January 7, 2008, 6:23 AM–that loud rumbling sound you heard was not the sound of a snowplow: it was the sound of 20,000 Flagstaff mothers realizing that it was really going to be a snow day.
The fact that we could even have a snow day after two weeks of school vacation is the best evidence I’ve seen so far for the power of prayer. True, it can be assumed that just as many parents were praying against a snow day as there were children praying for one (in much the same way that Steinbeck noted that millions of prayers must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God), but I have to believe that, when it comes to prayer, “vote early and vote often” is especially apt: while the number of both pro-snow and anti-snow pray-ers may have been roughly equal, I’m sure the pro-snow prayers themselves were far greater. Think about it: while the average mother probably looked up at the approaching snow clouds and said, “Please God–don’t let tomorrow be a snow day,” the average child, in contrast, was firmly ensconced in front of the Weather Channel chanting “Snow day, snow day, snow day,” until the lines between witchcraft and prayer became hopelessly blurred.
Whatever the cause, the end result was the same: Day 17 of captivity. Actually, a shipwreck makes a better analogy; when you are a captive there is at least (hopefully) somebody bringing in new supplies. On a lifeboat, however, you must make do with what you have, carefully rationing out your supplies until your rescuers arrive. Which is exactly what most of us did–only, in our case, the thing we were rationing was not fresh water, but rather that much more elusive of commodities: patience. Not that we didn’t prepare: knowing that two weeks of Christmas break loomed ahead, most of us laid in what we though would be an adequate supply. It was just our bad luck to find that, on the very day we had been planning to restock–perhaps with a quadruple mocha and the New York Times–we needed to have saved one more box. And now the cupboard was bare.
Suddenly, we realized that our survival story was going to read a whole lot less like a Reader’s Digest “Drama in Real Life” episode, and more like The Perfect Storm. Less like Robinson Crusoe and more like Into the Wild.
Actually, now that I think about it, I’m going to toss the lifeboat analogy out in favor of something a little more grim, and therefore a little more appropriate: the environment. Yes, in many ways, maternal patience is a lot like the water table: seemingly endless and yet exquisitely fragile. All it takes is a few out-of-control wells–say, the kind that pump nonstop for seventeen days straight–and before you know it there is a sinkhole in your front yard big enough to sink a Hummer. Or, in the case of maternal patience, big enough to sink all your hopes of finally losing the designation among your children’s friends as “the mean Mom.”
That, at least, was my plan. I had decided that, this break, I was finally going to be the cool Mom. I was going to be okay with being asked every fifteen minutes if there was “anything to eat;” I was going to be okay with listening to them say “I’m bored” as they crawled across approximately $1000 worth of new toys spread out all over the floor; I was even going to be okay with breaking up constant fights between two people who swore they would “never fight again, if only you get us (insert nearly anything here).” I was going to be okay with it–for sixteen days. Sixteen. And then morning dawned on the seventeenth day. A snow day.
And I was not okay.