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Government mandates that no two children have the same spring break

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AROUND TOWN

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water, someone mentions an event that will make your esophageal reflux back all the way up your throat and continue on until it reaches the tiny blood vessels circulating in your brain, which eventually will explode, sending your eyeballs flying across the room.

No, you have not had a stroke; that would be the least of your problems. But if you have college-age children, this will apply to you; the term we are referring to is known as "spring break" In other words, they're back Or as Yogi Berra liked to say, "It's deja vu all over again." Fortunately, no one really knows when spring break occurs, since it is one of the jobs, in fact the most important job, of all education departments to have as many different times as possible scheduled for spring break This is so as not to cause a worldwide panic, whereby parents will book themselves on cruises, airplanes, space ships, anything that moves in order to create a mass exodus out of the country. So the government mandates that no two children have the same spring break time or else the whole planet would shut down, much like Congress does every time someone mentions a pay cut for federal employees. At some point, a child will be on spring break at least very day of the year.

It's not that we don't want our children home, but rather that we've changed our lives. Okay, basically, as mothers we can't stand anyone to use the living room anymore. We've got the furniture just the way we want it, with no stains on the fabric and untouched by human hands or butts. We have little pillows with philosophical sayings that haven't been chewed by a random animal no one claims to own. We now have guest soaps in the bathroom in cute little plastic wrappers. And we haven't seen a towel on the bathroom floor in months; the bacteria that clung to the back of the toilet moved out when the kids left for college.

The dishwasher is actually used as a receptacle to place dirty dishes, rather than a foreign object that was never opened. The refrigerators con tains more than two dried-up apricots on a shelf at any one given time. After months without listening to "Ten Thousand Maniacs," our hearing has returned and some of us even have our sense of smell back.

As parents we sent our young adult children off to those ivy-covered walls in hopes that they will achieve a level of success that will allow them to make their own way along the path of life. Little did we realize that the scrimping, saving, doing without would last until the kid was old enough to go straight from graduation to Medicare.

There were hints along the way, like the art project he turned in, which consisted of leftover pizza boxes made into a coffee table that was held up by empty beer cans. And the four or five campus dogs that he adopted and named as executors of his last will testament.

Politics had a new meaning for most people encountering this dilemma. The only hope we had during the political year was that someone would take pity and back the car over us. And the only change we managed was what was dropped in the tin cup we held out on the corner.

And now they will be home, carrying all the achievements of attending college for the last year, 20 bags of dirty laundry, a vegan diet of grass and bark, someone else's clothes, various electronic devices that beep all day and night, a large zero balance in a checking account and an addiction to watching "Days of our Lives."

Well, at least spring break will give you time to catch up with children who once occupied the best part of the house, the playpen This should take all of two seconds. Good luck with that.





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