Spring Break- Day One

I woke up this morning with gleeful anticipation. "I will embrace this opportunity" I told myself. "I will enlighten my children" I promised. "We will make memories and have experiences (that aren’t related to ass wiping and pokemon)." " I am a good mother - goddammit!" I fed my children and asked them five to seven to twelve times (depending on the child and the particular article of clothing) to dress themselves and then at 10:00 a.m. sharp we piled into the car to visit the museums.

Our conversation en route went a little something like this:
Me: "Hooray! I am a great mom - this will be fantastic!" (that was not out loud, although it could have been as no one was paying attention)
Emma: "Where are we going anyway?"
Me: "To the car and airplane museum"
Emma: "What! You never told me that. I never wanted to go there!"
Me: "Oh you will like it so much." Someone told me that if you smile while you say stuff, it will sound nicer like you actually mean to be smiling while you are saying it, so I probably was smiling when I said that.
Polly: "Yuyyaby Elmo" (which means Lullaby Elmo and has no relevance to anything going on whatsoever."
Xavier: "Mom you forgot to buckle me in."
Me: "Oh, Ok sit really still until we get there and then you won’t have to waste up anytime unbuckling yourself."

When we arrived at the first museum, the splendidly boring Crawford Auto Museum, there were two good omens immediately - a Triple-A member’s discount on admission and a model train in the lobby. Not much else happened at that museum. The kids were impressed by the vintage car collection and had fun climbing on the one car they were allowed to touch. They also had a great time cramming themselves into the Tinkerbell replica. A tiny boat in which one man spent seventy days alone at sea. I’m not much for boats and sailing but I can see how that guy had a pretty great idea - he crawled into his little boat and no one could talk to him or touch him for more than three months! Then we spent some time in the other half of the museum, the part without the cars and planes and boat, the part with absolutely nothing interesting in it at all. Here are the highlights: Polly walked into a pole and banged her head pretty good; Xavier revealed his love for pushing empty strollers into my heels; I discovered that Emma loves museums and has to look at everything, even the Carl and Louis Stokes exhibit (which makes her completely unrelated to me); and I found myself in the middle of the lamest toy city playroom ever thinking "My God this might be the most boring thing I have ever done" and then simultaneously feeling incredibly guilty, because a better mom would have been loving every minute with her kids.

We finished that museum in just about two hours, which is incredible considering the lack of actual exhibits in the place, and marched across the street to the Museum of Natural History. When I was a kid I loved this museum and my kids love this museum. So after lunch in the café, which needs no reliving, they trudged happily through the galleries looking at dead animals and rocks and whatever else is natural and historical.

So if you discount the whining and the incident where one child slapped another in the planetarium, the museum was a success. But the whole time we were there I was pestered by this nagging thought - "I am so fucking bored, this is so boring" and its partner thought "I am such a bad mother." I’m pretty sure I am not the only woman I know having these thoughts this week, and I know that they are due to both the overall tediousness of child rearing and the incredible guilt we feel as mothers who find out daily that motherhood is not a nursery rhyme. And thinking these things over on the way home from the museum, I resolved not to become so absorbed in and disappointed by the negativity and dangerously high expectations of this job, and these next two weeks in particular, and instead to focus on the little things that my children do and that I do with them that give me joy and laughter and relief that this really was a good idea after all.

And then I got home, and too tired to make dinner, fed the kids peanut butter sandwiches and drank three beers and ate a bowl of goldfish by myself in the kitchen and waited patiently for one of those little things to happen.