This is the last day of peaceful quietness. Or foreboding silence and emptiness. Depending on how I’m viewing the world at any particular given moment. It generally takes a few days of everyone being gone before the silence really starts to get to me and I finally cave in and turn on the TV (which then stays on until some boys come home and turn it off) for background noise. This time, they’ve been gone entirely too long and I’m really looking forward to my full house again. I do not know what I will do with myself if I happen to survive long enough to see them all to adulthood and find myself living alone on a regular basis. I suppose I will travel. A lot.
Today we’re leaving late because my daughter wants to tag along and she happens to be in northern Ohio at a basketball camp for the weekend. Good news, they’re losing badly and as such she’ll be home early enough that it’s still reasonable to leave tonight rather than tomorrow. Not that I was going to wait anyway. I’ve never claimed to be reasonable when it comes to things like road trips. I was chatting with BFF and remembering a time when my middler was a baby and I was traveling quite frequently between IL and OH. It was a seven hour trip, door to door, and could *maybe* be done in 6.5 on a good night under the right circumstances. However, middler was a horrible, horrible, awful road tripper as a little guy, and these trips would quite frequently fall into the 10-hour or more marathon sessions that were hell for me and the older two (who were in the ranges of 4-6 for the younger and 7-9 for the older). Middler could escape from every car seat known to man once he started toddling, so from about 12 months on I’d be driving up the interstate at 70+ mph and BOP here’d be little middler between the seats grinning just as big as you please. I’d stop and get him resituated and restrapped and check everything to make sure I had it all done up correctly and try my best to look all mad and mean mommy when I told him in no uncertain terms that he had to stay in his seat… and ten or so minutes later BOP there’d be his little head again. I recall one night pulling over somewhere in KY and just crying on the side of the road, because I was out of solutions and I’d been stopping every 10 minutes for 300 miles and I was just so tired and so frustrated and he just would. not. stay. and I could not find straps that could contain him. And he wasn’t old enough to understand, and not going was not an option (I was doing court-ordered visitation schedules and it really was not optional). Oh, if he was behaving enough to actually stay in his seat (sometimes if the other kids would stay awake, they could make this happen for me) then he had terrible motion sickness and would inevitably puke all over everything at about the halfway point. It was hell. I do not know how I survived these years.
I never did find a good solution, but one strategy that I frequently employed was leaving at dusk such that the kids would fall asleep within an hour or so into the trip, and I’d arrive at the other end at 2 or 3 a.m. tired and bedraggled but at least without the drama of Middler Houdini and his Incredible Puking Extravaganza. I really enjoyed the late night drives, and being alone, and loved the feeling of it being just the trucks and me. I recall on occasion that the only thing I *really* hated was having to stop and pee, because 1) I felt vulnerable as a woman traveling alone with 3 small children at 1 a.m. at a truck stop in Nowhere, Indiana and 2). I hated that I had to wake 3 sleeping children just so I could run in and pee. But I was not about to leave them unattended and sleeping in the car so what choice did I have? It was still a better solution than driving with Houdini Pukekid, and I just tried to minimize the stops. I could do the trip with one stop on a good night, but more often it took two.
Tonight, I’ll be reminded of those trips as my daughter and I head out to Chicago kind of lateish. Not *that* late, but it will be 2 a.m. Ohio time when we arrive, most likely. These days, however, I’m more likely to be in bed by 10:00 p.m., and pulling an all-nighter means that I’m going to need to catch up with an all-dayer (of sleep!) Then again, I still have frequent bouts of insomnia in which I proudly proclaim on my facebook wall that “Sleep is for wimps” and declare that I do not need it anyway. Hopefully some of that attitude will hit me tonight, as I anticipate it will be a GREAT night for insomnia!
Speaking with my mom about this (the late traveling and such) and she insists that we all did things when we were younger that we wouldn’t dare repeat today – that common sense and the wisdom of aging instills upon us a desire to tread carefully as we realize just how fragile life really is. I disagree, however, at least for myself. I did in fact do all sorts of silly, inane, foolhardy, dangerous, and spontaneous things that I consider to be in the realm of “Mommy Adventures” (as my kids like to call them) but I think that I would repeat most of them today if I had the chance. And the lungs. YOLO and all that. Life *is* fragile, but I tend to view that as more of a reason to live for today and enjoy and treasure the moment I’m in. I try not to think about tomorrow too much, and maybe that means I’m in denial a bit but I’m okay with that. I’ll let other people worry about what tomorrow will bring, I’m too busy having fun today.
With that, I’m off to Chicago and hopefully it will be a non-adventure. My night vision is not as sharp as it once was. 🙂
Palikari Part Two 