I am prone to hyperbole. But still! This summer has been a beating of epic proportions. It's July 8. There are six weeks left of this season of Extreme Parenting, and I've only written enough for the pilot. I'm so broke I can't pay attention. I just know they're going to kill me and eat me. I'm weather-beaten and chlorine-bleached from pools, sprinklers, and water parks. My face will be a leather bag by the time I'm 45. I've ironed on, glued on, painted, markered, stenciled, board-gamed, Play-Dohed, dosey-doughed, ring-around-the-rosied, ducked, ducked, ducked and goosed. So to speak. Only streaming Netflix has kept mob mentality from rising.
Additionally, no one tells you about the sheer physicality of full time child care. Your nose bloodied accidentally with a vicious head-butt related to the pulling up of someone's underwear. Bruised from kicking shoes as children literally scale you. Balls thrown at your face, or God forbid, other tender parts of you with no warning. Games of Horsey gone terribly, terribly wrong. You should see the gun show I've got going on from doing forty pound toddler curls all day.
Take for example of my summertime blues our cinematic excursion this week to see Cars 2, a two hour cartoon with twenty minutes of material in it. Never mind the second mortgage I took out to afford concessions. First we stake out enough seats for a basketball team, but naturally these seats go unused as my youngest alternate climbing me or swinging from or pummeling with their feet the chairs in front of them. Every one of them wants to be next to Mom. People in nearby seats relocate. The kids' complaints start:
Mommy, I wanted regular M and Ms. These are peanut.
I want up.
I want down.
I want something to drink.
I want to go home.
Mommy, this is scary.
Mommy, this is boring.
Mommy, I'm tired.
Mommy, I lost my shoe. *starts to wail*
Add the constant narration of the movie's action by a chipper four year old, and you're getting a little idea of the family fun. Add in temperatures over a hundred for eight days in a row, and I'm telling you, I'm going to need bail before August. Sibling rivalry has taken on an eerie, Mad Max cage-match quality. Even Hubs, who you have to poke with a sharp stick to annoy usually, broke a toy sword this morning before I arrived at the scene of the fray, pounding it into the carpet in madness, trying to separate them. These children would have Job himself getting reamed out by Nancy Grace on TV for abandoning them at a fire station.
It can't just be our kids. Please tell me I am not alone. I swear, no judge would convict us either at this point. He might even offer me an Army blanket. And can you get a small business loan to pay for lemonade, peanut butter, and Goldfish? I need a grant, people. A duffel bag of money. Hell, I'll take a charitable donation for therapy at this point. A coupon for half off chicken nuggets. Anything.
Oh, yeah. And while you're at it? I could use a big, fat, stinking miracle to make it across this River Styx we're calling summer vacation. It can't just be me.
