The Po Show

Stay at Home Blah

I spend the weekdays waiting for the weekend (come on, all you old fogeys! Join me in a rousing rendition of Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend!!" Complete with head-bangin' air guitar!!). Weekdays are a flurry of hauling my ass out of bed, serving precisely timed breakfasts to surly children (Matthew must eat in courses: a bowl of grapes immediately upon waking, followed by a bagel with cream cheese, and lastly a sliced mango), haranguing said children into getting dressed and ready, filling lunch boxes, making sure backpacks are packed. Almost always topped by a chorus of "Get your shoes on! No, you don't have time for that! What are you doing? We're LATE!"

I aimfully float through my day, running innumerable errands, cleaning, doing laundry, packing up ebay sales, spending various amounts of time on internet suckage. Always a bit on edge, waiting for that phone call that might come, telling me to come pick up Matthew at school due to another "incident." Then I pick them up, wondering where the hell the day went, and we come home to snacks and homework and dinner. Ross comes home, and it's baths and reading and dispensing of pharmaceuticals and bed. Ross has been traveling quite a bit in the last month, too, with some overnight trips, so a lot of additional pressure has been piled on me as well.

But weekends are nice. I'm fortunate that my husband almost never works on weekends. We do fun stuff. We go to museums and the zoo and to the playground to shoot baskets and kick around the soccer balls. We go out to lunch, we go on hikes, we go shopping. We get out of the house and we spend time all together. And I experience a real feeling of release, that I'm not the sole parent. There's someone else to deal with meltdowns and demands and questions. Just someone else to think of stuff to keep the kids occupied so they don't spend every moment playing video games or watching TV.

On Thursday, Ross sent me an email that he was going to the Penn State-Wisconsin game this weekend. He had "semi-committed" to it a long time ago, he said, but he didn't think our friend was going to be able to get tickets, so he never mentioned it. Well, tickets were indeed procured, so they all left at 6:45 yesterday morning. They'll be back later today.

So it was just me and the kids this weekend, and I felt (I feel) an irrational amount of anger and depression over it. This is the weekend; this is when I am supposed to get a break. I didn't want to have to come up with activities and prepare all meals and go through the bedtime routine all by myself. I didn't want to take Tessa to soccer in 49 degree weather (wasn't it 85 degrees just a couple of DAYS ago???). I didn't want to have to bring her along to Matthew's haircut. I wanted to take a nap in the afternoon.

Most of all, I didn't want to have to come up with activities so they didn't spend every moment playing video games or watching TV. So I didn't :p.

I really hate to begrudge my husband a boys-weekend-out, since he never ever gets to have them. I think if I'd had more advance warning, I wouldn't have been so annoyed. But mostly I'm left with the thought, "When do *I* get a weekend away? When do *I* get a break?"