She Sleeps Until When?

When you hang out with other people’s children, you learn a lot about their parents. It’s fun.

I’ve written about our recent Spring Break zoo excursion to Tulsa. We tried to get adjoining rooms, but the best the hotel could do for us was two rooms across the hall from each other. I ended up with my daughter and her best friend. The other mom got stuck with all the boys and the pizza boxes. (I have no idea how that happened.) While we princesses were sleeping in, the other room was up watching cartoons and scarfing down leftover pizza.

“Are you girls hungry?” I asked the sleeping beauties in my room. My daughter’s friend nodded vigorously. “Okay,” I said “Let’s go to the other room. Your mom’s making oatmeal over there.”

“She is?” The girl looked at the clock. Her face registered extreme confusion. “Because she usually sleeps until like… ten.”

Meet Me at the Hotel Room

Remember when hotel rooms were sexy? All vacation and rendezvous and sheets you didn’t have to clean? Yeah, me neither. But I do remember when a hotel room represented relaxation. A freshly made bed, hours of freedom, drinks mixed with ice from down the hall. And again, the lack of laundry.

Now that most of my disposable income goes toward exposing my children to experiences (and boots) that may create wonderful memories or somehow serve them later in life, hotel rooms are all about the agony of too much family togetherness. Where once there was soft lighting and exotic snacks, now there are wet towels on every once-dry surface and my tweens’ ever expanding collections of grooming aids, which are fast outgrowing my own.

Instead of a good movie on TV (possibly featuring a naked Mark Wahlberg), we are forced to suffer through endless half hours of Miley Cyrus and that guy with the mullet whose head heart we all wanted to break, with a sledgehammer, back in 1992.

There are soggy pizza boxes on the bed. (Okay, maybe that part’s the same.)

I hide in the bathroom reading a book, partly to be alone, and partly so that no one can stink up the 200 square feet that have become our family living space. Did I mention the dog? Oh yes, we’re that crazy. In close proximity to the ever present them, I grow increasingly irritated. I crave escape from my husband’s brilliant observations, such as, “This place really fills up at night.” We smuggle the dog in and out of the room, begging him to ‘go’ at our convenience.

Finally, I turn to the ill-equipped fitness center for refuge and am devastated to see that although there are only two lonely treadmills, the tiny room has been outfitted with three walls of mirror, allowing me to see all that is shielded in my own strategically mirrored home. I want to go home. Now.

Other parents have already crossed over, crossed back into the world of peaceful hotel rooms. They have begun to reserve two of them. I can’t do that. I’m not ready. And I’m far to cheap. Besides, if I did that, what would I have to write about?