uncategorical

Endless Summer

My personal terror alert level has now been officially lowered from the status of “a red more vivid than any human eye can discern” to “cadmium red.” The reason is that my three children have begun the new school year.

All three started new schools this time around. One started high school, one started middle school, and one started a new elementary school.

I noticed that during the summer I completely lost my sense of humor. I can no longer think of a single amusing thing to say. But the important thing is that I survived without killing anyone thanks to my unique daily regimen, a mixture of modern science and ancient herbal remedies, or air conditioning and gin to be specific. I generally mix my gin with Kool Aid because drinking it straight is not considered classy here in Kansas.

I celebrated today by sending out a new batch of resumes to a new batch of jobs that I don’t really want to do and probably won’t be offered. I prepared for my upcoming interviews by getting a spanking new queer-eye-for-the-straight-guy haircut. “Make me look conservative. Make me look like a responsible adult,” I said, and off came the long gray and brown locks, leaving me only with short, gray stubble.

I have come to hate the telephone. When you are stuck in a tiny house with a 14-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy with severe autism for twelve weeks, and have to go off to work as soon as the “respite” provider arrives, you tend to find that there are enough interruptions in life without a bloody phone. But ring it does and always and it’s never for me and it’s never anything good.

I am exhibiting all the symptoms of early onset Alzheimers. I get up to perform some simple task and I find myself interrupted three or four times in succession until I don’t remember what it was I got up to do. Or I can’t remember whether I did such and such or just thought about doing it, or then again maybe it was yesterday that I did it. I’m not really sick though, just beaten down by another long, hot summer where everything had to be put on hold and nothing was accomplished.

And the youngest one is continually demanding “chips” and “juice” and “car ride” and “hose” and pulling things out of cupboards and screaming and biting his hand and pouring out shampoo and breaking his sister’s stuff and cutting up every piece of paper he can find (including library books) without any discrimination whatsoever and drinking any liquid he can unscrew and spilling noodles and cereals and running up and down and taking off all his clothes and missing the toilet and singing one line each of “Stop, In the Name of Love” and “Dinah Won’t You Blow Your Horn” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” over and over again and suddenly becoming cute and smiley faced before collapsing without warning into a fit of inconsolable grief and tears, then laughing hysterically five minutes later. Ten years old.

I can never tell him off because he has absolutely no sense of right and wrong, but the tension mounts and mounts and the second his 12-year-old sister puts a foot wrong I explode and start shouting at her because my nerves are in shreds and have been for some time. So I become a bad parent to one by trying to be a good parent to the other. Trying to be too good for too long can eat away at your character like a swarm of crawfish gradually devouring some lost soul tied up alone out in the bayou. Summer. How was it for you?

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