I’ve decided to write about my trip to Iowa in several posts. I know you are excited. I’m certain you’ve been checking back here every day, just waiting to find out the details of my winter vacation to blizzard country and cursing me for not posting. So I’ll start with the trip itself. And by that I mean the travel. The twelve and a half billion hours I spent in a small car with a smelly, growly, bitchy fifteen year old boy.
I was foolish enough to be excited about the prospect of a road trip. After all, I love road trips. And some fool suggested that it would be fun – a nice time to catch up with my son, who I don’t get to spend nearly enough time with because it seems I’m always at work or at work or sleeping. Okay, so this fool was me, but never mind that.
We had the opportunity to fly – my sister found us some fairly inexpensive tickets and my mother was paying – but we would have been flying out on Christmas Eve, and since I’ve never flown into or out of Des Moines without being delayed by weather and overcrowded flights, I wasn’t particularly fond of this idea. It sometimes ended up taking two days to get there (or home) and required sleeping on an airport floor or waiting to be shuttled to a hotel where I would get three hours of sleep before having to catch the shuttle back to the airport to be told that my new flight had also been delayed. Besides, when I offered the option of flying (or the train) to the kid, he responded that he too was really excited about the road trip. Driving it was.
It wasn’t so bad at first. We’d gotten a much later start than I planned since I am terrible at managing my time outside of work and thought I could accomplish twelve hours worth of errands and tasks in only three, but we adjusted, and instead of leaving at two in the morning we left shortly after noon. That meant I would be doing a lot of mountain driving in the dark, but it was bright and sunny for the first part of the trip and the weather maps I’d consulted only mentioned brief periods of chances of rain over southern Indiana. Of course, I was about twelve hours behind the maps I’d checked the day before.
It started raining as soon as we hit West Virginia. Not so bad though – a light rain, not even a cause for the windshield wipers. Then as we hit the turnpike, it started to pour. And it was rush hour. And when we came to a rest stop, I thought I’d pull over and nap and let the rush hour traffic and maybe a little of the rain pass on by. The kid thought this would be a good opportunity to move from the front seat to the back, and since the car was loaded down with Christmas presents and luggage and anything from my son’s room that he thought he might need during our trip, this meant rearranging the car.
I refused to help him. I did this out of love. First of all, it was a teaching moment. He needs to learn to take responsibility for himself: if he wants something, he needs to take the necessary steps to get it. I provided him with a perfectly comfortable seat in the front of the car. He chose not to sit there. His responsibility to do something about it. Also, I think it’s time he learned how to properly overpack an automobile. He’s fifteen now. He’ll be driving next year. But mostly, I did this because I was getting tired and needed a few moments to close my eyes before we headed into the dark hours of the night when I would likely a) fall asleep and drive us off a mountain pass or b) become so tired and uncomfortable driving that each and every complaint from the kid about how uncomfortable he was would add to my irritation until finally escalating into a shouting match at a rest stop somewhere in Indiana at four in the morning. See, out of love.
But, despite refusing to help, I didn’t get much rest. Apparently, the kid didn’t realize that I was trying to get in a nap, what with the cold mountain breeze blowing in through the open doors and all the things being tossed about, not to mention all the whining and grumbling and inappropriate language coming out of his mouth (see, he learned how to properly overpack a car. Score one for Mom). So I stepped out and smoked a couple of cigarettes and as soon as he was finished, we got back on the interstate and drove all through the mountains of WV and KY in moderate to heavy rain and darkness.
Good times.
The moderate to heavy bitching that began shortly after we left Richmond (“I can’t see the screen on my DS! This is why we should have left at night!”) continued all the way through WV and KY as well. First it was too hot in the car. Then it was too stuffy. Then cold. Then his ears were popping because he couldn’t find the gum I’d put in his stocking for exactly this purpose. He was hungry. He was thirsty. His DS was running out of juice. I solved each and every one of these problems as they arrived (I’d also stuffed a bunch of junk food in his stocking so he’d have plenty to munch on during the trip).
Then he started to complain about my choice in music. No problem. I plugged in the iPod on which I had strategically compiled a playlist of songs we both enjoyed. Score another for Mom. For about an hour. It seems that despite my reminding him and his promise that yes, he charged it before we left, he had not charged the iPod, but had instead listened to it the entire day before when he was off school and I was at work and then running around town picking up the car and last minute Christmas gifts and junk food. So without the iPod and compromise music, we listened to the new cd’s I’d bought him for Christmas not knowing that I would have to listen to them in the car. Score one for the kid.
Somewhere in Kentucky, he fell asleep in the back seat. I pulled over to a rest stop, smoked a few cigarettes under the overhang of the building, checked the weather maps, delighted in the knowledge that the rain was supposed to taper off in Indiana. I figured if it was going to continue raining, I'd go ahead and check us into a motel for the night instead of driving straight through like I usually do. But the radar showed the rain moving east and since we were heading west and out of the rain, and I was feeling pretty alert and the kid was finally quiet, I would just keep going. I found a station playing Christmas music and for a couple of hours, drove on a mostly empty interstate, checking out the occasional display of lights on some house or business along the route while the kid snored in the back seat.
The rain did start to subside once we made it to Indiana and by the time I stopped for gas just outside Indianapolis, it had stopped completely. I again considered pulling over for a nap, but the next rest area was just under a hundred miles and I felt good about being able to drive that far without getting too tired. Idiot.
Another ten miles down the road we ran into fog. Thick fog. Twenty yard visibility fog. I kept hitching my wagon to the taillights of various semi trucks that passed me, keeping up with them as long as I could and then slowing down until I could catch the next passing truck. Years later we reached the next rest area and I pulled over, used the little girls room, smoked a cigarette, and settled into my seat with a blanket for a nap.
I have discovered that there isn’t much difference between a teenage boy and an infant. Both require copious amounts of sleep. Both require constant feeding. And both wake up cranky once the moving car they had been so soundly lulled to sleep in stops moving for too long.
The first time he woke me up (ten minutes after I closed my eyes) was when he opened the door to go to the bathroom. Not a problem. Necessary bodily functions are acceptable. The second time he woke me up was when he opened the door again, this time to get something to drink. A little more annoying since he could have bought something when he got out the first time. Whatever, I just wanted sleep. The third time he woke me up (a mere twenty-five minutes after I first closed my eyes) he was playing his video game and apparently didn’t know where to plug in the headphones. The fourth time he woke me up was when he decided to call his father in the middle of the night and apparently didn’t realize that it wasn’t necessary to shout into the phone in order for his father to hear him all the way in Iowa.
At this point, I stepped outside of the car, smoked another cigarette to calm down, then got back in, explained to the man-child the importance of my getting at least a little nap since we had opted to drive straight through instead of spending a night in a hotel and tried to close my eyes for an hour or so.
I thought we were good.
Fifteen minutes later, the deep sighing began. This was followed by occasional mumbling. Then rocking of the car as he tried to get more comfortable. Then grunting. More rocking. More mumbling. Louder mumbling. And finally, “Mom . . . Mom . . . Can we go yet, Mom?”
Because of my psychic abilities (see paragraph 5), I had already foreseen the completely avoidable explosion that followed and done my very best to stop it. But, as is the case with most psychic visions (at least the fictional kind I write about in blog posts), the events seen in such a vision are unalterable.
This was the first of my son’s near-death experiences as his very tired, very agitated mother unleashed her fury upon him with a screaming tirade. I’m sure I woke up all the other travelers trying to catch a few minutes of shuteye at the rest area and am surprised the police were not summoned to deal with the uncorked mother about to discharge her only child.
With twenty minutes of sporadic sleep behind me and daylight approaching, we got back on the interstate and traveled in silence (the radio had been turned off after the kid had the nerve to complain about his homicidal mother’s choice of music) for the next five hundred miles through fog and increasing cold. By the time we arrived in Des Moines later that afternoon, I threw him out at his father’s house, helped him lug his stuff inside, and headed to my sister’s where I was informed that everyone in the city had been calling her asking if I’d arrived yet (I forgot to mention that my cell phone was also drained of juice by the kid who, besides the rest area call, phoned his father every half an hour to give him an update on our progress and complain about his horrible mother who was keeping him captive in the back seat of a cramped automobile - I realize that I need to invest in car chargers, but they require money and unless you are new here . . . ).
I called my family to let them all know I had arrived, handed my sister some cash to go get dinner from Taco John’s (oh, how I miss the craptastic Mexi-merican fast food of Taco John’s), and indulged in a little recreational activity that made the previous twenty-eight hours seem slightly more humorous.
Next time on My Mother Thinks I’m a Lesbian: How everyone in Des Moines thinks I’m the crazy one and why each and every one of those psych ward escapees is just plain wrong.
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