I am back from Disneyland with sore feet and a confession -"The Happiest Place on Earth" remains a hot soak in quiet tub reading a good book. I didn't dig Disney.
Sure the kids loved it and seeing it through their eyes was wonderful - for a few hours - then it dawned on me that I was seeing it through their eyes but on MY feet and with MY true loathing of all things, well, fun.
Thank goodness they had their dad with them to spin endlessly in tea cups, wait for hours for the Cars ride and enjoy the seventh go on Goofy’s Sky School as much as he did the first.
I waited on benches while the family spun and swung (for five days) and I had lots of time to think, I came to a conclusion:
The people who love Halloween and dressing up, are the first to put their hands up at Club Med, love to feel nauseous on a roller coaster, don't mind crowds and noise and smells, who get up early for a good spot on the parade route and run for the mosh pit - they are fun. And fun people want kids to do fun things with.
Someone like me, on the other hand, who once gave out cans of tuna on Halloween and never pined for kids to play with ... well, I realized AT Disney that the notion of having to do all this stuff is the real reason I waited so long to have kids. When I finally did get on board with the whole idea of breeding it was with the understanding that their dad would be the fun one. Yes, yes, I love my kids and we laugh, lots, but what I do with them requires little effort, no planning and often has something to do with farting...theirs, mine, the cat's, I don't care.
Here's the real litmus test: Donny brings the kids to Costco with him on purpose so they can enjoy a let's-see-how-many-samples-we-can-eat-and-hats-we-can-try-on adventure outing. And the only way I will go to Costco at all, let alone with the kids, is drunk.
How I ended up thinking I could handle Disney is beyond me.
I did do my best while to feign some level of glee. But the kids know me well enough to know that I was happier trying to find the Starbucks than line up for Tom Sawyer's treehouse so they stuck close to their dad and silently pitied me with sad smiles and small pats on my back.
On Friday, a day of relentless rain, I checked our tickets to see what time we were leaving the next day only to discover we were leaving Sunday, I went into the bathroom and wept.
While my kids did have fun I did notice that they did not want to go on the thrill rides because they were too fast, too noisy, too dark or too scary so it would seem perhaps that they have inherited my no-fun gene which, according to my theory, will mean they don’t froth to have kids, will likely wait till they are 40 like I did and thus I have no hopes of being an able-bodied grandma, which is OK cuz I wouldn’t have been any fun anyway.
Oh, one last thought, those guys walking around the park in chef’s clothes, are they part of a Ratatouille show? Because I didn’t eat any food on the grounds that required any cooking skills.
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