Absolute Truth and Roadtripping With Kids.
There’s an absolute truth about doing anything with kids. Mark me well when I say: There is what we want to experience with our kids, and then there is how we want to experience it with them. NEVER DO THOSE THINGS MATCH UP. I shouldn’t say never, sometimes the stars align and for a brief moment all is right in the world. But most of the other time? There’s a little bit of a discrepancy. Mostly because we have one agenda, and kids have their own, totally separate, ideas. This lesson repeats itself over and over to me, most recent on my roadtrip around Texas last month. It was an epic trip that took 2 weeks. What I wanted was for my kids and I to see new things and share experiences together that would last a lifetime. How I wanted it to happen was by visiting every fort built in Texas, talking all about nerdy history while driving (and driving and driving), and then reading library books when we’d stop at night.
The truth is, we did have a good time and awesome experiences…mixed in with all the other stuff that happens when you have a 7, 12, and 15 year old on board. Truth in this case meaning whining and complaining and overall sour attitudes. I think, in the past, I’ve skipped over all that stuff because the positives more than make up for the ‘negatives’. This has inadvertently lead some to believe I’m a saintly superwoman with abilities that are so awesome, I never have to deal with cranky kids or meltdowns in the middle of stores. This is clearly not the case. At least, the not having cranky kids that melt down part. The saintly superwoman part is pretty accurate. But even I, in all my awesomeness, still have to navigate the perilous waters of the discrepancy between what I want and how I want it to happen. In fact:
*Golfer cried for a good 30 min. before we left because the thought of spending 14 days on the road was too much for him to bear.
*Sassy was refusing to go unless she had an ipod full of music/apps and headphones so she could zone out.
*Both of them wouldn’t budge until I agreed our newly rescued cat could come with us too. The cat no one knows about yet cuz I haven’t blogged about it…
*They spent most of their driving time playing HALO or Assassins Creed in the backseat of the minivan, thanks to Golfer hooking up the Xbox.
*At night I made sure to check in to a hotel with wifi so they could watch youtube videos (instead of read all the nerdy library books I checked out on Texas and other historical things surrounding the areas we were driving to).
*Golfer frequently would look around at the tourist places we’d stop at and announce, “Well, this looks like a big waste of my time…”
*After all the awesomeness we saw and did, Golfer said the best thing about the trip was driving into our driveway because “it meant the trip was over!”
I obviously had a different idea of how I wanted our trip to go. In my fantasy land, we’d have been listening to history podcasts and NPR while discussing Texas history. Instead, the kids were hell bent on denying to themselves they were on the road by trying to recreate their home routine anytime they could. Thus…youtube, xbox, ipod, etc. It drove me crazy. Probably as crazy as I drove my dad when he took my family and I cross country in a VW Vanagon and all I did was read and listen to tapes of the radio station from my hometown in California.
I dealt with my frustration in lots of ways.
For one, by bringing a six pack up to the hotel rooms and pounding a few before chillaxing with the kids watching youtube videos of Halo Reach fails with them. This maybe wasn’t HOW I wanted it to be, but the end result was totally vibeing with the WHAT I wanted…together time creating happy memories. We still talk about the funny stuff we watched (on the nasty motel sheets. It took me a beer just to be ok with touching them…).
I hooped with my hula hoop. A lot. If the kids didn’t want to go anywhere and I did, I took my hoop outside and hooped around to my music.
We stayed with friends in Austin, and while I went out and about discovering the city and capitol building with Naturalist, I let the other 2 decide to stay at my friends house with their kids. This was Golfer’s second favorite thing, “staying inside and not having to do anything”.
If we did go anywhere nerdy and history minded, I budgeted in trips to gift shops and ice cream parlors. Sassy’s favorite memory from the whole trip was getting a machine to stretch out her penny and stamp Jim Bowie on it.
So I had to give up on a lot of my HOW’S in order to stay true to my WHAT’S. If I would have forced Golfer to do things he didn’t want to, then my what’s never would have happened. All that family togetherness would have gone up in flames. By compromising a little (all of us!) we maintained a good win/win balance. They compromised by letting me drag them all over hell and all of Georgia. I mean Texas. In exchange, I gave up on doing a lot of my own cruise ship-like agenda and went with their flow a little more.
I was still a little frustrated by the end of our trip…we ended up skipping lots of things I wanted us to see (like Big Bend National Park) and I felt like I’d failed in achieving both my what and my how for the roadtrip. But then I went through all the movie clips I took on my iphone (8 mm app!) and what appeared was exactly what I’d wanted in the first place…connection, experience, happiness. Togetherness. And even though you can see that Golfer is cranky for most of it (he is, after all, 12) I caught him smiling TWICE. And that is success in my book.
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Holy crap, I can so relate! Sometimes it feels like my kids want to do the opposite of me just to spite me(and yes, I know that’s not the case.LOL) I really do try to make things fun for them and bite my tongue when I’m frustrated. But thanks for posting this because now I know I’m not nuts.
Yep, I can relate too, I already said that on twitter
Great post, great video. I tend to only want to blog the positives too, but once in a while it’s nice to see the not-so-fun things that happen in life.
I can remember screwing up my Dad’s once-in-a-lifetime visit to the Kennedy Space Centre aged 13 though. To be fair, I didn’t know when we got there that I was going to hurl like a good’un and spend four hours in the medical centre crying. I’m from the UK, so we’d travelled a really long way to be there, and I moaned for the whole visit.
So maybe it’s Karma that half of my four kids never want to go anywhere, or do anything except play Mario Kart or Zelda on the Wii…
I drove from Chicago to NJ with my 7 & 13 year olds. I, too, had romantic notions of sharing history, frequent stops off the beaten path, laughing, playing car games. In reality, I had to set up the hot spot on my phone so my son could play Minecraft from his laptop in the backseat. My daughter just wanted to listen to music instead of checking out the custom maps I made for her. But overall, good memories and I think they learned a thing or two!
This is funny to me because I was just laying in bed daydreaming about an (idealized) roadtrip with my girls. I do love a good road trip, but my kids are 1 1/2, 4, and 8. I think I’d better wait awhile. I appreciate your roll-with-it attitude and really enjoyed your video.