One of the major things that you never hear about having children is how completely isolating it is. I spend all week with my kids, except for when I play trivia on Tuesday nights, or when I go out if Todd watches the kids. I get a couple hours off on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings when they are in MMO. Rollie goes all week, so i have some mornings without Rollie, but I still have Tiller. More manageable, but not what I would call relaxing. My weekends are exactly like my weekdays, so that they blur together and become one big block of monotony that continues for weeks, only being broken up by occasional trips out of town. Before I had children, I thought I would be someone with well-behaved children who could travel anywhere, who would be well-behaved whenever i took them out, and who would thrive on the interesting and stimulating things that i wanted to do with them.
This, of course, is making anyone who has children laugh their asses off. Unless you have one child under a year old, in which case you are still in the honeymoon phase, thinking that your child will always nap well in public, and that those people with kids having tantrums in restaurants are just crappy parents who did everything wrong.
The thing is, a parent wants to go out in public every once in a while, and so you take the chance on your kids. You explain that we have to use inside voices, and show respect for others, and that anything else will not be tolerated. If the kids can’t follow the rules, then they must understand that we will leave the restaurant. If they can’t behave, they will not get to go run errands with Mama, like we planned. So, when you take them to a restaurant, everything is fine, until someone takes a crayon from someone else, and the one warning is issued, and the bad behavior continues, and then you have to cowboy up as a parent. You have to leave the restaurant, and take the little offender home, with apologies to all the patrons staring at you as you leave the restaurant near tears. And you pile them in the car, and feel sorry for yourself because you can’t even have one fucking meal in peace, or have one Saturday afternoon where you walk around with your child and look in shop windows, or get a coffee, or stop by the bike shop, like you had planned all fucking week. Nope, you gotta go back to the fucking house, and be stuck with the little assholes who fucked up your day in the first place. And then you feel like you could die, because you love them so much, and what if something happened to one of them, and you had written something so terrible about them?
Truth is, i am lonely. We made a choice to live somewhere that has lots of things to do that Todd and I like to do, but that really don’t translate all that well to the preschool set. We live in a neighborhood where there are no kids Rollie’s age. Mom says she used to have friends in her neighborhood who had kids our age, and so they watched each other’s kids. That sounds awesome, but there are no Stay-at-home moms in my neighborhood, and I just don’t think trading dogsitting and babysitting services with the gay neighbors is an option. Babysitter, you say? Yeah, we use one for special events, but babysitters do not come cheap, and for a family on a very tight budget, it just isn’t something you are going to do weekly.
So, we continue to watch the kids for each other, and that is cool and much appreciated by both of us, and we go out with friends and it is fun, but it would be nice to go out with my husband every once in a while. Another thing about parenting, especially once you have two children, is how dividing it is. There is just not enough time for everyone to get what they need, and so you go out of your way to watch the kids for each other, so that each person gets kid-free time, but what you never get is kid-free time together. It would be nice to win the lottery and have a night each week where i get to go out in public with him and not have the kids with us.
Most of all, it would be nice to not feel like I’m turning into some desperate housewife (I have never watched that show, so i have no idea what it means to be that kind of desperate housewife.) My son seems to pretty much despise me, except when he wants something. He is four, for God’s sake. I used to tear up a little when he screamed and cried for Daddy at bedtime, but now i just feel a little dead inside, like here is what I got myself into, and there is nothing honorable to do but keep on loving him and taking care of him, and just shut off the part of my heart that used to hurt when he insulted me every night. I just know that I lose my temper too much, raise my voice too much, often dread being with my children, and feel resentment that I never have any free time to think straight. And so I can see why they love their father more.
There, i said it: Sometimes i dread being with my children, and I cringe at the sound of their grating little voices, and sometimes I wish I was the one that felt fresh and renewed and fun when I was with them.
And I hate myself for that, because that is never the kind of mother I wanted to be.