Back before I had children (B.C.), if I had walked in on a movie that featured several dewy-eyed children being terrorized by a deep, angry voice shouting “GET OUT!”, I would have assumed that I had walked in on an Amityville Horror-style horror movie. Now that I do have children, however, I would know instantly that I had not walked in on a horror film at all, but instead had obviously stumbled upon some sort of a documentary about modern family life, and that what I was witnessing was not, in fact, a case of demonic possession (much), but rather the typical, everyday reaction of a mother faced with her third vacation day in a row.
I have seen vacation days from both sides now: even though I grew up in Phoenix, where, it’s true we didn’t have any snow days, we did have something that, at least as far as parents are concerned, is much worse: we had summer. (If you think it’s hard to throw children out into three feet of snow just wait until you try to throw them out into 112E of heat. At least you can play in snow–all you can do with 112E is creep along from one shady spot to another, like a gigantic, miserable lizard.)
Not that my mother let that stop her. In fact, I can still distinctly recall the sequence of events that led to our annual eviction: usually around the second full week of vacation, which also happened to coincide with the second full week of watching my sister and myself wrestle furiously on the floor in front of the television (this was before remote controls) to determine whether we were going to watch a third rerun of the Bionic Woman (her choice) or a fifteenth rerun of Wild, Wild, West (mine), my mother would lunge for the phone book and start frantically dialing summer day programs. Usually the only ones left would be the awful ones where you had to stand outside all day, like “Archery for the Disinterested” and “Intermediate Hop-Scotch”. (I also seem to remember a course entitled “Painting Mr. Baker’s House”, although my mother swears that this never happened–it was, she says, all a delusion–brought on, I am sure, by heatstroke.)
At the time I remember being deeply resentful at being pried away from my television coma, but now that I have children of my own I understand completely. After our most recent four-day weekend, and after enduring my children’s twice a minute requests to play another three hours of Game Cube (“Can I play now?” “No.” “Can I play now?” “No.” “Can I play now?” “No.”), I, too, would have signed my kids up for classes with names like “Introduction to Breaking Bottles on the Railroad Tracks” and “History of Things Found in My Pocket”, if only it would have gotten them out of the house.
I’m sure that it has always been this way: someday archaeologists will find a cave drawing somewhere in France that shows a big stick figure using a spear to chase two little stick figures away from their spot in front of the fire, where they had just spent the last twenty minutes noisily and violently contesting over who got to be the next one to throw a log on the fire. (Not shown would be how, in the midst of the tussle, the cave children somehow managed to actually break the fire, or their mother’s exasperated shout of, “You kids could bust a mammoth!” In art, some things are just so obvious that there isn’t any need to show them.)
In the same spirit, I’m also sure that, in the future, we’ll see space stations equipped with special “eject” buttons that mothers can push whenever school is shut down because of solar flares and the like. Not that that would be a shock to anyone who had grown up in Phoenix: being tossed out suit-less into the vacuum of space isn’t that much different than being thrown outside into a Phoenix summer without a car–except for the probability that, compared to Phoenix, space will be a little more hospitable, and almost certainly a lot less dull.