I’m beginning to have serious doubts about my ability to survive this trip. It has nothing to do with stamina – after all I’m not the one cycling seventy-five to a hundred miles a day. It has nothing to do with comfort – I’ve finally convinced my entire family that, while camping our way across the country sounds exciting in theory, it is an entirely different thing when you have to live that way for almost three months.
It has to do with the fact that after two or three hours in a minivan every day I just might have to kill all three of my children and end up on death row in some conservative Midwest state where they don’t understand Northeastern mothers’ stress levels.
Actually, I may not have to kill all of them. Only Sarah.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my daughter. In fact I am amazed every day that I’ve been allowed to be mother to this brilliant, creative, altruistic, funny, and beautiful child for the past twelve and a half years.
But right now – this particular day – I wonder how someone managed to replace that brilliant, creative, altruistic, funny, and beautiful child with this whiney, temperamental, irritable, diffident and petulant tweenager without my noticing it.
And I wonder if there’s any way we might possibly be able to leave her home while we traipse around the country for the summer. I mean, if you go away for the weekend, you can leave your cat with plenty of food and water; and know that three days later it’ll be fine when you get home. It probably won’t even have noticed you were gone. If we leave Sarah with a computer, a phone, and a freezer full of veggie burgers I’m fairly certain the same thing will happen at the end of the summer.
And her brothers, especially William, will be so much happier.
I’m not sure what it is, whether they’re too different or too much the same, but Sarah and William are like rubbing alcohol and chlorine – mix them together in a confined space and there’s bound to be an explosion. This would be fine if we could just put them in a room together and let them conflagrate themselves. James and I, though, will be in a minivan that seems spacious right now when peacefully compared to my station wagon; but that will get infinitely smaller when we’re stuck in there with two screaming dragons dueling to the death. Invariably, they’ll survive to lick their wounds for another battle while James and I will be the collateral damage in a sibling war waged on four wheels.
And my husband will be happily zenning out on his bicycle.
The reality of this trip is hitting home now and a very practical and not-so-exciting way.
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