Gulley’s older son, Jackson, was eighteen months old when Caroline was born. And I insisted that Gulley bring him over to meet her by the time she was a week old. Gulley walked in the door carrying Jackson, who’d been our baby up until that time, and all of a sudden he looked enormous. When did his hands get so big? Was that facial hair? What happened to the red-haired baby?
He’d been replaced by a new baby. He was the big kid now. I have the sweetest picture of Gulley holding him while he peeked over the edge of Caroline’s crib and saw her for the first time. I like to think it was love at first sight even though it was probably at least a year before he really appreciated her. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about something that just poops and cries—at least when you’re a toddler. Or a thirty-two-year-old.
Jackson and Caroline were already best buddies by the time Will came along, thanks to the countless hours they’d spent together in Gulley’s backyard while their mamas discussed everything from sleepless nights to potty training to our thoughts on wedge heels.
But Jackson and Caroline embraced Will. He became “Brother,” and they babied him endlessly. Finally Caroline had someone she could boss around, even though Will isn’t really a fellow who likes to be told what he can and cannot do. He once told me when he was just two years old that he was “gonna bust somebody’s tail” if the outdoor playground at McDonald’s wasn’t open that day.
When they all were little, Caroline and I would go over to Gulley’s house almost every afternoon, and the three of them would pile into Jackson’s battery-operated red Jeep and take turns playing chauffeur. We watched over the years as they were no longer entertained by just driving each other around and instead started seeing who could hold onto the hood of the Jeep the longest while the driver sped through the yard at full speed and Gulley and I yelled out threats and admonitions about the potential for a trip to the emergency room.
Gulley and I have a term we use to describe docile, gentle children. We call them “cup pourers.” The name is derived from the little kids who sit on the edge of the baby pool in the summertime and are perfectly content to just fill their little nesting cups with water and then dump them out and then fill their cups and dump them out while their mamas get to engage in enjoyable adult conversation and never have to make the run of shame around the pool in their bathing suits to chase a toddler who has decided to break free from the bonds of the baby pool in search of deeper waters.
I tried desperately to make Caroline a cup pourer. I even bought her this fabulous plastic Cinderella tea set to take to the pool in the hope it would entice her to sit for hours and “make tea” in the baby pool. (As opposed to making “tee,” which is another favorite pastime of the toddler crowd.) But despite all our best efforts, Gulley and I did not give birth to cup pourers. We have three kids who are constantly on the lookout for the party, any party. As long as there is fun to be had or the potential to give your mother a heart attack, they’re in.
And so our constant refrains over the years are “You’re going to end up in the hospital!” and “Why did you kick him?” and “Didn’t we JUST SAY that you couldn’t play in the mud?” Followed closely by “Y’all need to work it out. We all LOVE each other.”
Because while Jackson tends to be the peacemaker of the gang, Will and Caroline are like fire and ice. We’ve always maintained that we will never allow them to date because none of us could survive the drama. They are either totally in love with each other or threatening each other with cries of “I’m going to lock you in this room if you try to tell on me.” Of course Perry once made the comment that it sounds like a typical marriage to him. He’s hilarious.
Just a few weeks ago we were all at the Little League fields watching Jackson play baseball. Actually, Gulley and I were watching him play baseball. Caroline and Will were engaging in their favorite ballpark activity, which is seeing how much money they can spend at the concession stand. All of a sudden the two of them came running up to us, and it was easy to tell there was some sort of argument going on.
Apparently Caroline had bought some blue Sour Punch Straws and then realized she had to go to the bathroom. So she asked Will to hold them while she ran in the restroom, and by the time she came out, he had “lost” them. Which I think we all know is code for “I shoved them all in my mouth and didn’t think about the ramifications.”
Caroline told me her side of the story while Will told Gulley his side. And I think Gulley and I both knew exactly what happened, but we pleaded the case of each other’s child to our own. I said, “He might have lost them. Maybe he set them down somewhere and someone picked them up. Why don’t you just go buy some more?”
Meanwhile, I heard Gulley questioning, “Did you eat her blue Sour Punch Straws? Did you? Be honest.”
And he looked her straight in the eye and said, “Please believe me, Mom. I didn’t eat them. I DIDN’T.”
So we told them they needed to let it go and get along. Caroline ran off to buy another round of Sour Punch Straws, and Will tagged along behind her. Gulley turned to me and said, “I’m almost positive my child just lied to my face and has no soul today, but I can’t prove he ate them, even though I’m 98 percent sure he did.”
It was the perfect crime.
But Caroline and Will worked it out and came back with a new pack of Sour Punch Straws that they shared as they watched Jackson pitch, and they cheered loudly when he struck out two batters in a row. Then they begged us to let them all go home together because we had NO IDEA how much they missed each other. Even though they’d just spent two hours hanging out and fighting and making up. Like a two-hour special episode of Real Housewives of Whatever City.
Because, at the end of the day, they always love each other.
When they’re all together, they take on their respective roles. Jackson is the protective big brother. He once stared down a little boy who had been giving Caroline a hard time at school, telling Gulley, “That boy is bad news.” I’m counting on him to get her safely through high school. Caroline becomes the middle child, always searching for a way to make everyone laugh so she can bask in the center of attention. Which has unfortunately resulted in some mooning incidents. And Will is the baby. On the lookout to make sure he isn’t being wronged in some way, sometimes getting left out, but ultimately always adored.
Jackson and Will have taught Caroline what it’s like to have brothers. Together, they love and they laugh. They wrestle and they fight. They argue over who gets the biggest cupcake, and they roll their eyes at their mothers when they think we’re not paying attention or saying something they deem to be totally embarrassing.
And in return, I believe Caroline has taught the boys that having a sister means there is always a good chance for tears and drama, even when you’re not sure what you did wrong. And that having a girl around makes your world a little bit sweeter.
Even if it’s a girl who can burp as loud as you.
Chapter 23
Like a Band of Idiots We Go down the Highway
Every mother knows the reason Robert Frost took the road less traveled is because he wasn’t traveling with children who needed to go to the bathroom every thirty minutes. Otherwise he would have taken the road paved with McDonald’s and truck stops with restrooms, covered by antibacterial hand soap and prayer. And that would have made all the difference.
There is no other experience that can bring a family together like hours spent in the car wondering if the person next to you is going to get carsick again. Ultimately the road trip is much like the actual parenting journey: it takes you to new, unexpected places while you marvel that you just had to ask the question, “Why are you licking the bottom of your brother’s shoe?” or “Do you need to throw up in this plastic cup again?”
Of course, we don’t take the normal family road trip where Mom and Dad load up the Griswold family Truckster and hit the open road. Mainly because Perry isn’t a big fan of traveling unless it involves making the forty-five-minute trek to the r
anch to shoot something. And that doesn’t count as a road trip in my mind because there’s barely enough time in the car to have a reason to stop and buy some Corn Nuts and a Diet Coke at a sketchy gas station that makes you feel like you might be taking your life into your own hands. Not to mention the trip ends when all you can see is cactus.
The fortunate thing is that Gulley’s husband, Jon, isn’t really up for the road trip experience either. At least not the way we do it. Gulley has actually called me after they’ve returned from a trip to complain that Jon didn’t even want to stop for a bucket of fried chicken. And at that point you have to ask, “What’s the point of even getting in the car?” Why not just take a plane and pay six dollars for a bag of trail mix and a quarter cup of Diet Coke and be done with it?
So, as with most things in life, Gulley and I have discovered we are road trip soul mates. We believe in the importance of a good playlist, frequent stops for snacks and/or a bucket of fried chicken, and seeing the sights along the way because you may get only one chance in life to see an actual snake farm. (I still haven’t recovered.)
Our first road trip together with the kids was about the time Will was a little over a year old, Caroline wasn’t quite three, and Jackson was four. We loaded up Gulley’s SUV, strapped the kids in their car seats, sprinkled ourselves with holy water, and headed to see her parents. Mainly because we knew her mom would feed us good food and help us with the kids, and it was the closest thing to a real vacation we could think of since Perry and Jon shot down our suggestion that we fly to Cozumel for a week while they kept the kids.
I think we were about thirty minutes into the drive when Will began to cry because he still had to sit in a rear-facing car seat and wasn’t one bit happy about it. And then Caroline began to cry because Will was crying and it hurt her ears. And then Jackson began to cry because it was like that moment on a turbulent flight when you notice the flight attendants have put up the drink cart and are beginning to quietly panic. That’s when we discovered that Gulley is extremely dexterous as she maneuvered back and forth between the front and the backseat, trying to keep everyone happy while I continued to drive, looking for a place to stop and buy some Xanax from someone on the street.
But when we finally arrived at our destination, we were all happy to be there and thrilled to be together for three days in a row. So a tradition was born. We decided right then and there that we would load up the kids and ourselves for a week every summer to take a tour of Texas, stopping at various locations and attractions along the way before reaching our final destination. (By final destination, I mean Gulley’s parents’ house in Bryan, Texas, not heaven. Even though there have been times we thought the trip might kill us.)
Gulley grew up in Bryan/College Station, home of my alma mater, Texas A&M University. I grew up in Houston and later Beaumont, Texas, but my mom moved to Oklahoma during my freshman year of college. My dad and my stepmom lived in Houston, but I needed a closer place to occasionally take a break from the dorm.
So once Gulley and I became friends in college, I began spending so much time at her parents’ house that I was pretty much adopted into her family. Or maybe I just kept hanging out there until they had to come to terms with the fact they couldn’t get rid of me. Because you know what college kids love more than just about anything? Besides cheap beer? A place to eat a delicious, home-cooked meal, and a washer and dryer where you can do your laundry without stockpiling quarters for weeks on end.
In fact, there may have even been a summer when I just moved into her parents’ house because it seemed to make more sense than driving over there every single day. And I think it speaks volumes about what kind of people they are because they let me. And they fed me. They took me in and made me their own.
Maybe the whole thing was a little like the movie What about Bob? But I choose to not examine that too closely.
A large part of the fun is that Gulley’s entire family is a cast of characters, and I love them for it. The matriarch is Gulley’s grandmother, Nena. Nena is the quintessential Southern belle, and she will be quick to tell you, “I subscribe to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to keep up with all the latest fashions.” She wore a poncho and embroidered jeans to Jackson’s birthday party a few years ago, and she looked so good that Granddaddy (her husband of sixty years, who is suffering from a little bit of memory loss) introduced himself to her at the party and said he’d like to take her out and get to know her better.
One of my favorite Nena memories is the Thanksgiving she invited my then-boyfriend and me to dinner. When I was in school, Texas A&M and the University of Texas (UT) always played on Thanksgiving Day, so everyone stayed in town instead of going home for the holiday.
We showed up with the requested relish tray (I wasn’t even sure what that was), and she immediately told my boyfriend, “Oh, I just love your sweater! If you ever decide to sell that at a garage sale, you let me know.” Gulley was mortified, but I was hysterical. Later on Nena told us she didn’t know what else to say because “that boy was so good looking, if he had asked me to run away with him, I would’ve said, ‘Hold on, let me get my purse!’” Because a good Southern Baptist woman may decide to run away from home, but she’d never leave her purse behind. What if she needed six tissues, some breath mints, and eighteen tubes of lipstick in an array of colors?
One night when I was at Gulley’s house, I ended up sitting next to Nena, and she revealed that she was in the market for a new car. She didn’t really know what make or model, but she was insistent that it must have a sunroof. I sat there thinking how chick (as Nena’s best friend pronounces the word chic) Nena was to want a car with a sunroof at eighty-seven years old and envisioning her driving to the Winn-Dixie with the wind in her hair.
Then she said, “Yes, I must have a sunroof because on the news they always show people caught in floodwaters escaping through the sunroof. I need a sunroof so I can get out of the car if I’m caught in a flood.” (No, I haven’t seen a news clip of anyone being rescued through their sunroof either.)
I asked the question that was on everyone’s mind. “Nena, do you even drive when it’s raining?” I felt fairly certain I knew the answer.
“Well . . . no. But you just never know.” Uncle Johnny chomped on his cigar and said, “Well, Mama, just make sure if you’re ever caught in rising water, you open that sunroof before the water gets too high, because otherwise it’s not going to work any better than the windows, and then you’ve wasted good money on a sunroof.”
Later on Uncle Johnny pulled me aside. “I hate to think about Mama getting caught in a flood,” he said, “but I’d pay good money to see her try to get through a sunroof.” Which completely summed up my feelings on the matter.
Eventually the conversation turned from how to survive a flood to religious matters. Nena told us about her search for a new television. She said she went into Circuit City and told them she needed the biggest and best TV money could buy and money was NO OBJECT because her TV is as dear to her as her Bible.
And while we were on the subject of religion, Uncle Glen told us about his church. Uncle Glen lives in a solar-paneled log cabin in a little town outside of Bryan, and as Gulley’s mama will tell you, he was always a little different. Nena thought it was because she cried so hard when she found out she was pregnant with him.
But anyway, it seems that the church he attended used to be Church of Christ, but membership kept declining so “they wheeled in a piano and an organ and changed the sign outside to say nondenominational, and now we’re up to 130 members.” And they were serious about the nondenominational part because during Communion they put wine in the inner circle of the tray, along with grape juice for the former Baptists who still preferred to drink in the privacy of their own closets.
The only flaw in the new, improved nondenominational church was that they discovered that their preacher, after eight years of marrying and burying various members of the congregation, wasn’t licensed or ordained. There might be some fo
lks living in sin despite the best of intentions.
But I’m sure it’s some consolation that they had lovely organ music during the ceremony.
If everyone had an adoptive extended family like that, I am convinced Disney World would go bankrupt. Because in a day when everyone feels like you have to sell the family farm to get your kids to the Magic Kingdom by the age of two, I believe it’s about the simple things in life. Good friends, family, junk food, and yelling, “Don’t make me have to pull over!”
I want my daughter to grow up with an appreciation for the open road and touring the state capital in Austin or stopping in Waco just so the kids can see the Baylor Bear or driving to Dallas to ride the city metro bus and take our lives in our own hands.
An old-fashioned road trip offers a little bit of pure Americana that can get lost in this fast-paced world where we feel like we need to compete with the Joneses. I guarantee our kids have had as much or more fun on our little adventures than some poor kid who has been subjected to the “We are going to have fun if it kills us because this cost us a fortune” mentality that more exotic trips can bring.
Normally it’s about a three-hour drive from San Antonio to College Station—if you make the drive without any children in the car. For us, it takes about the same amount of time it took the Ingalls family to make it across the Midwestern plains in the dead of winter as they fought wolves, Indians, and the bitter cold.
Usually at the halfway point we stop at McDonald’s so the kids can use the bathroom and order a Happy Meal to get the free toy and eat half a Chicken McNugget and four paper cups filled with ketchup.
Sparkly Green Earrings Page 13