Road Trip with Mom: A Prologue, June 23
June 23, 2012
The house is a mess. The yard is a mess. I love saying that-the yard is a mess. I have a yard, and the yard was useful today. Since the day I left my teaching job in Baltimore on June 8th until right now I have worried about today. Today was the first time that Chuck and I hosted a real birthday party for one of my stepsons, complete with kids from school and our family and their mother's family and the whole package. It’s the first time since I met Chuck five years ago that we ever had the kind of proximity and access to the boys to allow us to do something like this. It’s also the one-year anniversary of the day that we officially moved here, after years of strife and expensive litigation. It’s a milestone.
The pool is cloudy, and its filter is blowing air, and the few, Angry Birds balloons that have survived the day are drifting slowly to the ground. And it’s over. For me, anyway. I cleaned the shed and made the trip to the dump with an old volleyball net and some building materials that I couldn’t give away and an entertainment center and some hazmat that had been sitting in our shed for a year. I rented the roto tiller and spent two days leveling the ground for this pool that we bought on a whim and that kept the fifteen kids that showed up today occupied for hours. I weeded and mulched. I bagged all the kids’ unwanted toys and cleared the dining/play room and scrubbed the floors and the walls with bleach. And Chuck worked, brought in our very necessary household income by taking conference calls and managing affairs from the third-bedroom office that slowly filled with the clutter from around the house that I couldn’t deal with. And after he worked, he mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges and cleaned the bathroom and made the cake and the balloon runs. And people came and complimented us on our cute, little house, and our yard, and this party. And now it’s over.
The weirdness of this day I will place in another file. The awkwardness of hosting a party with the “committee of four,” a term I use to explain parenting from a stepmother’s perspective-how decisions are made with two, biological parents and their respective spouses when they live fewer than three miles apart from each other and are still trying to strike some kind of power balance with raising the kids. When the visiting parents, at our house, bring their kids to the biological mother for thank yous on their way out the door, and she sends them in my direction instead-“This is the woman you should thank.” I don’t like those accolades, I think. It’s like Chuck isn’t there, despite the fact that every fight I’ve fought since the day I met him was for stuff like this, this party. So he could be “the parent” and enjoy some recognition as such. It isn’t for me, I think. But that’s for another file. Chuck is still fussing with the pool filter and folding up the chairs.
Tomorrow, I’ll forget it all and head up to Pennsylvania for my road trip with Mom. She’s been reminding me for two weeks that I need to remember my passport, and a light jacket, and seven or eight days’ worth of underwear. She planned this whole trip while I planned this birthday party. We’ll have a lot to talk about. It’s our first trip alone together as adults. And I plan to document it all. So today, June 23, 2012, is not an end, but a beginning. As the Angry Birds balloons settle, I’ll pack my passport and my underwear and prepare the get the hell out of here.
The house is a mess. The yard is a mess. I love saying that-the yard is a mess. I have a yard, and the yard was useful today. Since the day I left my teaching job in Baltimore on June 8th until right now I have worried about today. Today was the first time that Chuck and I hosted a real birthday party for one of my stepsons, complete with kids from school and our family and their mother's family and the whole package. It’s the first time since I met Chuck five years ago that we ever had the kind of proximity and access to the boys to allow us to do something like this. It’s also the one-year anniversary of the day that we officially moved here, after years of strife and expensive litigation. It’s a milestone.
The pool is cloudy, and its filter is blowing air, and the few, Angry Birds balloons that have survived the day are drifting slowly to the ground. And it’s over. For me, anyway. I cleaned the shed and made the trip to the dump with an old volleyball net and some building materials that I couldn’t give away and an entertainment center and some hazmat that had been sitting in our shed for a year. I rented the roto tiller and spent two days leveling the ground for this pool that we bought on a whim and that kept the fifteen kids that showed up today occupied for hours. I weeded and mulched. I bagged all the kids’ unwanted toys and cleared the dining/play room and scrubbed the floors and the walls with bleach. And Chuck worked, brought in our very necessary household income by taking conference calls and managing affairs from the third-bedroom office that slowly filled with the clutter from around the house that I couldn’t deal with. And after he worked, he mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges and cleaned the bathroom and made the cake and the balloon runs. And people came and complimented us on our cute, little house, and our yard, and this party. And now it’s over.
The weirdness of this day I will place in another file. The awkwardness of hosting a party with the “committee of four,” a term I use to explain parenting from a stepmother’s perspective-how decisions are made with two, biological parents and their respective spouses when they live fewer than three miles apart from each other and are still trying to strike some kind of power balance with raising the kids. When the visiting parents, at our house, bring their kids to the biological mother for thank yous on their way out the door, and she sends them in my direction instead-“This is the woman you should thank.” I don’t like those accolades, I think. It’s like Chuck isn’t there, despite the fact that every fight I’ve fought since the day I met him was for stuff like this, this party. So he could be “the parent” and enjoy some recognition as such. It isn’t for me, I think. But that’s for another file. Chuck is still fussing with the pool filter and folding up the chairs.
Tomorrow, I’ll forget it all and head up to Pennsylvania for my road trip with Mom. She’s been reminding me for two weeks that I need to remember my passport, and a light jacket, and seven or eight days’ worth of underwear. She planned this whole trip while I planned this birthday party. We’ll have a lot to talk about. It’s our first trip alone together as adults. And I plan to document it all. So today, June 23, 2012, is not an end, but a beginning. As the Angry Birds balloons settle, I’ll pack my passport and my underwear and prepare the get the hell out of here.