There are scenarios that, as a parent, can leave you utterly dumbfounded. In that state of paralysis where you wonder what exactly is to be done. Instances I can recall with sharp clarity include finding out why swim diapers exist — turns out those little pouches are great at absorbing an infant-sized amount of liquid, but not so much an entire swimming pool. Or the explosive bathroom-related episodes that leave your spouse wondering what happened to Junior’s underpants, and regular pants, and socks. “I threw them out!”
But perhaps none are quite so vivid as what happens when your kids’ nausea becomes suddenly … overwhelming.
Motion sickness is the WORST.
I know, because I used to suffer badly as a kid, though perhaps facing backwards in a third-row station wagon seat didn’t help matters. My youngest daughter has to deal with it, and though I always feel almost as awful for as she feels when it hits, today, we can all have a good laugh at the incredibly unfortunate situations it’s put us in over the years.
Like the time, when all three kids were still in car seats and we were on a road trip that took us through the windy mountain passes of West Virginia. John Denver wasn’t kidding, the vistas are so beautiful as to make you want to cry. But I wouldn’t recommend enjoying the scenery with a car-sick-prone kid in the back seat. At the time, we didn’t know of this reality. To make matters worse, I had very proudly figured out how to get three car seats all in a row in the back of our Ford Flex, courtesy of some slim-line Diono units.
The upside to that configuration is having all children easily accessible.
The downside is when one of those children unleashes the contents of her stomach, which featured a raisin-heavy lunch, um, everywhere. No matter what, this is all downside, but it’s doubly bad when those car seats are fitted in there so tight as to need a crowbar for removal. As you might imagine, this is made even less fun on the side of a road when said seats are … soiled.
Or the time that we found ourselves in the crosshairs of an upset tummy while crossing the Atlantic, on an airplane, in the middle section, surrounded by other passengers. There’s only so much you can do in such a setting.
Surprisingly, the most memorably outrageous instance would have been a few summers ago.
I say surprising because the kids were well beyond their toddler years, so in theory, bouts of car sickness would be less work for the parents. Maybe, but not when the event takes place on a blistering hot day in the wilds of upstate New York with nowhere to pull over except a closed U-Haul parking lot with no shade.
Also, putting the kid with motion sickness in the third row of a vehicle should be in the “Forbidden” section of the Parenting 101 handbook. Because, man, when that nausea rears its unpleasant head on a windy rural road in searing 100-degree heat and the outcome ends up all over the inside of the car, the concept of parental paralysis becomes acutely real.
