Many years ago, I watched a movie about people at a fancy dinner party who for some mysterious reason could not manage to exit the house once the party was over.
The film was black and white, in a foreign language; and everyone in it seemed irredeemably stupid, because what’s so hard about leaving a house?
The doors weren’t locked, the windows were open — and yet somehow, inexplicably, people just stayed inside… for days!
The film — “The Exterminating Angel,” by surrealist Luis Buñuel — was named one of the 1,000 best films ever by the New York Times. But if it had a message, it escaped me. Or rather, I escaped it, finding an exit door and going through it, myself — long before the point, if there was one, arrived.
I was young then, unencumbered by husband or children. Years later I had acquired them all; and I re-lived that film every day, just trying to get out the door.
There was always something. You’d get one boy dressed while the other got something all over himself, only to have it happen again in reverse. Then you can’t find someone’s coat. Or shoes. Or hat. Or your own coat, shoes, or hat.
Or you’d get to the car and realize you’d forgotten the car keys; or a bottle; or the diaper bag; or your own purse, with directions to the doctor’s office… any one of a million things.
Because no matter how obsessively you try to control every factor, life with small children is just out of control. It’s like living inside a small hurricane, 24/7.
At one point, my allergies were getting the best of me, and I needed to get to my own doctor’s office for allergy shots, once a week. One day, I’d had an exceptionally hard time getting us all out the door… but I made it.
“Ta daa!” I said, triumphantly, wheeling the double stroller into the reception area at 2:55 p.m. We were all three of us clean, and dressed, and in the appointed spot — with five whole minutes to spare!
“So tell me,” said the doctor, with a plaintive look toward his own hat and coat on a hook. “All you’ve had to do, all day, was get here by 3 o’clock. Is this really the best you can do?”
“Do you have kids?” I asked him.
“Well, yes, my wife and I just had a baby.”
“And where is it?”
“He’s home with my wife, of course.”
I changed doctors. It was that or kill him, and I didn’t have the time.
Perhaps the actor William H. Macy could have explained it to him. Macy was on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” recently, recounting a time when he’d tried to take his daughters, then 8 and 10, for a day of skiing. “It was a disaster.”
“In what way?” asked Colbert.
The actor’s face filled with fury. “By my watch, it took four hours and 26 minutes to get out of the house the first day! It… it was like shoveling cats! It was awful! By the time we were in the car they said ‘I’m hungry’ and we had to stop for lunch!”
My husband and I had a trip like that, too. It was a family outing at a pricey lodge — none of which we ever got to see. It took us all day just to get one parent and one small boy outfitted, suited up and ready for takeoff near the top of a very small slope. That’s when the staffer in charge yelled, “We’re closing up! Time to go home!”
We told our boy he’d been “skiing” so he wouldn’t realize the day’d been a total bust. But I don’t think he ever really touched a ski slope till years later, in college.
In those early days, we were late for everything. Our standard operating procedure for every family event was to book a hotel room there for the night before, and just try like hell to get to whatever it was before it was cleaned up and over.
Now the kids are in college or beyond, and I am still late for everything. It is sadly obvious just who’s been the problem all along.
So it’s time for me to admit that that movie wasn’t so surreal, after all. It turns out, I have more in common with the folks in that doomed dinner party than I ever would have believed!
