Being Housebound with One's Children, by a Mom About to Lose It

Men think they are tougher than women because they lead expeditions to the North Pole and climb Kilamanjaro and jazz like that.  I scoff at such paltry, wussy “feats of endurance.” When the most grueling tests of human stamina are required, men chicken out and vamoose. I’m not talking about jumping cars over ravines. I’m not talking about anything having to do with search-and-rescue, monster trucks, or ultimate fighting. I’m talking about superhuman, godlike fortitude.  When school is cancelled for weeks on end because of snow in the winter, men do not get trapped in their houses with their children.  They shovel out, chip out, dig out and get the lead out.

A man would marry any female, go down on his knees and plead with grandma, hire a complete stranger, resort to any desperate measure, rather than stay in a house with a bunch of kids 24/7 for two or three straight weeks.  It was pleasanter in the Gulag Archipelago.

Did I mention that it’s usually men who get the bright idea to cancel school in the first place?  These men who cancel school for half the winter tell the newspaper, when parents (mothers, that is) have the face to gripe about it, that they do it for the children’s safety.  They get on their high horses and say it is better that the whole school system shut down and SOL tests be flunked and accreditation be lost, than that one child should slip on ice.  Well, let me tell you fellas, my children are not safe in this house from Dec. 22 until January 11 with only a few holiday dinners for respite, because I, myself personally, might strangle them.

A woman runs out of videos eventually.

And food. And brain cells. And patience.

Plus, I get constipated. Trying to gulp down food with kids screaming, and then having kids pound on the bathroom door every other minute, will do that to a person after ABOUT TEN DAYS. Come to think of it, the Tenth Day of cabin fever in a large household is the critical mass point at which Mom is functionally comatose and the kids are incapable of being entertained by anything—except torturing each other.  It is usually on the tenth day that you find yourself at the kitchen table enacting a scene like this:

I need to look up this phone number. I just need to look up this phone number. They won’t let me eat or cook or shower or answer my email or clean or put two sequential thoughts together, but I just need to look up this one phone number. Surely. . .

“Hey Mom, do houseflies eat human skin?”

(bursting into tears) PLEASE JUST GO AWAY AND BE QUIET! For God’s sake, can I do this ONE THING? I can’t THINK! I SMELL! I can’t have normal bowel functions! Build something out of Legos! Watch one of the $30 worth of videos I rented! ONE MINUTE! CAN I HAVE ONE MINUTE!”

“Geez, Mom. Ask a simple question. . .” (in the living room) “All Mom ever does is yell.”

“Yeah, she’s in a bad mood AGAIN. I don’t know why, since she is THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS THE INTERNET IN THIS HOUSE. I was only on Myspace for four hours last night and had to stop uploading after the 275th pic. . .hey, c’mere, there’s something on top of your head.  <SMACK> Got it! Tee hee!”

“MOM! She’s hitting me on the head!”

Thus does a mother descend slowly into madness, resorting to zombie refereeing and random discipline which only makes everyone angrier.  “(Numbly) Yes, I know she took your Nintendo DSI. And he ate your barbecue Pringles. Everyone is grounded. Go to bed.”

“Grounded? There’s three inches of ice in the driveway! We are trapped in here anyway! And you can’t put us to bed at 7:15! You didn’t even cook supper!”

“Why are you grounding me? I’ve been in my bedroom reading “Eclipse” for the past hour! Oh, hey, c’mere, bro. There’s something on your shoulder.”

You transcend madness. You miss one salon appointment, then two. You begin to look like a frizzled ape, only grayer. The days all run together. You cannot remember your own name. You are living on Spam and Cheez Whiz. You demand that the children build snowmen out of solid ice at a temperature of seven degrees with wind gusts up to 30mph, just so you can talk to your mother on the phone for five minutes. She laughs, because she was snowed in with you and your siblings, notably for the entirety of January 1978, for which she should have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

And then comes that magical day when the school system decides to have school beginning at 10:00 and actually educate your children past lunchtime. The last time since Christmas when they almost had school, but then sent the kids right back in a few hours because of a bad forecast, you thought you would bathe, then nap, but were so exhausted you ended up napping in the tub.

I was looking forward to another day like that, when I could crawl into the tub and nap in the blessed all-glorious quiet. When the youngest came into the kitchen wailing that she didn’t feel well enough to go back to school, I wasn’t sympathetic. By golly, they were going to school.  They were all going to school, come flood or famine, if anyone in Grayson County was at all inclined to actually hold classes for even part of a winter weekday.  But the baby of the family was adamant, even after polishing off a large bowl of Super Golden Puffs, that she needed to go back to bed instead of getting on the bus. She pulled an old thermometer out of the cabinet, took her temp and declared, “See, Mommy, I am sick. I have a fever of 85 degrees.”

I wasn’t going to let a little thing like her clinical death keep her out of third grade.  Not today. It was not safe for the kids to stay home on a winter day like this.  You see, today would have been the Eleventh Day.

We don't need to go there.