Post-Holiday Time Out

We just debarked from our eight-hour drive and I believe I’ve spent too long in too confining a space with these people. I’ll be at The Madison Hotel if anyone needs me. Not that The Quartet was bad on the return home from Georgia, just the opposite, in fact, but they were all right there on top of me, breathing down my neck, farting in my space. I love them dearly and I love the Thanksgiving holiday, as I’m sure you’ve been able to tell, but I’m only human. I need a time out. I feel as though I’m hungover, that I’ve been drunk on family for four days and now I’m in the gutter, stinking of ravioli, toddler and cigars, and all I can do is curse the light. Like any hangover, the light from the TV, emitted from Manny, Diego and Sid the Sloth for the fiftieth time is burning into my eyeballs. And the noises. The various sounds these kids make are at foghorn level in my brain tonight. JP was just bouncing S’s shoes she left behind on the wood floor and I threatened to make him eat them if he kept it up. This is contradictory to the previous threat I made to sew his lips shut if he didn’t take all parts of his clothing out of his mouth. JP has a habit lately of chewing on his sleeves, or whatever scrap he can fit in his mouth. I can’t get him to eat a banana or meatloaf, but a cotton/poly blend seems to be the perfect snack. And now S and her mother are arguing over whether or not Ice Age 2, The Meltdown is a cartoon or a movie.

I know this all sounds very harsh, and probably drops me from the short list for Father of the Year, but I have to tell you people the truth. You don’t want me telling you that everything comes up roses after 96 hours of constant contact. You don’t want me to start lying now, do you? Well, I can’t. I can’t lie to you and I can’t lie to my kids, so when I tell them that they’re going to have to sleep on the front porch if they don’t calm the hell down, then that’s just the way it’s going to be.

And now, on this cartoon or movie or whatever it is, they’re showing the baby mammoth who’s all alone because she doesn’t have any parents for some reason or other, and I already feel guilty about what I’ve written because this little creature has big, sad, lonely eyes, but no parents. Yet at the same time JP, for no reason at all, falls off of the couch and it sounds like somebody’s thrown a sack of potatoes on the floor and I swear to him that I’m going to glue him to that couch if he doesn’t calm down. And then C asks some questions about something else and S whines because no one is helping her put her pajamas on and I’m ready again to send them all the way of the mammoths, with their mouths sewn shut, sleeping on my front porch.