Welcome home to winter.
December 21st, 2009
As I hunched over my steering wheel last week, watching the car thermometer slowly tick down to a negative 9 degrees, I decided that Minnesota winters are the weather equivalent of childbirth.
Eight years ago, giving birth to the first of my three children, about 4 hours after the doctor started the Pitocin drip and about an hour before I finally gave in and demanded the anesthesiologist, caught up in a painful contraction, I screamed at my husband.
“I can’t take this Any More!!”
I don’t remember what he said, something soothing and dismissive. I didn’t care. “NO! I’m serious,” I growled. “I am NEVER doing this AGAIN.”
In Minnesota, every winter brings snow, cold, and, for the fifteen years I have lived here, the same conversation. I complain. I whine. I chronicle the struggle in Facebook. Winter finds me tracking the temperature, lamenting lost mittens and icy roads, shoveling, scraping, shivering, climbing into cars with frozen doors and foggy windows, hunching into coats, and scurrying between heated places. And every year I say to my husband, “I’m not doing this any more. I CAN’T HANDLE another winter. I’m serious. We’re moving south.”
This week, though, the mercury has risen just enough to strap on the snowpants and steer the kids outside. They sled in the backyard, and when they stomp back in the door, cold but sweaty, rosy-cheeked, and giggling, I’m glad they get winter. Coats and gear transform into a mountain of work in my entryway as they hunch over their hot chocolate, ignoring the mess. And, sure, I grumble my way through putting it all away, but my heart smiles knowing how much they enjoyed the snow.
Of course, I didn’t stop having kids, and sometimes the day-to-day work of parenting drives me crazy. I’ll complain about bad attitudes, bad trips to the dentist, and exhausting bedtime routines. But the sun always rises on a smile, an I-love-you, handmade artwork, first accomplishments, and the fun of family time. The winter will end and find us still here, tired of shoveling but blessed to have good friends, good schools, good jobs and good lives – no matter what the weather brings.
Once again the calendar will turn to a January full of Minnesota weather events, and my whining will reveal that I’m still here, still suffering, still begging the question from friends and relations in warmer places: “Why don’t you just move? You don’t have to stay there?”
I probably won’t ever move. For all its faults, Minnesota is Home. When I complain about my kids, you wouldn’t tell me to give them away.
But, seriously, get the anesthesiologist in here STAT, if it’s going to dip to the subzeros again next week, I might need an epidural.
