There's nothing like the nice, cool, refreshing spray of a water park on a hot, humid summer day to make you wish your kids were still attached at the umbilical cord.
Why do wide open spaces like parks terrify me now that I have children?
Oh yeah, because creeps walking little dogs like to hang out at parks hoping to lure kids away. And because I'm a really crappy runner, even if Jason Voorhees were chasing me with fire and a chainsaw, it couldn't motivate me to run faster. And, I just finished reading a book where the main character is born to his kidnapped mother inside a 12x12 garden shed and neither of them can get out because some creeper kidnapped her 7 years prior and she tried to get out but he thought of everything to keep her inside. Frick, right?
And, let's face it, I don't want to teach my children about the creeps with their little dogs and make them prematurely lose their precious innocence. Instead, I go CRAZY at the park watching people, assessing and re-assessing who is with whom and how close that person is to my child compared to how close I am, all the while looking completely relaxed.
I think, had I been working in Texas in 1963, JFK might still be alive. Well, maybe not today, but, like, he would have lived passed November 22nd. What I'm trying to say is that going to the park is a very stressful little "easy outing" for me and because of that, I'm sure my kids will grow up crazy.
Does Coffee Come With a Side Of Valium: Growing up With Elizabeth Downey-Sunnen
Co-Authored by Kiddo #1 and Kiddo #2.
First Published in 2047 by Harper Press Ink.
Excerpt: Pages 147-149
Chapter 4: Summer Time, Not Funner Time
I remember the day the city's new water splash pad opened. It was 2011, a year after my brother was born. The park had been closed for more than a year while the city workers pushed around mounds of dirt, dismantled and reassembled the play equipment in dozens of locations around the park, and then finally installed the splash pad pipes. When opening day arrived, Darling Mother refused to let us go!
She said it was for our own good-- there would be too many people, and there wasn't any grass to speak of, anyway. It would be mud, mud, mud. But really, we knew it was because she wanted to drive us around in her Easy Bake Honda, baking and delivering cakes while blowing sweaty, humid air through the broken air conditioning vents.
She used the broken A/C trick more than once to get her way. Who could argue when drowning in a pool of your own sweat?
A full week later, Darling Mother finally relented to our pleas for relief from the heat, and brought us to the splash pad.
What a lunatic she was! There were a total of about 50 people there that day-- which, if you consider a family of four, that's roughly 12 or 13 families, and still she couldn't behave like a normal human being.
We got to the park and she brought out the biggest bottle of sunscreen we'd ever seen; I don't think even Costco sold sunscreen in such a large container. She began slathering it on so thick that my brother and I were, quite literally, white from top of head to bottoms of toes. It was incredibly dangerous for us to even WALK to the splash pad, but the best part was that she wasn't doing that because of a concern for skin cancer! No! She kept muttering over and over again, "There. Now you'll be so greasy no one will be able to steal you. You'll just slip right out of a pervert's hands and slide all the way back to mommy!"
The lunatic grin she wore while white-washing our arms has forever been burned in my retinas. My brother was young enough-- he can hardly remember this, although he says whenever he sees an opossum bare its teeth and snarl, he shudders and thinks back to our mother on that day.
Then, once we were mummified (mommy-fied?) in sunscreen, she put these humiliating little bracelets on our wrists that were attached to hers via, what I now understand was an ancient telephone cord?
The picture included illustrates what the contraption sort-of looked like-- it's hard to explain without a graphic, since nothing of this sort exists anymore; now that we can travel through space to and from precise locations, kidnapping is a crime of the past. However, Darling Mother didn't have this technology, and was terrified of Ninjas and The Killers (not the band, and not the new space car, either).
Darling Mother said that these little bracelet things kept us attached so that no Ninjas or Killers could steal us while we were at the park. What those little ropes did, besides attach us to her being at all times, was also create a long cord between the two of us, with which we took out passersby at the neck.
I think it used to be called a "clothes line" or "dryer line" or something to that effect, but I could be wrong. Whatever the word, I would stand close to the splash pad, she would be a little behind me, and without fail, every few seconds some happy, free child would slam into that rubber cord with his neck and fall backwards gasping for air. Darling Mother would pretend to help the fallen child, but really, I knew she was happy to not only be physically attached to us to keep us from having fun, but also able to take out potential predators. She really was a lunatic; she would cackle for days remembering the victims of our clothesline.
Slippery, covered in a bizarre goo and attached to her via a tightly curled cord, Darling Mother was content now that her children had again, more or less, been reattached to her like newborns. Nothing could possibly take us away from her.
And then, that day, it happened. The unthinkable. The cord, probably from the sunscreen, possibly from divine intervention, slipped off my wrist without Darling Mother noticing! The freedom was intoxicating to my four-year-old brain. At first I stopped where the end of the rope would have been. Then, realizing I didn't have to stop, I squealed and jumped for joy. I careened to the gigantic water basin, filling with water until the tipping point where it would pour all of that delicious wet freedom onto my head. Screeching with ecstasy, I washed off the layers of goo until I felt the actual warmth of the sun for the first time.
The birds' song has never been as sweet as it was that glorious, wonderful moment. Then, as quickly as it came, it went.
Once Darling Mother realized that I had slipped out of her iron-clad grasp, all hell broke loose. In the following weeks, radio shows were consumed with talk about "Deranged Mother that went ballistic" while others thought she was a modern day, Mother-Hero for doing what she did. All I can say is what I saw and what I have pieced together from various newspaper and television reports.
Everything slowed down, like they used to do in those Movie things they used to watch. Everything slowed down until all time seemed to stop. All I remember hearing is the high-pitched, turned lion-like, roar of my mother. Eye-witness reports say she screamed, "Freeze!" and I'm inclined to believe the reports since I remember every single man, woman, child and dog stopping instantly. The smell of urine burned my eyes as people lost control of their bladders in fear of my Darling Mother. Little children clung to their parents, whimpering, while my mother, hair whipping around her head as though the Hell fires themselves were billowing below her, walked calmly through the crowd. The only thing defying my mother's demand of frozen compliance was the splash pad itself, which seemed to taunt her victims by tickling them with delicious fun and water every few seconds.
My mother, with my empty cord trailing behind her right hand, my brother's cord (and sunblock-soaked brother) slipping through the water on her left, wove her way through the frozen people like the serpent in the Garden of Eden until she got to me. I smiled, trying to change the mood and she smiled, too. Her forked tongue flicked across her lips as she said, in a normal, happy Mom tone, "Oh, thank heaven. You're here, Kiddo #1!" In the blink of an eye, everything changed and she was the woman everyone knows and loves again. She turned to the twitchy crowd and said, with tears streaming down her face, "Oh thank you! Thank you all for keeping my baby safe from The Killers, not the band, and Ninjas. You, ALL OF YOU!, have saved her life. And for this, I thank you. Please. I beg of you, return to your normal, daily lives, and we shall return to ours." She bent at the waist dramatically, while the thawed statues clapped for her and for themselves.
But even then, at four years old, I knew somehow that these people had fallen prey to my mother's ability to be completely crazy and then sane in a matter of seconds.
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I'm sure this is how part of my unauthorized biography will read, as written by my beloved children. And, when I read it, as a reincarnated octopus, with all my children firmly attached to my suction cups before, during, and after our outings to the local park, I will smile and remember that when one loses a child in a park, a mother's best weapon is the panicked tone in her voice.
And then I will hope that you, gentle reader, will still have access to this blog where you can read what truly went down, which goes a little more like this:
I love my children. I took them to the park. I blinked and Kiddo #1 vanished in front of my eyes. Heart-in-throat, I scanned the crowed to no avail. I looked at the playground equipment nearby as I scooped up Kiddo #2 and began the panicked walk-run around the park until I returned to the splash pad where I found Kiddo #1. I may, emphasis on the may, have cried out in relief something like, "Kiddo #1!" And my tone may, emphasis on the may, have alerted nearby mothers to scoop up their children and then look around, wildly, for my child who had clearly done something abominable.
All I know is that I called to Kiddo #1 and she came to me (oblivious to my verge-of-meltdown status) and I said, "If you are here and you want to play anywhere else, you MUST come tell Mommy first or you will lose your Pinkie Poodle, no second chances." Her eyes, wide as saucers, blinked twice and she, confused, said, "Ok Momma."
At any rate, I'm sure Kiddo #2's chapter on this event will present a third version of that story that sounds vaguely familiar but not quite right, too. Whatever.
Believe what you want to. I just hope that space-travel machine she's talking about in that story exists while I can use it to have lunch in Paris and dinner in Nepal. I mean, how fun would that be?!?
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