June is ending

Tomorrow is the last day of June, and the twins and I will be heading up north for some cooler temperatures, greenery, and family. (Rocket Boy will come a few days later.) The drive is agonizing, no way around it, but I think we will survive. Six hours of driving, on eleventy-thousand different highways, but that's not the bad part.

The bad part is that we'll have to stop periodically to go potty. That will mean chasing the twins across parking lots, trying to keep them from grabbing candy in convenience stores, trying to keep them from leaving the restroom before I can use it too...

I wish my children were better behaved. I have come to the conclusion that it actually IS my fault that they're not. I've been falling down on the job. You cannot give up when your children are four years old and say, "oh well, that's just what they're like, naughty and willful, I'm going to go inside and read a novel." You need to stick with them, keep on correcting their behavior, don't yell, be consistent, blah blah.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about the reason that Rocket Boy and I had children. When we got together, way back when (almost 12 years ago), we discovered that we both really wanted to have children, despite our (already, back then) advanced ages. Both of us also felt that it was kind of our duty to have children -- that we had enjoyed our lives as single, childless people, but now it was time to "give back" to the world, by reproducing. (The world is probably thinking, "hey, it's all right, you didn't need to do that.") I knew that it would not be easy for me to be a mother: lazy, messy, don't like to cook, prefer curling up with a good book or website to interacting with my family. But I thought I would rise to the occasion.

STILL WAITING for that rising thing to happen.

Sometimes I think, I can't do this! I just can't! But this is your life, I tell myself. You knew it would be hard and you chose it, knowing that. You decided that you wanted to do this. It is not a bad life. Embrace it.

Yeah, yeah.

But anyway, I'm really looking forward to a break from all these serious thoughts, and especially the presence of other adult family members. I'll still be Mom, but it's easier to be Mom when there are Aunts around too. And Uncles! And Cousins! Oh, it's going to be fun. Independence Day, my birthday, we're going to the beach one day... we're going to have fun. And now I must go to bed, because I have six hours of driving to do tomorrow, not to mention all the potty stops. Think good thoughts for a little red Subaru full of Ridgecrestians!