Kate Gosselin I’m not. I don’t travel the globe getting hair extensions and pushing my reality career. I am home all the time. So when I go out, it’s a major occurrence. Even with their dad right there under the same roof, the kids prefer to turn to me and I get calls and messages tinged with abandonment attitude.
Usually it takes about ten minutes before the phone rings, so either I am still driving wherever I was going or perhaps I am just starting down the first aisle of the grocery store (yes, I really go nuts when I get away from the family). My phone lights up and vibrates and I see it is home calling. The texts start coming in. I always read them because they might be important. It might say something like, “A large bookshelf has fallen on dad and we are not sure what to do. PS Found that Treasury of Harvey Comics I was looking for…<3 xo.”
No the messages are more like this.
“Mom, where r u?”
“Mom, when r u coming home?”
“Bring food.”
“Pls come home asap. ”
Why do they need me? I don’t know. There’s not a calamity brewing, they aren’t starving and, when I get home, they are usually just doing their thing.
I think they miss me. Which is nice. But I would like to think their dad can be the go-to guy in my absence. Not that my husband couldn’t answer their questions or help them find sandwich makings or whatever it is they need. They just prefer to ask me.
Even when I was in France with our daughter last summer and my cell phone was supposed to be for emergencies only, I got a call from our teenage son asking, “Hey, Mom. So say I broke my glasses. Would that be something that I could just go to the glasses store and they could fix?” I didn’t dare ask the details. I just said yes and told him to get his dad to take him over there.
This past weekend, a bunch of high school boys came over to play touch football with our oldest son, the one with the broken glasses. I made hot dogs for everyone, brought out a case of water, and a box of cookies. Then I had some errands to run.
When I left, our five-year-old was standing on top of a pile of old snow waving a broom and yelling at the boys playing in the street. I went over the usual, “watch your brother, and don’t let him in the road, Dad’s right inside.”
When I returned twenty minutes later, the same five-year-old was still standing on top of icy mounds yelling but now, instead of sweat pants, he was inexplicably wearing a bathing suit. In February.
I got out of the car. “Why is he wearing a bathing suit?”
“I dunno,” came the classic teenage reply.
I went inside. I asked my husband, “Why is your son wearing a bathing suit in 40 degree weather?”
“I dunno.”
My five-year-old explained that his sweats got a little wet and dirty playing in the old snow and he couldn’t find another pair of pants so he just put on his swimsuit. Seemed logical to him. Well, it is supposed to get wet -- so it’s the perfect thing to wear.
At least he still had a coat on. Until spring, I may just try to stick very close to home.
