Moms Unite! *or* Summertime Confessions!

Raise your hand if you are a female, over the age of 10,
and think this looks fun

After our camping trip this weekend, I have been privy to not a few conversations and blog posts by women who confess that they secretly hate camping. Everyone seems to agree, we do it for the kids! Of course we do! And we put on a happy face, but really we would rather that our husbands did all the climbing into the hot attic to retrieve camping gear, all the straining and sweating involved in sqeeuzing all this gear into the car/spacecase/bike rack, all the grocery shopping for the trip, and that only our husbands headed off for the hills with the little ones, bouncing off the walls of the car in their zeal for spending a few days in the out of doors.

A common theme seems to be one of what a lack of good sleep does to our motherly attitudes. Think of the phrase, "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy".

Another concern is the problem of Mars and Venus trying to search out, organize and pack camping gear together. IT DOESN'T WORK. Different philosophies about different methods to go about this task weave an ugly tapestry of sarcasm, blame, short tempers and just plain old p.off-ed-ness. One of my friends (who shall remain nameless here) told me tonight that she and her husband got into such a fight while packing for a recent camping trip that she was afraid her neighbors may have heard the racket. And they live on a rather large piece of property.

Finally, we mommies are PRACTICAL. We make phone calls while we do dishes and help with homework while we cook dinner. We apply makeup while reaching into the shower to help rinse the hair of a child who has used too much shampoo. Camping is not PRACTICAL. You pack up and take a whole bunch of household items into a camping site. Enough household items to get by, but not to really work. So now you are washing dishes and cooking dinner, but with dirt, bugs and no running water.

When your whole goal in life at home is to keep everything tidy and running smoothly, camping is a stick in the spokes. A glitch in the system. A gun with which you shoot yourself in the foot.

What we would really like is for our husbands to take care of everything and drive away into the mountains with our darling children waving goodbye out the windows to us while we look forward to a couple of days of fixing meals for one, catching up on reading, and going to the bathroom uninterrupted.

I say all this, but I know darn well I will be planning and packing for our next camping trip. Because I hate to miss out on anything interesting. Because I would get lonely and bored being by myself for more than 24 hours, because Zane and I can always use a good, old-fashioned quarrel to liven things up, and because this sweetness is what will be waiting for me after all the trouble to get there...

P.S.

Have you ever seen a more nervous-looking camp stove in your life? We thought it was a good candidate for this site.