Organized Happiness

One weekend, we took the boys to a small street festival down the road from our house.  A few times a year, they block off the main thoroughfare downtown and various townsfolk set up booths offering art, crafts, food, and the occasional invitation to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment or join your local Cross-Fit community in throwing tractor tires, mallets, and sandbags towards a new you.  We respectfully decline all offers, of course--but if we go early, before it's crowded, it's a nice stroller walk that ends with some ice cream or a treat for the boys.

It started out great--light crowds, a nice breeze, free balloons, and emergency vehicles parked so the kids could actually touch all the fascinating cars and trucks they nearly break the Civic windows to identify as they blare past us on the highway. We had done our requisite 2 laps and almost went home, victorious in having accomplished a free, tantrum-less outing...but the oldest one saw the dreaded "Kid Zone" in front of one of the downtown churches. It was basically a collection of bounce houses packed into a parking lot, with lines of kids streaming from each one. In case you're not familiar with this latest advance in torturing parents of young children, "the bounce house" is an inflatable cage match.  The "house" itself can range in size from huge to gargantuan; it’s always somehow big enough to lose your kid inside, yet not quite big enough for a grown adult to accompany their kid without deflating half the structure or ending up on YouTube for the physical comedy and array of wardrobe malfunctions that result from any grown person climbing up a 20-foot inflatable ladder to rescue a child who is having second thoughts at the top.

The garden variety bounce house is an inflatable wrestling ring. Kids brave enough to enter are absorbed into a Lord of the Flies free-for-all, where they are all at the mercy of each other’s over-stimulated excitement.  There’s always at least one—perhaps even your child—bouncing with abandon on the necks, spines, and faces of other hapless youngsters, and someone inevitably ends up with a bloody nose or a pair of front teeth shoved through their bottom lip before the fun is over.  If you have a toddler/preschooler, you may have the good fortune to encounter one of the more developmentally-appropriate bouncy castles--which commonly takes the shape of an over-sized life raft with a maze of inflatable tunnels or weebles to punch. Your luck, however, will certainly change whenever it’s time to leave and you have to physically remove the child, who now indignantly believes that this is his new place of residence.  Menacing but also intriguing to kids too young to enjoy them are the towering bouncy slides with a two-story incline to conquer before you reach the top and the mammoth fun-house-style mazes you may lose your child in for so long that they emerge a fully-formed adult.  If your kid is understandably timid about entering one of these behemoths alone, then you're stuck in a maddening state of limbo where your kid is torn between wanting to go in, but being too scared--not wanting to leave, but refusing to take their turn whenever it finally arrives. THAT was my oldest son. The youngest took one look at the options presented and simply told me "NO". But the oldest made Ray stand in line with him at 3 different bounce houses, only to wuss out when he got the go-ahead to jump in. It was heart-breaking...but also annoying. And the longer it went on, the more frustrated and overwhelmed we ALL got, until finally we had to storm off en masse back to the car, the free balloons we’d tied to the stroller hitting me in the face as we stomped down the street, with the oldest wailing and Ray and I taking turns threatening him with early nap if he couldn't calm down.

As we packed our sad little circus back into the car, I remembered that my family had rarely participated in what my mother referred to as “organized happiness”—situations engineered for the express purpose of having fun (ready, set, ENJOY YOURSELF) that often turn out to be miserable for one reason or another. It's becoming increasingly clear to me why my mother was never particularly eager to parade all five of us around at events like this. The one exception was the Halloween Carnival.

OHHH, the Halloween Carnival! How we counted the days down to that rinky-dink little school function when we were kids. And what a NIGHTMARE it must have been for my mom. Once a year, the school opened itself in the evening hours for a period of fun and fellowship centered around Halloween and harvest themes.  Students were encouraged to wear Halloween costumes and each classroom, hallway, and alcove was converted into a different booth, game, activity, or snack-yielding endeavor.  Someone really grew a pair one year and sponsored a miniature zip line from a power pole on the playground to a set of rusty monkey bars.  It was a raging success—but never made an encore appearance in subsequent years, most likely because someone’s “Little Johnny” is still having additional surgeries to reconstruct his caved-in face 30 years later.  Beyond that singular attempt at a ride, the carnival was just a crowded throng of sugar-infused kids, fighting over the same low-budget games. I'm sure my sisters and I were impossible to keep track of and even worse to deal with, demanding money for silly ring toss games and popcorn balls, while my mother struggled to cart my enormous infant brother through the crowd. I'm sure wrangling us back into the minivan, all overstimulated and cranky in a dark parking lot, was a slice of hell's most treacherous circle. Even so, all I remember was having fun. Which means my mother must've been way more patient than I'll ever be, sacrificing a whole night of her life to the thankless task of enduring the Halloween Carnival. Sure, there were other times, day to day, when she felt free to extol the endless negatives of “organized happiness” and all the reasons we would not be attending a particular fellowship function--but other times, she just let us enjoy ourselves. In that selfless motherly way.

Back at the car, as I rolled my eyes and scolded my oldest again for not getting a hold of himself, I realized I've got some big shoes to fill in the "selfless mother" department and that I have two lifetimes of carnivals, birthday parties, and beach trips to train for.  

So if you happen to see me out and about town, engaging in excruciating tasks, like attempting to return a faulty air mattress at Walmart with a cart full of cranky kids a half-hour past lunch time, consider it a willful act of both penance—in honor of my long-suffering mother—and preparation-- because my kids are young…and the sacrifice of time and personal happiness (organized, disorganized or otherwise) has only just begun.