I’ve had it. I’m actually surprised I made it this long—that I was able to endure the seemingly endless days that bled into one another like some sort of Jean-Jacques Rousseau film. (Okay, in truth, I’ve never watched a Rousseau film. I actually have no idea who he is. I googled “French absurdist filmmakers” and his was the first name that popped up…although he’s really Belgian. But this alone should give you an idea of my state of mind lately.)

I’m of course talking about the snow. In case you hadn’t heard, the east coast was walloped last week with two back-to-back storms that resulted in the shut down of the federal government for almost an entire week. The kids have missed seven straight days of school (today, although a holiday, was supposed to be a snow make-up day, but it was—whadayaknow—canceled due to—wait for it—snow!). If you count the two weekends we’ve been snowed in, the children have been home for 11 straight days.

I think those of you who read this blog regularly know a few things about me by now:

1) I like horses.
2) I like to sleep.
3) I have a very low tolerance for spending lots and lots of time with my kids.

And I have to qualify #3 because that’s really about me, not my kids. I need a lot of alone time to function in the world. There’s really no one I can spend that much time with without growing tired of them. And really, my kids are great and actually very low maintenance. As I write this, they’re downstairs playing nicely together. Oh wait…no, they’re not…I just heard the television.

Me: “Kids, who told you that you were allowed to watch television?”

Silence.

Me: “Since when can you watch TV without permission?”

I was answered with a chorus of very unconvincing “sorries.”

Sigh.

They know I’m weak. Like a lion watching the lone antelope limping far behind the herd, the kids know I can’t hold out much longer. Any semblance of routine and discipline I’ve worked hard these six years to establish is one juice box and a snack-pack of Hershey kisses away from crumbling. At this point, I’d let the children draw on the walls and set the living room couch on fire if it means I get fifteen minutes of uninterrupted quiet.

So, yes, the snow. I actually did quite well for the first week of it. There’s no getting around the fact that the snow is beautiful. When I woke up in the morning, I would look out the window ready to grouse and grumble, but then be so taken by the pure white landscape filling the window frame that I couldn’t help but whisper—usually to the dogs—“Isn’t it beautiful?”

And the fact that we had so much snow meant no cars were out, which meant I could walk the dogs all over the neighborhood down the center of the street. The night the last storm hit, I took the dogs out around nine o’clock. The snow was falling in giant, pancake-like flakes. No one was out but us. It was absolutely silent. I could have walked forever.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that the kids love the snow. Our neighbors built the equivalent of a skeleton track in their front yard, and every day the kids would trek down the street with their sleds in tow and spend hours zipping down it like they were training for the Olympics.

And because the government was closed, Dave was home from work for the week. So we’ve had FAMILY TIME like nobody’s business. We played cards. We baked. We cooked. We watched movies together and ate popcorn. We shoveled snow. We drank hot chocolate. Seriously, Norman Rockwell couldn’t have painted a better scene—except for the parts where Noah would serenade us with arm-fart covers of “Happy Birthday” and “Here Comes Santa Claus.”

For the most part, I’ve enjoyed it. I commented to Dave how rare it is to have time with the kids where we’re forced to do nothing. Even on vacation, we’re usually running from one place to the next. But being snowed-in, running wasn’t an option. Our lives, typically scheduled to within an inch of our lives, all of a sudden had no boundaries. We didn’t have to be anywhere or do anything. No Tae Kwon Do. No Ballet. No horses. No buying snacks for the Valentine’s Day party at school. No homework. Aside from the little bit of work Dave and I were able to squeeze in from time to time, we did nothing for over a week.

But we all knew I couldn’t enjoy it forever. A refrain throughout Dave’s and my life together has been, “What fun is vacation when you don’t have anything to compare it to?” Whenever we’ve had stretches of unemployment or slogged through too-long, too-boring vacations, we’ve said how important it is to have the routine—and work—of normal life from which to take a break. Otherwise, it’s not a break. It’s Groundhog Day.

And that’s what these snow days have become. Nothing distinguishes one day from the next. Thursday night as we were going to bed, I said to Dave, “I can’t believe tomorrow is going to be exactly the same as today, and exactly the same as the day before that. When is it going to end?” Even the dogs have had it. Our young dog Clara, who spent the better part of the first five days of snow bounding through it like a sled dog (in fact, I even bought her a harness and hooked the kids’ sled to it), now stands on the steps leading out our back door with a kind of bewildered “not-this-again” look on her face.



(Our older dog, Barrabas, has been unimpressed since day one.) They keep waiting for me to put on my riding boots and load them in the car to drive to the barn, but that hasn’t happened in ten days because the roads to the barn have been impassable as well.

In a perfect summation of what this snow has done to our spirits, my neighbor Cy sent an email the other night: “I’ve even lost the will to drink.” To which my friend Lee Ann replied, “I haven’t lost the will. We’ve just run out.”

I was ready to take the dogs for a long walk and never return.

Luckily, our friends Heather and Vince came for a visit from Philadelphia this weekend, reminding us that life existed beyond our single, half-mile block. It was like Noah (of the Bible, not my son) seeing the dove with the olive branch in its beak for the first time that signaled to him the floodwaters had receded. The end of the snow tunnel was, however dimly, in sight.

We got a babysitter Saturday night and went to the city with a group of friends for dinner and then to a bar to watch a band. I drank and danced and reveled in the fact that I wasn’t at home watching Ella Enchanted and eating my bodyweight in popcorn yet again.

…and then came the email yesterday afternoon from the school district telling us schools would be closed Monday…and the weather report predicting another snowfall, albeit lighter, tonight. And with all this went my sanity and any hope that life will ever return to normal. The dove with the olive branch in its beak just took a nosedive into a snow bank. But, alas, I still have my will to drink.