Are you kidding me?????

by

Patti Dickinson

What's up with all this reality television? Wood is out of town, so last night I found myself scuffing around the house looking for something to do. I sat down with my daughter, Meghan, who was watching 18 and Counting. For the uninitiated, this is a family with 18 kids who, in this particular episode are traveling cross-country to a convention that they attend every year. I tuned in late, but I think that the gist was that all the attendees were families that home-schooled their children. (Memo to self....this should be the first indicator that a mental health evaluation is indicated....)

Look, I have eight kids. I know big numbers. I know how much spaghetti gets snapped over the boiling water to feed a family of ten. I know that once four of the ten of us shower, six are going to be sudsing in ice water. Ever wonder why when you ring my doorbell after six pm I am fresh-scrubbed with wet hair?

I watched this group load up the silver home-on-wheels that slept eighteen. That included a trailer on the back that contained eighteen bikes, two large picnic tables, and two golf carts. Could I be making this stuff up??? I don't know how long they were staying at this convention, but the dad made mention of the fact that they had packed equal numbers of hot dogs and hamburgers to cook on their brought-from-home, oversized charcoal grill. Five hundred, total.

I consider myself a pretty decent mom. I never forgot to enroll a kid in Kindergarten. I never had a Dickinson version of a kid who was Home Alone. Remember that movie? (Okay, one time we all went to a Girl Scout Picnic at the kids' elementary school. We piled hot, sweaty, dirty kids in the car to go home, got home and corralled them toward the bathtub. One at a time, dunking them in, drying them off and heading them toward bed. But wait....someone is missing. OMIGOSH. Mary Morgan is still at the Girl Scout picnic!!!! Turns out, she was busy with friends and never even knew that she got left. To this day -- and she is TWENTY years old, she still talks about being the "forgotten middle child".)

I ratcheted up my voyeuristic curiousity when I watched them pull the silver-mobile over on the highway because they had a flat tire. Honestly, the dad had to be on a Valium drip. Gets out of the trailer in the pouring rain, and circles the vehicle while smiling. Finds the tire that is shredded, and nonchalantly begins looking for the right tools to fix the problem. Not the frantic search that would happen at the Dickinson's.....let's just leave it that it would be a very different scenario in our family. The mom, that would be me, would likely wonder aloud (trying hard to keep the shrillness out of her voice) whether it might not have been a good idea to check the air in said tires before venturing hundreds of miles down the highway. Nope, the dad maintained his cool until the repair was complete. In fact, the family, waiting inside, were having lighthearted conversation, and one of the kids was wandering around outside, picking wildflowers. And he wasn't yanking them out of the ground in handfuls, either.

This isn't reality television. Can't be. No one smiles over a flat tire in the rain.