Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-04-23 - 12:25 p.m.

Easter WHAT??

I sped over to the elementary this morning, shoveled my children out the car door, and raced away cackling. Free at last! Free at last! Thank Gawd Amighty I'm free at last!

We may have been two hours early or so. I don't care. That school OWES me.

Ten and one-half days together, people, and it wasn't any fun. This is not MY opinion - it's verbatim from my children. They can never tell me exactly what Fun is, but they can always tell me what it isn't. Fun: What You Never Let Us Have Any Of.

Fun is, apparently, also Not Any Plaything We Own. Not Anything We Do Around Here. Not Anything Mother Suggests.

It's also, interestingly enough, not Anything That Already Happened. You can take your kids to Disneyland for two days, stopping off on the way home at the Raging Waterslides, drop by Toys R Us and let them buy anything they want, and go home by way of Baskin Robbins for a triple cone with seven toppings AND gummy bears - they're still going to say, "But what are we doing NOW? We never have any FUN."

I don't know why they look to me to provide fun, anyway. I've obviously been a giant bust at it for their entire short lives - or so they tell me. My ideas of fun are always something like Let's Buy Shoes, or Let's Drop You Off At Your Father's For The Weekend.

The older child has developed a dangerous new idea of what's fun. She wants to Organize things. She gets that gleam in her eye and says, "I know what we can do! Let's organize all the bookshelves!" But she's her mother's daughter, so this means "Let's get out every book in the house and pile them on the floor and then get bored and walk off and leave them." I don't find this Fun. I don't find this a bit Fun. "Doesn't your Daddy have any bookshelves?"

The younger child has another idea for fun. It's a quiet one. It's called "Older Sister Torture". The rules are simple: agree to play a game or put together a variety show, go along with it until it's either time for someone else's turn at the fun part or time to present the show, and then quit. Go and turn on the television and sit on the couch with your thumb in your mouth. Refuse to acknowledge anyone else's existence. Watch the foam come out of your older sister's mouth.

I don't find this so much Fun, either. What's the mother's solution? "You VILL be in the variety show! Get up and dance RIGHT NOW!"

So now they're at school. No variety shows, no triple scoop cones. And I drove back home and napped, and vacuumed the carpet, and took a long shower, and put up this entry, and now I'm going off to work.

Now THIS is Fun.

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