I Am The Moving Van

My daughter has started traveling with a menagerie that includes a stuffed bear, a stuffed rabbit and a very large and very fluffy stuffed duck. She carries them everywhere. They take up all the room on the couch so that the rest of us have to squeeze onto the loveseat when we watch T.V. We’ve tried to explain to her that we will hold her babies on our laps, but she insists that they just don’t like lap-sitting—at least not on our laps. When it’s time for bed, we have to line each of her babies onto her pillow, praying that there’s room enough for her too. She has fallen out of bed a couple of times now, because she’s afraid of squishing her kids.


Her birthday is coming up and she has settled on wanting a bigger bike—but only if it comes with a bigger basket on the front. Currently, her bike-basket only fits two of her children. The duck has to be shoved into her backpack with its head sticking out the top if she wants to go along for the ride. When I asked her why Ducky can’t just keep riding on her back, she told me that Ducky doesn’t like it when her hair blows in Ducky’s face.

The thing that worries me about this strange behavior is that it’s just a precursor for the rest of her life and she seems awfully young to be dealing with the logistics of getting kids where they need to be. I want her to have a nice long break from having to worry about a bunch of little kids—at least until she has ones that aren’t made out of plastic, fabric and stuffing.

I remember the first time I had to take my newborn out into the world. I had run out of diapers and formula and I had to go to the grocery store to stock back up. First, it took me thirty minutes to strap my child into the dizzying array of belts in his car-seat. Then I had to bundle him up, insuring that not even a single finger would feel the frigid air that was blowing outside my front door. Then I had to pack a diaper bag that would have been easier to manage had it been on wheels. Finally! Off to the store. Car seats are heavy and don’t rest in the grocery cart well and you can’t fit much in your cart when the diaper bag takes up half the space, but all in all, it wasn’t a bad trip. It was just short. In all my preparation I’d forgotten to feed him.

I’ve been blissfully free of diaper bags for several years now, but I can assure you that baseball bags and football pads take up far more room than a diaper bag ever did. It seems like it’s a mother’s destiny to cart children and their paraphernalia everywhere. I do have hope that my final trip with my children’s belongings will be when I drop them at college, but too many adult children live at home these days for me to get too excited about that prospect.

The point is that, as women and even as little girls, it seems like we know that it’s our responsibility to cart out children wherever they need to go. My daughter has her sights on a larger bike-basket. I’m thinking a van might come in handy—but then I’d have to crawl in the back to clean up the juice boxes and the grass left behind by cleats—of course, cleaning up after them is another responsibility altogether.