4/1/2004 08:27:17 PM|||Amy|||I just realized that next weekend, the weekend that I was planning to spend in someone else's house drinking someone else's booze and pretending that I have someone else's life, is Easter. Holy shit. That's just my luck. Easter. I wonder if my kids will notice if we just don't bother to celebrate it this year. They get crap at Christmas and their birthdays, shouldn't that be enough? I hate Easter. I don't know when I started hating Easter. Was it as a kid? Probably not. My mother was always good on overloading us with candy that she probably bought for herself, and justified by putting it into our Easter baskets. What did I do for Easter as an adult before I had children to consider? Nothing, I'm sure. Except for that one Good Friday that I crossed over into Ireland and almost couldn't find a place to stay because Ireland shuts down on Good Friday. The next year, while working in a pub in Killybegs in southwest Donegal, I learned that a vast majority of Ireland living adults use Good Friday as a day of rest for their poor beleagured livers - if they're not actively trying to pickle themselves with what they took home from the off license the night before. It was the next year that I found myself back in good, old, materially driven Big D with an 8 week old baby and a house full of relatives, and a conscious realization that for the next several years I was going to have to bear Easter with the grim determination of a mother who maybe became a mother too soon.

God help me. I hate Easter.

So, on this upcoming Easter weekend, I am going to be faced again with my own mother and her expectations of how I should celebrate this morbid fucking day of religiositically pessimistic optimism with my children, and do "fun" Easter type shit with them. And I know that the whole time, I will be wishing that I was at my housesitting gig doing my best rendition of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?' and getting as loaded as you can get without throwing up all over the carpet your friend just had cleaned.

Last year, pregnant, tired and pissed off, I made 500 salads for my mother and her Easter dinner. Then, I took the kids for a walk. I was wearing a white, gauze see through shirt and no bra. Not much of a protest since an obviously pregnant woman with a pair of visible nipples and a couple of kids only looks like a slut or an idiot, but I felt that I was somehow making a show of protest. At Easter of 2001 (pregnant then too) I got into a fight so terrible with my husband that it was no small wonder the neighbors didn't call the police. I, then, got into my car and drove out onto the streets of my non-descript surburban town going 90 easily.

I hate Easter. Maybe I hate Easter because the only really good memory I have of Easter is realizing that even though some Irish tv station was showing The Ten Commandments in the hotel I stayed in on Good Friday in Ireland that year, I didn't have to watch it. Instead, I could take a shower (which I did), go eat dinner in the hotel restaurant (which I also did) and then go back to my room and sleep, long and hard. Unfortunately, for Amy there is no sleeping long and hard anymore. And no more do I have a choice about celebrating Easter.

Fuck.
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