I’m gonna level with yall right now: I am not a good mother.
Not by nature anyway. Some parents were born to be parents, whether they realize it or not. They’re doting and loving and genuinely take a real joy just from their children’s presence. They kiss booboos and smile a lot and very naturally are able to have deep conversations with the little people in their charge. They’re not perfect, sure, they have spats with their children, get frustrated, even yell sometimes, but at the end of the day they’re still there. Present. And taking in all the joy that raising a family entails.
I am not one of those people.
I try. I try so hard. But none of this comes naturally to me. Trying to talk to my children becomes a feat of strength. I don’t like to admit it, you know, because of the #momguilt but I am actually much happier as a person when they are not around. They seriously harsh my zen with their constant fighting, questions, can I’s, can you’s, and leaving their shit everywhere. I take joy from them, I do, but it doesn’t seem to be the pure kind of joy that I see on many other parents’ faces.
Now, I know I’m also not alone in this. There are plenty of us out there. My tribe is definitely the frazzled moms who are trying so hard to get this right but also kinda just sitting there on their smart phones while their kids scream their names to watch them go down the slide for the hundredth time. Them’s my peeps. They get me.
Anyway, to the point. School breaks have typically always been me chasing my children outside while I hide away doing random things in the house. We might have one thing planned…with someone else or maybe go the park down the street or something, but more often than not it’s just days filled with fighting and screaming and me yelling at them to stop.
When we moved to the city, my husband and I were excited about all of the opportunities and activities there would be for us to do, particularly with the kids. Well, we’d lived here for two years at the point and have done quite a bit but still not a lot if you know what I mean. Sure, we’ve been to each zoo…once. We took the kids to the Perot museum…once. The arboretum when my grandparents were in town. You know…special occasion type things and not actually taking advantage of this vast metroplex of people and things to do.
With Spring Break coming up, I decided to change that.
And also, my oldest guilted me.
While walking home from school one day, he asked me where we were going for the break, having heard all of his friends talking about their plans. Gut punch. We are very firmly middle class, and by that I mean we are not poor by any stretch of the imagination (Red and I know what it’s like to be poor, we’ve been there before and this is not poor), but we also don’t have a lot of extra money at the end of each month either. We have a fixer-upper house, but we’re not renting. We both have cars, but mine is ten years old and we don’t have a payment on it. The kids got a trampoline one year for Christmas, but that’s all they got. To sum it up, we’re doing alright, but not alright enough to take a trip over Spring Break.
So I told him that we weren’t going anywhere, but there are lots of fun things to do here. He just kind of nodded and sighed, saying under his breath the way eight-year-olds do, “That means we’re not going to do anything fun.”
Damn, kid, straight for the jugular.
So in my mind, I was like, ‘You know what, kid, fuck you, I’m gonna plan a whole week of fun shit to do, then what are you gonna whine about??” (Spoiler: He still whined a lot.)
I sat down that night, on Facebook, and scrolled through the events tab for hours. And, to my surprise, there were a ton of things to do during Spring Break, and almost all of them were FREE! Take that, kid, the whole week filled up before I knew it! I had a plan. And dammit, I was going to stick to it and we were going to have fun!
Now please understand what a feat this was for me. Every single day. And I am so proud of myself because we managed to do it all. I kept my promise and we did so many of the things.
Monday: There was a bat symposium in the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens, the only thing I paid for. $35. We got to learn all about bats and meet a couple of live ones after the presentation. The 8yo loved it but the 6yo was literally bored out of his mind.
After that we had a picnic lunch in the garden and walked around for about an hour. I always had the thought, “Why don’t I take the kids to the garden more often?” It’s free, it’s outside, it’s the perfect place to take them right? Yeah, no. Now I remember. They are like wild animals climbing on literally everything.
Literally.
Everything.
My blood pressure was through the roof as I felt the scornful judging gaze of a hundred parents as my kids not only acted like crazed baboons, but I was yelling at them like some kind of ancient backwards human from the 1960s.
Once we were done in the park, I took them up the road to the Modern Art museum because they were offering free admission to the entire museum on Monday. I really wanted to go because they have a Ron Mueck exhibit right now and figured a day when I can get all three of us in for free was the best day to do it because I expected them to not be able to handle it. Remember, these are the same children that just before our visit, couldn’t handle staying out of the flower beds and off the water falls in the Botanic Garden…
But to my surprise, they did wonderfully! They loved the museum and we ended up spending more time there than in the garden. They were given a free sketch book with random pieces inspired by the artwork in the exhibits and a little golf pencil. Every time they saw a piece they recognized, their eyes would light up and they’d excitedly proclaim that they’d seen that one in their book! They enjoyed plopping down in random places and drawing. They were really good about keeping their hands to themselves, keeping a distance from the sculptures, and minding their manners. It was like I had two completely different kids.
It was a magical experience and I’m still kind of shaken by it. Everything was perfect all the way up until the very end….
We were just about to leave, but the 8yo wanted to look at one last sculpture that was right by the door. I guess it just ate away at the 6yo a little too much, all that being good, and right before we were about to leave, when he thought no one was watching, he reached up and very quickly poked the bronze sculpture.
I got onto him and, sure enough, somebody employed by the museum pops a head out of nowhere and gets onto us too. As embarrassing as that was, his face was pretty priceless and made the whole ordeal almost worth it.
Tuesday: We laid low Tuesday morning, still tired from our big day on Monday. The little one and I did some housework while the older one got started on these two massive packets of homework his teacher sent home for the break…Have I mentioned how much I hate homework?
We had lunch with my mom and then headed back into Fort Worth in the afternoon to the Amon Carter Museum which was having Spring Break activities all week. For anyone who didn’t know, like me, the Amon Carter is free to the public all the time. They have a massive grass…pit? That the kids ran around in with a bunch of other kids and a really beautiful view of the city. The museum had little games set out for them like corn hole and jenga, but mostly the kids ran around in packs of noise and wildness.
After a while, I was able to talk them into going inside the museum to have a look around. They didn’t get into it as much as they did the modern, but they still did really well with their manners. We walked through the entire museum (mostly) before we finally came upon where they were having the activities. They had fun coloring and wrapping thread around posts to mimic some of the artwork in the museum. It was, overall, and enjoyable afternoon.
Wednesday: Pi day was the biggest day I had planned and by far the most anxiety inducing. There was a big, free, Pi Day event going on in Dallas that I wanted to take the kids to. I mean, how can you pass up a free math festival?! Now, anybody who lives in this area will tell you that Fort Worth is a far more accessible city than Dallas. It’s a big city, but it still kind of acts like a smaller one. It’s pretty easy to navigate, everything is clearly marked, and there’s just not a whole lot of traffic. Dallas is more like a typical big city with a lot of one way streets, unclear signage, and so. much. traffic.
Going into Dallas is really intimidating for the suburb dwellers like me, but there is just so much to do if you can just get there. I decided, since driving is stressful and parking is expensive, that we’d take the train into the city. Altogether, the tickets were $10, and I’m sure I would have paid at least that in parking. I’d never ridden the train on my own before and honestly had no fucking clue what I was doing, but dammit, I was going to make it work. If we’re going to be doing things in Dallas, I need to get to know the train system and what better way to learn than to just dive in head first. I literally had to ask someone at every single train we got on which one we needed to take. Fortunately, everyone we came across was super nice and forthcoming of their knowledge of the rail system. I am proud to say we rode the TRE into the city, switched trains, and got ourselves to our destination without any missteps. I’m still pretty amazed.
We walked from the station up to the AT&T arts center, through some dark alleys that made me nervous (Thanks, Google) but we made it! And, I mean, who’s gonna mug a woman with two loud ass kids and an off brand purse…it’s pretty obvious I don’t have any money, right? We were fiiiiine…
The festival was a lot smaller but also a lot bigger than I imagined. It was just a bunch of organizations with little tables and activities set up in one corner of the patio, but there were so many people there. We stayed for several hours, making hot glue fidget spinners, trying out musical instruments, and playing with diy seismographs. The kids had a blast running through the water slick and doing flips in the grass. We wandered around the buildings next to the arts center, finding more sculptures to gawk at and trying our best not to j-walk, despite the construction about closing random side walks. We even got a free tour of the opera house.
While the kids were playing in the water, I asked the almighty Google where we should eat, not wanting to just eat at a random McDonald’s or something. I mean…how often do we go into Dallas? We can get McDonald’s anywhere. The problem with this is, I cannot afford a $60 lunch…and we were in Dallas after all. So I found a Shake Shack that looked close. I’d never been and have heard people talk about it. Google said it was inexpensive and just up the road, so it was perfect, right?
Yeah…just up the road like a mile. We still managed and it worked out because there was a big yard with a ping-pong table and some corn hole to play and run in and other kids doing the same so that parents could stand in line in peace. Got our burgers, $25 for the three of us isn’t great but it honestly isn’t that bad, and I’m pleased to say that the food was really good.
After that, I asked the almighty Google where the nearest train station was. That’s one of the best things, I’ve found out, about using the trains to get into the city. You don’t have to know where you are, where you’ve been, how far you’ve walked, you just have to be able to get yourself to a train station, and there are lots of them. But…I found out that the almighty Google cannot be trusted in this quest.
After looking at the map, I found out there was a little train station not far from the Shake Shack where we had lunch. But Google decided that we didn’t need to ride one of the little trains, but instead took us straight to Victory Station where we could pick up the TRE and not have to change trains to get home. The problem with this? We walked for so. fucking. long. It was probably at least a couple miles. It was such a long walk and we were already so tired. We walked through uptown and got to see the penthouses. We were almost run over by a cream colored Range Rover. We accidentally walked through a dangerous construction scaffolding because we didn’t see the sign that had blown over saying the sidewalk was closed. We got to the American Airlines center and the map was saying the train station was just on the other side. We got to the other side and I couldn’t see it. I asked a police officer who happily pointed to it on the other side of a parking lot, right there in front of me, and laughed at the silly tourist.
That is when I learned that Victory station is not like Union station. There’s no building and more importantly no bathrooms. The little one had to poop and I had no where to let him. On top of that, the TRE wasn’t coming for another forty minutes. It comes every half hour all day…except at 2:00…it’s an hour. Guess which time we showed up at the station. We were all pretty tired and miserable.
But after the long wait and the roasting hot thirty minute train ride out of the city, we managed to make it home safely and the little one did not poop his pants. The kids still say it was a fun day, so…win!
I’m, like, ridiculously proud of myself for this.
Thursday: This was my mom’s day. She took the day off from work to spend with us and it was a wonderfully lazy day after our adventure the day before. We took the kids to see A Wrinkle In Time, her treat. I’ve been so excited to see this movie ever since I first found out it was being made and who was directing it.
It holds up; I enjoyed it a lot. The little one on the other hand…well, let’s just say it’s a good thing no one was around us. He literally just rolled in his seat and basically did flips throughout the entire movie. It’d come to a quiet part and we’d just hear squeeeeaaaaaakkkk because he was playing with the recliner and of fucking course he got the one with the squealing motor.
After the movie, we bribed the kids to be good (It didn’t work.) with a trip to Steel City Pops. To be honest, the trip was for us. We don’t get to go very often and have really been wanting to go. My treat, around $18. We happily ate our chocolate drenched popsicles and came home where we kicked the kids outside, sat our butts down on the couch, and actually had to interact with one another because her phone was almost dead.
My mom volunteers at the Arlington Symphony and offered to get us into the show Thursday night at no cost, so we jumped on the opportunity. The kids had never seen a real symphony concert before. We got ‘Volunteer’ badges and put the kids to work passing out programs while my mom ushered people to their seats. Honestly, for the kids, I think it was the best part of the whole night, thrusting small booklets into elderly people’s faces.
The 8yo absolutely loved the concert, taking in every instrument and paying attention every time someone got up to introduce a piece. The 6yo whined until he fell asleep…
I’d still call it a good night though.
Friday: And that brings us to today, the last day of Spring Break. The only day I didn’t have something pre-planned. The kids have been playing outside almost all day (I won’t let them on the TV), we went out to Chick Fil A for lunch, and I’ve been doing some housework…and writing this blog post. I think we needed this rest day, especially after staying out late to watch the symphony.
I look back over the week, and I really have to say, I’m super proud of myself. I did good mom stuff this week. My kids have memories to share when they return to school. I didn’t end the week just ready to throttle somebody like I normally do. I made plans and actually went through with all of them. We did something every day and the whole week cost me less than a hundred bucks. Some people might not get it, but some people will. This is a big deal for me.
Go me.
Now I’ve gotta rest up and get ready for the big one: Summer.
The Terrible Housewife 