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I Used To Think Women Were Going Places [1]
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Date: 2023-08-07
Nowhere terribly fancy for us, vacationwise. No Gay Paree, no Greek Islands. Plenty of Wild West, though. The National Parks of Utah. Once upon a time, when we were young and our children were mandatory baggage, Honey and the kids and I, we used to go places. Nearly every year. Like it or not, kids.
Road Trip! as the famous movie line once spoken said...
I think for some families, that Road Trip is not an optional thing; it’s essential downtime or maybe merely tradition, some strange sort of relief from the nonstop stress of Dad’s (in this case) management job where nobody was ever happy and nothing was ever good enough. Why do parents think trading the stress of an 8 or 10 hour work day in for the 24/7 stress of Determination To Have A Good Time, Look Over There, Kids! is going to be relaxing? Let us all laugh heartily at that notion. It’s still a mystery to me, why the need for Road Trip. Kid Hangover? Reliving our youth? Who knows?
Not I. I have repeated my parents’ mistakes on occasion, done Extremely Much Better in some areas, and failed my children in completely different ways. Just like Mom said would happen. Road Trip isn’t a mistake, per se, but it’s still a challenge. And we tried to have a good time.
Road tripping with kids is a lot like your wedding day, in that you expect everything to go a certain way, and it doesn’t...it seems a terrible tragedy at the time, but eventually segues into a sort of misty recall, “Hey, remember when you guys all chased those kids who were messing with your car, hahaha.” or, later in life “Hey, you remember when The Boy puked in the parking lot at Zion because of altitude sickness?”
I know we road tripped a lot when the kids were young. By the time our eldest was old enough to stay home by himself, I was fairly certain that the older one didn’t want to go with us ever again (Being 16 will do that to you, I guess, one day you wake up and your parents are lizard people or something).
Because we are adult parents. and very mature, because the Son declined our invitation to travel to Arizona and Utah, in retaliation we stole his life size R2D2 cardboard cutout and we would send him photographs of R2 by the Arch in St. Louis, hanging with turkeys on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, lots of pictures. R2 isn’t going to play this back for you, kid.
For me, an alleged adult, road tripping is almost a meditative state, even when I’m leaning over the back seat, threatening dire consequences for the next child that even says, “Peep.” Mom does not want to hear it, leave her alone, let her stare out the window and compile the bird list for the trip. I do not care if your sister is breathing your air, or if your brother’s finger is on your side of the car, it’s a Crown Vic, kids, suck it up, you’ve got Room To Roam in that back seat.
Furthermore, there is an entire box with books and cards and things to do, so quit whining and have a good time, dammit. I‘m sorry, the crayons all melted together in the 5 minutes we left the car closed up at Lake Mead. Do something else.
And you know the amount of space in the back seat is truly large, because here’s a picture of you two sleeping on the back seat. Together.
Moving right along,..Whose turn is it to pick the music now?
Moving right along, licking down the road in that giant tongue of a police car..
When I was a kid, we did road trips, too. A lot of them, And I noticed a lot of changes between the trips of my own childhood, and the trips we force marched our children on during Mandatory Family Vacation Fun Time. For one thing, the music got better. No more AM squeal from across the country every time you went under a bridge, most of the country only got AM radio stations. FM Radio hadn’t even made Pirate Radio status when my dad was doing the driving.
And good luck finding an FM radio station anyway, except the classical one from Springfield, which I really liked. For all 50 miles of its reach. When my own Honey drove the kids and me (crazy) CDs and cassette tapes were our friends, and it turns out you can never take too much music with you. Never, ever drive 1900 miles with only 6 8-track tapes.
The Rambler of my childhood did not have anything besides the cursed AM radio/Top 40 (which was really maybe Top 10 over and over) If we wanted music in the car, we sang. Some of us quite badly. I recall it being the summer of The Rolling Stones “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” and my mother, a die hard Peter, Paul & Mary fan, would about sneer off the road in disgust. “Ain’t got no...” “Can’t get none,...what the heck kind of language is that?” She came around when my 8 year old self showed her how to do the monkey.
So going anywhere in the car with my parents would be miles of word games and songs, and we could get my Dad to sing solo, so I did learn some performative church music (more than one kind of religion/song was taught), and of course we loved what must have been silly kid songs. I don’t remember. Something something Billy the William Goat……My dad is 91 now, and I would pay a lot of money to hear his beautiful singing voice again,
But I digress. Point is, childhood entertainment options in the car were limited. Even then I liked riding in the car, going for a ride soothed me; the hum of the road taking me miles into dreamland.
If I got bored, woke up, I might read. The only problem with reading in the car was that if I didn’t face forward, the hissing past of scenery reeling backwards, eventually made me carsick enough that I’d have to quit reading for a bit. Carsick made my dad impatient.
So family road trips were definitely on the Together list of things to do and places to go once we became parents; we went to a LOT of car shows. Having a shiny orange GTO will do that to you.
But I wonder about road trips now. Maybe we’re just more pinched for cash. And we’re not young anymore; nobody is going to make Chicago to Salt Lake City in 20 hours ever again. Sorry about that, Nebraska. No revenue for you.
I think about summer road trips and speed traps and I can’t help but think about the looming possibility of some kind of women traps at state borders that some states would like to implement. What if you’re going on a legit vacation with your pregnant daughter? You not going to let us leave the state?
Sorry, caught myself ramping up the ranting. I don’t mean to do the ranty dance, but sometimes things irritate and/or infuriate me, and I just start hopping up and down. Which is pretty funny when someone my age does it. But not germane.
No, what I wanted to say what I was thinking about many years ago, and today as well. Let the good times roll.
I remember we were coming home from a car show, middle of the 1980s, and as we got closer to the bend in the road, we saw perhaps 20 hot air balloons, and they looked so pretty up there. I thought to myself, “Isn’t it great that we live in a country where we can travel from state to state and pack up and go any time we like, and nobody will come and talk to us about where we went, once we came home. We are free to come and go. Like the hot air balloons.” I want to keep doing this, and I don’t want my daughter questioned, should she drive out of state.
It does look like women are going places again. Like to the morgue. I remember being declared a person in 1972, and I liked it, and I won’t give it up. Women don’t want bad trips. We want children when we want them. Which is our business, or a decision with a partner.
Why does the expression “You’ve come a long way, baby,” fail to ring true? For one thing, it’s sort of a circular way we’ve come. You drive around in a circle day after day, because you don’t know your driveway is circular, and you’ll be home again before you know it. Freedom, no freedom, WWII ends, go home, women, make babies. Gimme back my factory job. Some of those babies would survive today, but not in the 1950s. I am the 2nd child of my parents, the first died at 19 days, the third at 6 months, my parents got 2 living children out of the deal and seemed pleased about it. My mother miscarried 5 more times. I cannot imagine having to justify my travel within the confines of the United States, and if you please, do not do it, Idaho. Adding misery to miscarriage is also doing justice wrong.
I think Honey and I aren’t going to go many places much longer, with the looming sarcoma in 3 places on his leg that require surgery, somehow I doubt there will be any hiking for some years, if ever. But it’s not as important to Go Places now; we have already Been There; the children can no longer be tortured with Have Fun Or Else, them being 40 and 30, so no Family Road Tripping will ever happen again.
I liked the days when we could drive from state to state without having to checkpoint. That only happened once in my life; at the California border, because they were confiscating all the fruit that came in. Ironic isn’t it? Keeping the pests out, keeping the women in. Hmph. Women are not a fruit.
And we’re resourceful. Block us from one way of travel, we’ll find another way. The olds remember what it felt like to be pregnant and have no choice.
Nossir, I don’t like it. Not at all.
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