I have an illness. It is Make Every Day a Holiday Syndrome.
Basically I’m obsessed with trying to make every second of our daily lives a
Kodak moment. (Side note – should that now be an IPhone moment? Honestly I don’t
know the last time I used a real camera.)
It all started out innocently enough. Of course you have the
regular major holidays every year – Christmas, New Year’s, etc. Those are
always easy to make special. Then you get your secondary holidays, like St.
Patrick’s Day, May Day and Valentine’s Day. And if you are a parent, you start
to realize that the leprechaun and Cupid have started taking crack because now
we have to mess up our house because the St. Patrick’s Day leprechaun does
tricks and Valentine’s Day has become a week-long art project to make the best
Valentine’s Day box for school. I shun the leprechaun – this is a holiday I
hate second only to May Day (to spare you yet another May Day hate filled rant,
please see one of my first blogs). But I put Valentine’s Day on steroids when I
started leaving little gifts in the house 4 days before Valentine’s Day, mostly
as an excuse to justify buying my kids more stuff. (Because I love my kids and
buying them things makes me happy but I don’t want to look like a parent that
spoils them. Even though that’s exactly what I’m doing.) Even Halloween now includes
Booing people, which goes beyond the practice of trick or treating and starts
to look oddly like May Day for spooks.
But then you read about how to make your kids excited to go
to the grocery store. “Make it a game!” screams parenting magazines. So you do.
Getting groceries and taking the cat to the vet becomes an Adventure (which in
truth, if you have children, any trip outside of the house becomes an adventure
to see if you can keep your sanity intact. Can you make it through your errands
without an emergency stop at the gas station bathroom because children never
have to go when they are in the vicinity of a decent bathroom? Double points if
you do!)
And this is how the slippery slope of Make Every Day a
Holiday Syndrome starts. Soon you find yourself ignoring the rules of grammar
and you start making every moment a proper noun. Library Day! Taco Tuesday! Gym
Night! Movie Night! Technology Free Tuesday! (Tuesday is a big day.) For
goodness sake, we’ve even done it in our adult lives on Facebook with Throwback
Thursday (which I hate but also occasionally do anyway.)
This brought me to my low point - the night that I declared it
was Stay Home Night! (Yes, every made up holiday requires capitalization and
exclamation marks.) I realized that I was fighting to make every moment special
and in a way, structured. The kids love it because it did make every moment in
our lives a celebration, which (sappy moment) it is. And if I’m being Dr. Phil
Real, it helps me get through a mundane day by putting a little spin and
excitement on a regular task. But what the heck are the kids going to do when
they realize that their lives will also include Pay Your Rent Or Be Evicted Day!
Or Cram For Your Test Because You Have Poor Study Habits Day! Or Your Roommate
Ate All Your Food and Now You Are Hungry Day! Will Laundry Day still have that
sparkle when they are plugging quarters into a washer at their dorm? Am I
setting my kids up for disappointment later in life by making every moment a
Moment? What if just for a minute, we do nothing. Not Nothing Day! But nothing.
So I did. We had to take a week off of screens due to the
Rock getting a mild concussion. Like a moth to a flame, any screen would draw
him in so we had a complete moratorium on screens in the house. It’s all well
and good during the week when we are running in circles anyway. But this
special week also fell on a weekend when we had very little to do – which never
happens so it must be fate. A whole Saturday with no plans. I got hives
thinking about it. But rather than name the day and turn it into an exhausting
circus of special, I did nothing. The boys looked at me. “What do we do?” I
said you can do anything that doesn’t involve screens or wrestling. And I left
it at that.
There were a few complaints of being bored, which turns out
that kid-bored can be remedied with the threat of housework. After a bit, the
kids found ways to entertain themselves without me being the ringleader. They
discovered the thousands of dollars worth of toys that had been sitting around.
They made up a game with a tape measure and marbles. They finally broke out
some art kits and started using them. As a whole, we made it 5 hours before the
first fight occurred. As a parent, I know even you would like to call this The
Day of Miracles! But try to refrain yourself – I was straining not to label the
day a holiday myself.
So I learned a lesson and took the first step towards
recovery. Sometimes less is more. We don’t need to make every moment of our
lives something special. It can be a special moment in itself by being nothing
at all. Let’s see Hallmark make a card for that!
