“Mama, I just can’t hold it anymore,” my six-year-old said as we entered into hour two of our pre-picture day combing out of every last blasted tangle from his (to others) enviable mass of ringlets.

“Gosh, babe – go then! Why didn’t you just say something?” I jumped back from my armed-with no-more-tangles hovering position to clear a path to the bathroom.

He looked at me blankly. I nodded to the bathroom and he shook his head impatiently. “No, I mean I can’t hold all this. My stomach is full of my heart and my head just hurts and, and, and–”

And plunk went the head of now gorgeous curls into his folded arms. “I want to go to school,” he sobbed, “but can you ask the teacher if I can just stay with her at lunch, maybe I can help her do something? I just can’t go to the playground, I’m just too grey to play.”

My son’s poetic nature had caught me breathless before but this was a kick in the gut. He’d been through an unforgivable amount of chaos and Murphy’s law-style misfortune in recent months somehow finding humor and silver linings with me. Not once had he complained. But this combing out torture finally put him over the edge.

I hugged him and kissed his sore head. The thought of my recess-lover sitting forlornly in an empty classroom was too much. My kid needed a mental health day. It hit me, why not? My kid was not a whiner, he loved school and even in his desolation still wanted to go. So why not? He deserved it and he needed it.

His favorite places in the world were Mohonk Mountain House, Disneyworld and The Great Wolf Lodge. Disney and Great Wolf were too far away for a one day escape and Mohonk was so close the odds were too high I’d run into someone we knew. Besides having to explain why I was playing hooky with my son, my plan of serious uninterrupted mom and boy quality time would, well, be interrupted.

Someone had once told me about Great Escape Lodge in Lake George, New York, a convenient under-two-hour-drive indoor waterpark-style resort with an Adirondack theme, so I went online and grabbed a room. I threw suits and a day’s worth of our comfiest laziest style clothes in a bag and handed my son a pair of jeans and sweatshirt. My preppie child of six took these with great suspicion as our usual dress code involved a button down shirt at minimum, but it all added to the conspiratorial air.

As we turned left rather than right for school (I had made a quick call to clue them in), I caught a little smile of disbelief in the rearview and reached over to pat his knee. He asked timidly if we could maybe play that song again, the one about the car, and I rebooted the kid-and-mom-friendly version of “Mustang Sally” (from a Little Monsters compilation called Soulville), which we repeated eleven more times until he had all the words by heart.

Great Escape Lodge did a little body good. His shoulders visibly lifted as he forgot his worries and became engrossed in creating a 36-layer-sand sculpture. The benefits of showing up at a family oriented hotel on a school day were evident as he enjoyed a private game of “Scooby Says” with a character he loved solely due to bone-shaped cookies, having never seen the show. He was fairly clueless about most of the characters we met-declaring the “chickie” (aka Tweetie) as his fave. However, this made him no less thrilled when Sylvester (“Is that a fox or a skunk, mama?”)hand-delivered cookies and milk to our room at bedtime and came in to join him for a bedtime snuggle over Green Eggs and Ham.

We hit the road early the next morning, two happy human beings reconnected as one against the world, in time for the return to school and real life. As a song ended, I reached out unasked to hit repeat. We shared a smile and our voices belted out, “RIDE, SALLY, RIDE!” once again in perfect harmony

December 3rd, 2008 | by Sascha Zuger 8 comments