Long Weekends

This evening, on the nightly weather report, they announced (much to my childrens' delight!) that school would be closed yet again tomorrow. Today's ice and sleet, added to the 10 inches of snow from Saturday, means that we will be headed into our 5th day of the "weekend." If the groundhog was right at sunup, we've got a few more of these long weekends to go!

Needless to say, the kids are blissfully happy. When we first moved to the mountains from Florida, the boys looked at the school schedule and were exceedingly grumpy about having to start early while they felt it was still summer. I tried to explain to them that, in climates where they actually have "winter" (unlike Florida where there are only two seasons: hot and more hot) schools have to factor in "snow days" to make sure they have ample time to get in the required attendance. At that point, they still didn't quite get the concept. I told them to imagine "hurricane days" except without the threat of the roof blowing off and much, much colder.

None of this meant anything, however, until that first morning when they came down the stairs for school in their usual cheerless humor and I informed them they could go back to bed because it was a "snow day!" That's when it became clear that maybe living in a colder climate might be a GREAT thing!

Strangely enough, though, I hear other parents in this area talking about how they DREAD snow days. The prevailing attitude seems to be that it is somehow a burden and a curse to be "stuck" at home with your kids for a whole day, fixing them snacks, listening to their noise, and dealing with them being underfoot! These are some of the same parents I sometimes hear confiding in each other about how they can't WAIT for the weekend when they can drop the children off with the babysitter/grandparents/other parent/anybody who'll take them and get away to have some "me" time!

I watched an episode of Oprah one day where young moms were lamenting their fate and discussing how much better their lives would have been without the weight of their children dragging them down! They're so messy! They're so loud! They're so needy! They're so smelly! They take too much time, too much money, too much...everything from ME! Several of them even said they didn't LIKE their children and would have be so much happier if they'd never become mothers. By the end of the show, I was looking around the room for something to throw at the screen that would get the frustration out of my system without breaking the television set!

My obvious question would be: WHY in the world did you ever have kids if you didn't want them, didn't like them, and spend all your waking hours resenting them now? What in the world did you THINK they would be...little dolls that you could dress up, play with for a while, and put back in a box when you lost interest? Didn't anybody TELL you that babies cry, throw up, poop, and require every ounce of energy in your body to keep up with? Nobody ever mentioned the "Terrible Twos" to you??

I can not understand these women, nor will I ever understand them. To me, my kids are the first and best thing I ever did with my life. They are a miracle, a blessing, a joy, and roller coaster ride that I want to stay on for the rest of my life! There has never been a day where I looked at either one of my boys and thought, "Gosh, just think of the things I could be doing without YOU!"

The day I brought Zach, my first, home from the hospital and laid him on the bed, he looked up at me, seriously and intently, as if to say, "What now, Mom? I'm waiting on you?" Even though I'd spent years taking care of other people's kids and could diaper a baby with my eyes closed, I suddenly realized that the game was changed this time. When I was "borrowing" somebody else's kid, if I didn't do well or didn't enjoy it, I could just hand them back and say, "Sorry 'bout that" and start all over. This time, those little intense and deep eyes staring back into mine BELONGED to me. There was no "do over" built into this experience. If I messed this up, I would have to spend forever explaining to him why I failed. This child that I had willingly brought into the world would be forever linked to me no less securely than as if the cord had never been cut.

Somehow, though, unlike those shallow women I saw on Oprah, I felt up to the challenge. Maybe it was partly due to the fact that I was somewhat older when Zach came along. Maybe it was because I'd pretty much sowed my wild oats and didn't feel like I was going to miss out on anything else. Maybe I had just wanted to be a mom for so long that this all seemed so right. But, whatever the reason, the thought that this little person would be calling me "Mom" for the rest of my days brought me a sense of accomplishment and tremendous joy. Like Tom Hanks, dancing around the bonfire in "Cast Away," I wanted to crow, "LOOK what I have made!"

From that day on, and especially with the addition of Zach's brother, A.J. less than two years later, I have wanted anybody and everybody I met to know I am a mother. I enjoy my kids! I love to travel with them. I love to eat dinner with them. I love to laugh with them, cry with them, watch movies with them, play games with them, argue with them, and live with them.

It drives me nuts to hear women say, "I'm JUST a mom..." JUST a mom? It would make more sense to say I'm JUST a corporate executive or I'm JUST president of the United States! What in the world could a woman ever possibly do in her entire existence that could ever match the ultimate achievement of creating life AND nurturing and shaping that life into a human being that will one day do great things in this world?

Every day that my children go off to school, I rejoice in the fact that they are learning and growing and becoming good men in whom I have much pride...but I also have to admit that, every day, I feel just a tiny touch of that same sadness I felt on the very first day I carried them to pre-school and left them in the capable hands of their first teacher to go home to a strangely empty and silent house. On these snow days, these long weekends, though, I once again get to revel in the joy of having noise, noise, noise in the house. With the snow, I get to temporarily postpone that inevitable day when the boys will be gone, off on their own, and the silence of each day will drift on into each night and beyond and I will truly miss the noise, the mess, the chaos, and the blessing.

Thank you, Lord, for wonderful snow and long weekends and the chance to pretend that tomorrow will never come!