Cheeky Sweetie

My mom and I and the four kids are in Tennessee right now; my nephew is getting married on Saturday.  We love coming up here to visit.  The countryside is beautiful and it is so peaceful.  I am crazy about my nieces and nephew, and now I have a great-nephew to snuggle all over, too.  We usually have these whirlwind visits where we really only spend a day or two here before turning around and heading home, but this time we have almost a full week to enjoy our family before packing up the minivan and started on our journey home.

The ride here was….well, interesting, to say the least.  I was totally dreading it and was fighting off an anxiety attack all day in anticipation.  All I could think of was that I was going to be stuck in a packed van with four kids and my mom for about fourteen hours.  But mostly, I was thinking about having Kris there without his father to back me up.  And it petrified me because his behavior pushes me to an edge I don’t ever want to get too close to.  We hadn’t even started the car before his bitching started about being sent to the rear seat instead of the middle.  Faith gets carsick, so she needed to be where I could attend to her if necessary without having to climb my fat ass over two teenagers.  But I didn’t even bother explaining, because it doesn’t matter of I have a really good reason for my calls or not, he still acts the same about them. Why bother engaging in a power struggle, right?

As it turned out, the rest of the ride was fine.  The Dramamine warded off Faith’s tummy troubles, Kris didn’t give me a hard time at all, and we made it to my brother’s in twelve hours instead of fourteen.  I’m sure choosing to leave at 8pm helped, and it also helped my wallet since we didn’t have to feed the kids meals on the road.  We brought a few snacks and we stopped for breakfast in town where we got here to save the family the trouble of feeding us as soon as we got in.  We did have some issues unrelated to the kids’ behavior though, along the way.

As we approached Tifton, Georgia, Mom warned me that she would need to use the bathroom within the hour.  We were approaching a quarter of a tank of gas, which is our refill point, so I figured it was decent timing…plus I wanted to tweet @AnissaMayhew as I approached Atlanta and tweeting while driving would give my Mom a heart attack.

Mom and I are way broke right now, so we decided to put the gas on the Shell card and split it when the bill came in.  So I started looking for Shell station signs.  I found one, and pulled off……and it was closed.  There was a Wendy’s attached to it that had people in there, so we all got out to use the bathrooms at least.  My mom could barely get her swollen feet in her shoes, but when we got to the doors, we saw they closed just minutes before.

We turned around and got back on I-75N, and the next exit had a Shell, so we took it….and it was closed, too.

We got back on the highway and Mom saw a few billboards for a truck stop at Exit 84 with a Chevron and a Shell.  We saw that Exit 82 had a Shell, but by this time all the kids were squirming, too, and we were getting way closer to our 1/4 of a tank threshold, so we decided to go for the truck stop with the sign that said 24 hour.

So we did, and when we got off the highway….you guessed it. Closed. Not only was it closed, but as we turned around, I noticed a GIANT cow at the far end of the parking lot.

I said, “OH! Look at that giant cow!” which instantly quieted the chatter in the car, mostly about what in the heck was wrong with the people in the middle of Georgia-didn’t they ever need gas between midnight and 9am, and why in the world would gas stations along the highway be closed at night at all.

“Who wants their picture taken in front of it!”

I was shocked that no one was unbuckling themselves and hurtling their body toward the huge bovine.

My mom went right back to her angst-ridden pondering, “The sign SAID 24 hours!  Why would they say it’s a truck stop?”

As we pulled out, I noted the thirty-five or so parked trucks across the road from the closed gas station and said, “Look, mom. Trucks. And they are stopped.  Thus, a truck stop!”

She looked at me with that familiar “what in the ever loving HELL are you talking about, child?” look, but before she could say anything, Christian piped up from the middle row…

“That cow was huge! I bet it had massive calves!”

We all dissolved into giggles.  It was just so freaking cheesy and coming from him, the tough guy who just got out of essentially jail for juveniles, I don’t know, it was…wonderful.

The conversation grew more silly as we drove on, looking for a gas station that was open.  We gave up on a Shell station at that point.  We tried to make funny phrases of the town names on the exit signs-Inaha and Ashburn made for some colorful attempts.  Somewhere along the line someone pointed out that hysterical giggling was not good for a full bladder.

We finally found a Pilot station that was closed, and I dragged all the kids, whose eyeballs were all floating by this point, in towards the bathroom, which turned out to be an adventure in itself. One boy, my own, of course, walking into the ladies’ room, a filthy toilet seat, eight empty toilet seat cover dispensers, and a premature auto-flush later, we emerged, mostly unscathed.  The service at the counter was terrible; my cashier actually walked away when I set my things down and had to be directed back by her manager, who was on the phone.

When we piled back up in the car, I told my mom about Christian’s accidental detour into the women’s bathroom. She laughed and said that wasn’t as bad as what she did.  I was afraid to ask, but I didn’t have to anyway.

“I was kind of absent-mindedly heading in there, and I walked into the trucker’s showers!” she said.

We all gasped and then exploded into laughter, imagining her puzzled wide eyed, “OH!” when she realized where she was.  It still makes me chuckle, lol.

We had to take a detour to get back on the highway, and as we drove, it seemed like we were going in the wrong direction, and further away from civilization.

Mom said, “Are you sure this is the right way?”

“I’m following the signs, Ma, you saw them.”

Christian pipes up, “This is looking a little more like ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ by the minute.”

We wound up where we needed to be, but somehow our conversation got even sillier.  Christian started running our little family jokes together into sentences, and one of those little family jokes is “crotchroach” because when he was little he saw a roach and started screaming about “the crotchroach” that was coming for him.  Well, while the story is cute and funny, the word brings up a not so nice visual, you know.

My mom says, “You know that happened at work once.”

We all look at her. Mom/baby registered nurse say WHAT?

“Yeah, a lady came into L&D and they were putting her legs up in the stirrups and two roaches came crawling out of her crotch.”

A chorus of “Oh my GOSH!”es rang out throughout the car.

“What did they DO?” I asked, my hand still over my mouth in horror.

“They killed them and finished prepping her.”

………….

Maybe that’s why I got there so much faster than expected.  I spent the last seven hours running away from the thought of the poor baby that had to go home with that woman.