But Gulley and I often feel we can’t stomach another meal at McDonald’s. We are grown women. We need something a little more sophisticated, a little more refined.
So we make a run for the border.
Which for us is a true delicacy because Taco Bells are next to nonexistent when you live in San Antonio, Texas—home to over 852 Mexican restaurants.
In spite of the easy access to some of the best Mexican food in the world, Gulley and I still crave Taco Bell from time to time. Which just goes to show, you can take the girls out of East Texas, but you can’t take East Texas out of the girls.
This stop is also our chance to load up on Diet Coke to fortify us for the remainder of the trip because by this point we’re usually beginning to question our sanity and wonder how one child can ask, “Are we there yet?” at five-second intervals.
The kids never disappoint us in that regard. Usually we’re in the car only about four minutes before one of them asks, “How much longer until we get there?”
I reply, “We’ll get there when we get there. Don’t ask us that every five minutes.”
“Okay . . . but how much longer till we get there?”
The good news is they only ask about forty-two more times over the course of three hours. And in between they alternate which two of them are going to annoy the other one until that one decides to tell on the other two. Then they interrupt Gulley and me to rat out their fellow man. What they don’t know is that Gulley and I decided a long time ago we would have a strict policy of telling them, “Work it out yourselves,” because we’re too busy discussing wrinkle creams and our hair to get involved in their backseat drama.
After one of our visits to Bryan it was about time to head home, but Gulley and I weren’t in any hurry to get on the road, so we decided to take the kids to a nearby splash pad to burn some energy before we got in the car. Will decided he’d rather go with Honey, which is what the kids call Gulley’s mama, to visit Nena because Nena styles his hair for him when he visits and he’s a fan of the gelled coiffure. So Gulley and I took Caroline and Jackson to play in the water, which was a great idea until Caroline fell and skinned her knee and the top of her foot.
You would have thought we’d just amputated her leg with a dull butter knife. She was actually fine until she saw the blood, and then she got the vapors. We left the park to pick up Chick-fil-A for lunch while Caroline continued to moan about her injury and the cruelty of life. It was like a monologue from a Lifetime movie and finally ended with my interrupting her to tell the story of the little boy who cried wolf. I’m not sure it was entirely relevant to the situation, but it was the first fable that came to mind, since I didn’t recall any about a little girl whose mama leaves her in Bryan, Texas, because she’s being a drama queen.
Finally we got the kids back and settled at the table to eat their lunch. All was well until Honey walked in with Nena and Will. Caroline realized she had a fresh audience for her tale of woe, got up from the table, and began to hop over to where they stood while she said in her most pitiful voice, “Honey, I’m not hopping because I want to, but because I fell and scraped my knee.”
Did she not learn anything from my recounting the tale of the little boy who cried wolf?
I told her to sit down and eat her nuggets before I started in on another fable, perhaps one involving children who aren’t fortunate enough to spend part of their summer vacation riding the train in Waco, Texas.
After the kids finished eating lunch and got up from the table, Nena leaned over to me and whispered, “Caroline seems to enjoy ill health.” Gulley mouthed to me across the table, “It takes one to know one.”
Nena is herself a fan of any type of illness. In fact, if you asked her, she’d tell you she has had six surgeries in the past two years even though three of those were root canals.
Eventually we got on the road. (I wish I were kidding when I tell you I had to carry Caroline to the car because of her injury.) Everything was going smoothly until we stopped for a potty break and the kids all begged to get something to drink. Clearly we were a little off our game because we let each of them get their own twenty-four-ounce bottle of Gatorade. Then, because I am an idiot, I got in the car and made the dumbest declaration of all time.
I turned around, looked each kid in the eye, and said, “We are not making any more stops. Do not drink more than what you need to drink because there will be no more potty stops. I repeat: there will be no more potty stops. Drink only what you need.”
Genius.
About five minutes later, Gulley and I were deep in conversation in the front seat when we heard some cheering and yelling coming from the backseat. We turned around to see what was going on, and I kid you not, Caroline and Will were having a Gatorade chugging contest to see who could finish their bottle first.
My first thought was that their ability to drink twenty-four ounces so quickly does not bode well for their college years. My second thought was to wonder if I needed to take Caroline to the doctor to get her hearing checked.
Sure enough, we had to stop fifteen minutes from home at a questionable truck stop so those two clowns could go to the bathroom. Rumor has it they each went for about four minutes without stopping.
When we were finally about six blocks from my house, Will announced he needed to go again. Gulley and I both said (maybe yelled), “You can hold it. It’s just six blocks.” I pulled up to my house and handed Gulley my house keys so she could take Will to the bathroom while I unloaded the car.
But it was too late.
Will had let himself out and was happily peeing in the yard right outside my house, which considering we were in the midst of a drought, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Unless you’re the person in a black Suburban who drove by in time to see the whole thing.
Over the years we have endured car sickness, fights over who ate more Cheetos out of the community bag, and tears because someone was belting out Jon Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” too loudly and it hurt someone else’s delicate ears. Along the way, Gulley and I have decided there is really no better indicator you’re a mother than acquiring the ability to catch throw-up in a plastic bag, disinfect your hands, and immediately ask your friend to pass the beef jerky as you put on another Taylor Swift song and act as if nothing has happened. It’s a unique skill set.
There have been times when we’ve been desperate to get home and wondered why we ever thought this was a good idea as we looked for a place to stop and take a break from the car, only to find there’s not a nearby gas station or convenience store around—or a fire department where we can drop off the kids and see if they’re too old to be placed for adoption.
And there have been times we’ve had so much fun we think we might want to buy an RV and just travel cross-country all the time. Even though I am kidding myself if I believe I could ever learn to park an RV.
But the family road trip has become a tradition. We spend all year discussing where we want to go next summer and what we’d like to see along the way. Because for us it’s not about the destination as much as it is about the journey. A journey that involves stopping along the way to smell the roses or see a snake farm or drive through a Texas zoo that turns out to have only a bunch of cattle grazing in a field—as if that’s exotic. And we laugh and we argue and we have moments where we could all use a time-out.
There are times when, if our drive was any indication of what Ma and Pa Ingalls went through, the Little House books should have contained the line “And then Pa kicked us out of the wagon, left us on the prairie, and said, ‘Good Luck.’”
But I guarantee we’ll be back on the road this summer. And every summer after that until the kids are grown and Gulley and I can finally take that trip to Cozumel.
(And I bet we’ll be a little sad about it.)
(At least until they bring us our fruity drinks with the umbrellas as we lie out by the pool.)
Chapter 24
The Dream of the Wheaties Box
A friend once told me that the worst part about having children is visiting all the theme parks. I disagree. I find the theme parks fairly fun as long as the temperature is less than one hundred degrees. I think the worst part is all the extracurricular activities and the social pressure to be involved in everything. When did motherhood become a competitive sport?
I mean, can’t I get my kid potty trained before we decide if she has what it takes to be an Olympic athlete? Or have we reached a point where we invest thousands of dollars and countless hours on gymnastics classes because we saw our toddler roll down the slide at the McDonald’s PlayPlace and feel it’s a sure indicator of her future athletic ability?
Don’t get me wrong—I’ve been guilty of the same thing. Caroline learned to swim before she was two years old, and I remember many days by the pool smiling at other moms who were jamming floaties on their kids’ arms while I struggled with an inordinate amount of pride, more than slightly convinced I had given birth to a child who was clearly going to be on the front of a box of Wheaties by the time she was thirteen.
There is nothing like sports and academics and every other activity to bring out some latent competitive instinct we didn’t even know we had. And it doesn’t help that we live in a society that thinks it’s totally normal to have your child enrolled in guitar lessons and underwater macramé classes by her second birthday, lest she fall behind in her area of giftedness.
In other words, we’re all crazy.
From the time I first learned I was having a baby girl, I dreamed of the day I could sign her up for ballet class and dress her in a pale-pink tutu. So as soon as she turned three years old, I signed Caroline up for a weekly ballet class. Which, soon after, became known as my weekly beating.
Oh, sure, she loved the tap shoes and the ballet slippers. She loved the leotards and the tutus. She loved watching herself in the mirror as she performed all sorts of dance moves—none of which happened to be the same routine the class was actually doing.
But because I had a deep-seated need to see my baby girl perform in a dance recital, and because I am constantly searching for ways to make my life more difficult, I signed her up to participate in the recital and wrote a check for more money than I care to admit to pay for the costume.
What I envisioned was a delicate little pink tutu with yards and yards of tulle. The reality was a hot-pink costume with glaring polka dots, complete with a huge neon-yellow bow for the top of her head. It was a costume that would cause Charo to say, “Wow. It’s a little gaudy.”
(Does anyone else remember when Charo used to be on The Love Boat almost every week? The ’70s was an awesome time for inappropriate television shows that kids had no business watching.)
I barely survived that year of ballet. In fact, it’s hard to talk about even now.
It’s as if some latent-stage mothering tendencies rose up in me and caused me to act like an insane person. Next thing you knew, I could have found myself sitting backstage, saying, “Sweetie, put down the sippy cup and let’s get this eyeliner on before we take out your hot rollers and tease your hair. And don’t forget to use your sparkle fingers!”
I wept with relief when Caroline announced she was done with ballet. But after a year off, she decided to reenter the dance arena.
I supported her because that’s what parents do. It’s just like when my mama bought me those new roller skates with green wheels and a stopper because I had set my sights on becoming a professional roller skater. I blame the movie Xanadu for that ill-fated career ambition. But at least that was better than my other ambition, which involved being the best mechanical-bull rider at Gilley’s and wearing white cowboy boots under my wedding dress, courtesy of Urban Cowboy.
When I signed Caroline up for lessons the second time around, the instructor informed me that Caroline would have to retake the class for beginners because she’d sat out for a year. Everyone knows the year you turn four is crucial for proper dance mechanics.
I was okay with it because it seemed to be dance studio policy, but on the day of her first lesson, I noticed she was about a foot taller than any of the other little girls in her class.
Also, she was one of the only ones not wearing a Huggies Pull-Up.
She thoroughly enjoyed the class the first week because she knew all the music, plus she was kind of the star of the show—if for no other reason than she didn’t tee-tee in her leotard. But after the next week she told me she didn’t want to be in a class with babies.
I called the dance studio and explained Caroline was the only five-year-old in a class of three-year-olds. Was there any way she could move up to the class with the other five-year-olds? They told me to show up for our scheduled class and they would evaluate her abilities to see if she could be promoted.
What exactly were we evaluating? Her ability to hold Barney in front of her while she pointed her toe out to the side? Or maybe her ability to pretend to be a fire truck as the whole class ran screaming around the room in their little ballet shoes? Or perhaps her proper use of the fake binoculars as they played the theme song from Dora the Explorer?
You just know that’s exactly how Baryshnikov got his start.
I gently explained to the instructor that it wasn’t so much about her brilliant interpretation of Dora the Explorer leaping through the rain forest as much as the fact that she knew how to go to the bathroom by herself. And with those kinds of lofty ballet goals, I knew that it was just a matter of time before she won the role of Sugarplum Fairy.
Eventually the dance teacher agreed to promote Caroline to the five-year-old class even though she let me know she was very concerned we had fallen too far behind in our “dance career.”
Our dance career?
Are you serious?
Do you think that potbellied five-year-old who picks her nose throughout the entire class is going to have a dance career just because her mama operates at a higher level of denial than I do and continues to fork out precious money for dance classes year after year? Doubtful. Whatever happened to just twirling around with your friends in a tutu that makes you feel pretty and gives your mom some nice photo ops for the family? Isn’t that what dance is supposed to be?
Anyway, it all turned out to be for nothing because Caroline decided two weeks later that she wanted to quit dance once and for all. I realize some people believe you should make your kids stick with something once they’ve committed to it, and I agree with that, to a point. But not to the point that I was willing to subject both of us to complete misery for the next eight months. Sometimes, in the legendary words of Kenny Rogers, you got to know when to fold ’em.
And so our dance career came to an end.
Later that fall, Caroline realized some of the kids in her kindergarten class were playing soccer, and she announced that if she only had one wish, that wish would be to not have a lame mom who hadn’t signed her up for a soccer team. She didn’t actually say that out loud, but she said it with her eyes.
I’d debated signing her up for soccer but ultimately decided that just making it to kindergarten five days a week was enough of a transition and there was no need to add a Saturday morning commitment.
When spring came, we signed up for T-ball because I realized that an inevitable part of parenthood involves spending at least thirteen years of Saturdays cheering from various sidelines. And I took comfort in knowing I’d be able to sleep in again at some point in 2021.
This was our first foray into sports, and it was okay. I enjoyed visiting with the other parents, and Caroline liked being part of a team and wearing a uniform, even though she didn’t really care for T-ball because “there’s too much sitting around doing nothing.”
So the following fall I signed her up for soccer.
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but I played soccer in high school. If you want to know what that looked like, all you need to do is picture Mia Hamm. And then picture the opposite of that.
My high school had formed a br
and-new girls’ soccer team my senior year, and I basically made it because they’d ordered twelve uniforms and only eleven girls showed up for tryouts. The only reason I showed up in the first place was because I felt like I needed another extracurricular activity on my college applications to offset the glaring fact I’d had to take Algebra II twice.
Sadly, I spent most of the season sitting on the bench because the coach seemed to have issues with my tendency to stop running after the ball to retie the bow in my ponytail. There was also that time she tried to teach me to do a header, and I ducked and screamed. It just seems unnatural to hit a ball with your head. On purpose.
Anyway, I filled out all the registration forms for Caroline and received an e-mail letting us know they’d received our forms and our coach would be in touch to let us know about practice and whatever. But as the season drew closer and we still hadn’t heard anything, I started to get a little worried. Then, finally, we got an e-mail that announced Caroline was assigned to a team but no one had volunteered to be the coach.
I think you all know how this is going to end.
Perry came home at the end of the day, and I told him the news. We agreed that we’d wait and see what happened over the weekend. Maybe someone else would volunteer. It was totally like that scene in Footloose where Kevin Bacon and that other guy are playing chicken with the tractors to see who would drive off the road first, except in our case there were no tractors or cool sound track involved. Yet make no mistake: we were holding out for a hero.
On Monday I e-mailed the coordinator to see if anyone had offered to coach the team (I am always the one to drive off the road first), and he responded, “No one has volunteered. We really need someone to STEP UP and coach the team.” He totally threw down the all-caps STEP UP guilt gauntlet.
When Perry walked in the door later that morning, I asked, “How do you feel about us coaching soccer? Do you think we could coach?” He looked at me and said, “But neither one of us knows anything about soccer.”
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