I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression (9 page)

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Why didn’t you say so? We’ll compromise. We’ll go camping.”

I know for a fact that a lot of families who travel together have a swell time. They play “Count the Cow” until they faint. They wave to “Out of State” license plates and sing gaily, “Getting to Know You” in two-part harmony. Our kids play a game called, “Get Mama.” Or, “The Family That Camps Together Gets Cramps Together.”

It’s a 400-mile non-stop argument that begins when we leave the driveway and doesn’t end until Mama threatens to self-destruct.

The players include a daddy who drives in silence, a mama who listens in silence, a daughter who keeps repeating, “Mom!” and two brothers who make Cain and Abel sound like the Everly Brothers.

Just for the mental discipline, I kept a record of the last “Get Mama” game. The kids argued for seventy-five miles on whether or not you could run a car a hundred miles in reverse without stalling. They used up fifty miles debating how workers in the U. S. Treasury Department could defraud the detectors by putting hundred-dollar bills in their mouth and not smiling until they got out of the gates.

It took them longer to resolve the capital of Missouri than it took to settle the entire territory. They argued about whether or not you could use a yo-yo on the moon. Whether hair would grow over a vaccination. Whether a gorilla if put at a typewriter could eventually produce a best seller. How come some daddies have wrinkles in their necks and others didn’t What size shoe Pete Maravich wore. And if a nun were allowed to become a priest, would you call her Father.

They threatened to “slap” 55 times, “punch” 33 times, said, “I’m telling” 138 times and whispered, “I’ll give you
one” three times. (That sounded ominous and I didn’t turn around.)

As I sat in the front seat nervously knotting my seat belt into a rosary, I concluded our family would never make a TV series … unless it was “Night Gallery.”

As I slumped against the door, one of my children yelled, “Hey, Mom, you better push the button down on your door or you’ll fall out.”

If only I could believe that.

It does not impress me one bit that every year more than a million families embark on a camping venture.

I know that of those who make it back (some poor devils wander around for years looking for ranger stations, children, and ice-cube machines) a goodly number are disenchanted. Why you may ask yourself?

To begin with, few realistic camping guides have been written. Usually, they are small, shiny booklets with waterproof covers (this should tell you something) showing a family in a small, secluded paradise. Daddy is in a trout stream up to his creel in excitement. Mother is waving nearby from a pair of water skis. And the children are gathered around a campfire playing Old Maid with Gentle Ben.

It never rains on the covers of camping guides. Mother is never shown doing a three-week laundry in a saucepan. Dad is never depicted fixing a flat on a tandem trailer in Mosquito City, with three children dancing around, chanting, “We are going to miss ‘Mod Squad’ and it’s your fault.” It is never revealed that children often sit around for four days at a time crying, “Make him stop looking at me or I am going to bust him one.”

There are all kinds of camping, of course. There are the primitives who sleep on a blanket of chipmunks under the stars and exist only on wild berries and what game they are able to trap in the zippers of their sleeping bags. There are the tent enthusiasts who use cots, ice
coolers, matches, transistor radios and eat store-bought bread, but who draw the line at electricity and indoor plumbing. Finally, there are the wheelsvilles. They run the gamut from the family that converts the old pickup truck to a home on wheels to those who rough it with color TV, guitars, outdoor lounge furniture, flaming patio torches, ice crushers, electric fire lighters, showers, makeup mirrors, hoods over the campfire, plastic logs, Hondas for short trips to the city, and yapping dogs that have had their teeth capped.

It doesn’t matter how you camp. The point is that a few practical suggestions could keep you from going bananas:

What to do when it rains. Rearrange canned foods, plan a side trip, write letters home, remembering to lie. Read all the wonderful books you brought and promised yourself to read.
(The Red Badge of Courage
and
The American Journal on Tooth Decay.)

And rains. Pick grains of sand out of the butter, sit in the car and pretend you’re going home, find out who really has gym shoes that smell like wet possum.

And rains. Send the kids out to find traffic to play in. Call in friends and watch the clothing mildew. Pair off and find an ark.

Otherwise camping can be loads of fun. Tips from my woodland log:

1. Don’t kneel on the stove to let the cot down from the wall until all the burners are off.

2. If the table converts to a bed, make sure it has been cleared.

3. Whoever brought the guitar along sleeps with it.

4. If the wind is blowing southward, sleep northward of the person who bathed in mosquito repellent.

5. Place the kid who had three bottles of pop before bedtime nearest the door. Oil the zipper of his sleeping bag before retiring.

6. If you are sleeping on the ground, make it as comfortable as possible by using a rollaway bed.

7. Make sure all the cupboard doors are closed and traffic areas cleared before the light is extinguished. Statistics show that more campers are lost through carelessly placed ice coolers and clotheslines than through crocodile bites.

1. Forget Disney. Remember, not all bears have their own television series. Some of them are unemployed wild animals.

2. Never argue with a bear over your picnic basket, even though deep in your heart you know the green onions will repeat on him.

3. Any woman in the laundry room who tries to assure you snakes are as afraid of you as you are of them should be watched.

1. When you are reading the road map and your husband accuses you of moving Lake Michigan over two states.

2. When the kids start playing touch football in the back seat with a wet diaper and the baby is in it.

3. When not only starvation sets in, but your stomach begins to bloat and your vision becomes blurred.

4. When Daddy screams, “Stop kicking my seat!” and the kids are all asleep.

5. When you find a haven the size of a football field that you don’t have to back a trailer into (even if it is a football field).

No one, not even a man and a woman, can endure two weeks of complete togetherness—especially when they are married. Thus, being confined with two or three children in an area no larger than a sandbox often has the appeal of being locked in a bus-station rest-room over the weekend. Planning your activities will help avoid this.

1. Keep busy. Rotate the tires on the car. This gets you out in the fresh air and at the same time gives you a feeling of accomplishment.

2. Play games like “Look for Daddy” or “Bury the Motorcycle” (the one that runs up and down through the campgrounds all night).

3. Have a roster of chores. One child could be in charge of water for the radiator. Another could be in charge of killing that last mosquito in the tent at night.

4. Have family dialogues around the campfire. Suggested topics: Who was the idiot who had to bring the ping-pong table and “Harvey, where are you getting the drinking water and what did you hope to find when you put a slideful of it under your new microscope?”

5. Make new friends (assuming your marriage is stable).

If it happens to be Be Kind to Campers Month (July 19–26), observe it by taking a camper to the city for a day.

Maybe other mothers make it to the water skis, but the closest I ever get to water is a laundromat. I have
spent entire vacations watching my enzymes and bleach race their way to the dirt and grime in our underwear.

Commercials lie. They always make laundromats seem like fun places where you go around smelling each other’s wash, comparing whiteness, looking for hidden cameras, and breaking out in acne at the thought of stubborn stains.

It’s not like that at all. There are thirty-eight washes to every washer, sixty-three dryees to each of the three dryers (one of them is out of order) five Coke machines (all of them in order), no chairs, and a small snack table to fold your clothes on.

The “washees” are bustling, no-nonsense people. They stuff the washers, deposit the soap and coins, look at their watches, and estimate they’ll be out of there in an hour.

The “dryees” are a bit more affable. They know with three dryers (one of them out of order), they must live as a community for an indeterminate amount of time, striking up acquaintances, laughing, talking, eating, and sometimes intermarrying.

I was lucky. I got in line for a dryer once behind a bearded boy who couldn’t have owned more than two pairs of shorts, a T-shirt with the peace sign, and a fringed vest. I figured him for twenty minutes of drying time.

“Why do you suppose the dryers are heating up?” he asked.

“It’s all that nerve gas they’re dumping in the ocean,” I said tiredly.

“Hey, man, I think you’re right,” he mused. “You come here often?”

“Only when I can slip away,” I said.

We talked for another hour or so. Finally, it was his turn. “Hey, Mildred,” he shouted across the laundromat. Mildred had four baskets of wet laundry, three children, and five rain-soaked sleeping bags. Her hair was in rollers
the size of fruit juice cans. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I want to dry my hair first.” She started the dryer and stuck her head inside the door.

Later that night I decided to compromise with my husband and go to New York for a vacation.

“That’s impossible,” said my husband. “Who will sit with the children?”

“My mother,” I stated firmly.

“You know how your mother feels about baby-sitting,” he said. “After our first child was born, she had her phone and her address unlisted.”

That’s not exactly true. Mother loves her grandchildren. As she puts it, “I also love Smokey the Bear and Harry Reasoner, but I wouldn’t want to sit with them on a regular basis.”

She once told me she considered grandchildren a special bonus for having outlived her own children. “When you’re a sitting sit-in,” she declared, “you lose your role as a grandparent. Of course,” she said, “if you get desperate you can call me at this number at a candy store. They know where to reach me.”

I called the number. “Mom, I haven’t had a vacation away from the kids since my honeymoon.”

“What kind of a crack is that?” she asked.

“I told you I was desperate. Do you suppose you could sit with the kids for a few days?”

“They hurt me the last time,” she sulked.

“That’s my fault,” I replied. “I should have told you that when you stand the baby up on your lap, he pushes his head against your chin and severs your tongue in half. Besides, the kids are older now. It’ll be easier.”

“Than what?” she asked cautiously.

“The problems of teen-agers are overdramatized,” I told Mother. “Actually there is nothing to sitting with them. First, I have hidden the distributor from the car in the flour canister. This will give you a warm, secure
feeling when the announcer on TV asks, ‘It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?’ They’ll be tearing the house apart looking for the distributor.

“Second, don’t worry about meals. They’ll eat anything as long as it is in a carry-out bag.

“Third, keep a supply of dimes. You’ll need them when you have to make a phone call at the gas station on the corner. Fourth, if you want them to wear something clean, put it in the dirty-clothes hamper. It’s sneaky, but it’s the only way you can get them to rotate their clothes.

“Fifth, you’ll get used to the records, especially if you spend your evenings crouched in the utility closet next to the hot-water heater.

“Sixth, don’t ever say you understand them. It breaks down the hostile relationship between you that it takes to understand one another. Now you know all there is to know about the children, I am off to the city.”

“Hold it!” shouted Mother. “In case I need you where can I get in touch with you?”

“Here’s the number of a candy store,” I said. “I’ll check in from time to time.”

For years, I have tried to figure out the logic of parents who travel on separate airplanes. This is some decision. Do I want to be on the plane that doesn’t make it? Or do I want to be left to raise three children alone on an educator’s pension?

This is like asking a drowning man if he wants the leaky tire tube or the boat with the hole in it. Either way, you lose.

Frankly, I think it is a theory advanced by airlines to keep women from finding out what Joan Rivers has known for years: The Bunny Club in the sky is a man’s world.

I sensed it when my husband and I boarded and I asked the hostess to hang up my white coat that was made out of a perma-wrinkled fabric. She folded it carefully and (excuse the expression) heaved it onto the rack above my head. When my husband boarded she snatched his attaché case out of his hand and started to hang it neatly on a hanger.

“Really,” he giggled, “that’s not necessary. I can put it under my seat.”

“Let me do it, sir,” she insisted.

She leaned over and I instinctively threw my shopping bag over her sit-upon. Throughout the trip she was as obvious as a mail bag in the seat pocket.

“Gum? Drink? Pillow? Ice? Dinner? Oxygen? More coffee? Stereo? Magazine?”

“If you play your cards right,” I told my husband, “she’ll give you a pair of wings and let you drive the airplane.”

“She’s just being nice,” he countered. “She’s that way to everyone.”

“Oh yeah? Then why did she tell me my seat was a folding chair on the wings?”

We were about twenty-five mintues in the air when we heard the Spanish voices. At first they were faint, but as more people became aware of it, conversation ceased and the voices became more distinct.