We started to make our way back to our campsite, passing the tables and the girls again. I walked a few extra steps and then called to my kids, “Hey, guys, why don’t you go on ahead to the campsite. I’ll meet you there.”
They looked at me with curious eyes, but the tone of my voice must’ve convinced them it was better to get out of there already.
I backtracked and walked over to the picnic table, setting my coffee down and swinging my leg over to sit down as if we were old friends. As if I had been invited. They looked at me and I looked at them, which alone almost gave me a contact hangover.
“So,” I began, “I’m at the campsite right next to you.”
And the look on their faces all but said, “Fuuuuuuuuuuck meeeeeee.”
I continued, “Look, I totally get it. I know this is going to make me sound like your mom, but I was in my twenties once.”
Pause.
“The thing is, I fucking love swearing. I love it. You can’t imagine the level of control it takes for me to not swear in front of my kids.”
They looked uneasy.
“But my kids had to listen to you guys swear for hours last night. HOURS. And they heard some swears I’m not even sure I recognized. They are eight and ten years old, you guys. And they had to listen to all of that shit. Again, I get it. I get having a good time. But here’s the thing—we also deserve to enjoy this park. This is our weekend too. I’ve already complained to the park ranger. We’re not having another night like that.”
They went on to tell me it was the guys who were the problem, that those same guys were leaving this morning, and they were sorry. Not effusively, not like they owed me anything, but more to save face. More to make me just stop talking and go away already.
I rose, tipped my coffee to them and said, “Good. Have a nice day.” I smiled the whole way back to our campsite. If you can’t mess with someone twenty years younger than you while they’re having one of the worst hangovers of their lives, what are you even doing?
As our campsite bustled back into activity—and the campsite next to us went about preparing breakfast in a silent even-breathing-is-too-loud stupor, shooting us wary looks—we were finally able to savor the best parts of this best-worst camping trip. We saw sunrises and sunsets, one sunset in particular the most stunning I had ever seen, right on the summer solstice. My daughter waded around in the shallow water and I snapped a photo of her, her silhouette sharp against the liquid orange light. I laid down after lunch in an open stretch of grass on a soft cotton blanket and listened to the buzzing of bees, the fluttering of bird wings so close. We had gathered pinecones and ferns, leaves of all shapes and feathers and a smidge of a robin’s eggshell. I had taken in wildflowers bobbing back and forth in the breeze, we goose-stepped our way across rocks to go swimming, and we wolfed down Snickers ice cream bars at the campground store.
It was one camping trip that started horribly and turned into something greater than we could’ve imagined. We stuck it out and were rewarded, when typically I would’ve cut bait and left pissed off at the world.
Dad Camp is now a ritual that fills up arctic winter days with the promise of better, warmer days to come. Jon takes care of reserving the sites and paying for them, arranging who goes where, and beyond that, I don’t know any details. Happily.
This past year he left with the kids only a couple of hours after they came home from their last day of school, summer vacation starting immediately. He told me later that when he drove into the park and checked in at the office, the park ranger looked over the sites he had reserved and said with caution in his voice, “Now, you know you’re responsible for all of these sites, right? And for all of the behavior at these sites?”
As he told me this story we both laughed and I said, “Burton Island. That’s what he was expecting.”
That’s when Jon explained that he understood, that this was actually the third year this big group had camped there. That it was a big group of dads and kids. That’s when the ranger lit up and said, “Oh! It’s you guys! We love you guys!”
Me too, park ranger. Me too.
Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should
I have come face-to-face with gratitude every single day since the heartbeat on the monitor decided to keep beating, every time it continued to beat. And those two times I went to the hospital and left with a fully alive and complete baby, and every single moment since.
I do not need to keep a journal to remind myself.
I am grateful for my children’s lives, above all. I’m grateful they are not jerks, as far as I can tell. And I’m grateful they genuinely enjoy meeting and talking with our neighbors more than I do, therefore making them excellent spies.
I am grateful they were both born years before the invention of the iPhone and social media, so when I nursed them I had to occupy myself the old-fashioned way, by reading W and watching the Red Sox win their first World Series since 1918. I couldn’t text or use emojis or e-mail while lightly resting my elbows on my baby’s sleeping body. Instead, I paged through copies of Vanity Fair, stared into space, stared at his face and his jaw or her closed sleeping eyelids with those searching eyes underneath.
I am especially grateful none of that existed so when I was completely at my wits’ end, I didn’t also have to endure posts from other moms of their infants peacefully napping in cleanly designed cribs with modern color palettes and graphics. Or babies who were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed smiling—always smiling!—their gummy grins showing how happy they were to be alive. The best babies. That would’ve been fucking it, as I could barely shower or sleep or figure out what either of their problems were. I sweated through two summers with nonstop baby ragers covered in their own spit up. If social media had existed, the only thing I probably would’ve been able to post would’ve been, “Do you guys like my armpit hair? I’ve been growing it out.”
I have wished for a lot of things over the years. I have wished for good health like the good getting-older person that I am. In my twenties I used to think “At least you have your health” was a polite way of saying “It’s so sad you’re so single and such a friggin’ loser.” I now know that wish is a good wish indeed.
I have wished for all good things for my kids, for them to be happy and safe, to be safe forever. I have wished for them to have cheerful lives and retain their good, tender hearts. I have hoped they find satisfaction and purpose in how they spend their days. If they spend their days ticking off dates on a calendar, just waiting for something to happen, it would fracture my heart in about three places. I hope they will return to me always, happy and healthy, wanting to see me, not out of some sense of duty or because it’s a holiday. I have wished, more than anything, to have the kind of relationships with them I see and envy in others.
I hope they won’t make fun of me behind my back or roll their eyes when I call them to say I love and miss them. I hope they will love and miss me back.
I have wished misery upon their enemies and a smaller amount of misery upon people who are just plain mean to them. There is a part of me that’s counting on lightning bolts of regret shooting at will from my fingertips and straight into the jugulars of those who wrong them.
Pretty typical mom stuff.
I have maintained an identity for myself more or less since the day my son was born. Less in those early hours and days and years, but then picking up with the speed and momentum of a runaway eighteen-wheeler ever since. I am building myself up at a breakneck speed and, to be honest, it feels fucking great. I wonder if I am leaving my family in my wake, but I don’t want to stop. I have stopped so many other times.
I think about how old my kids are now, eleven and thirteen, and I almost can’t say their ages aloud. It’s as if their birthdays were a surprise this year, almost as if they don’t happen every year on exactly the same dates. I’m not sure how I got here, yet the gratitude I feel at having made it this far is overwhelming.
I have spent years wishing for a bubble
of personal space only to discover that twelve is apparently the age when kids stop holding your hand. My daughter isn’t quite there yet. When we were in Maine this past summer I realized my son never reached for my hand. This vacation and that place was the one place that hand-holding was guaranteed, on our morning walks, us two early birds out for a stroll. I kept this in mind as my daughter and I walked to our joint haircut appointments the other afternoon. I stuck my hand out for her to grab and I immediately realized how long it had been, because the motion felt awkward and surprising instead of automatic, the way it used to. It felt electric. She immediately grabbed for it, perhaps thinking the same thing, in her own way. From the minute our hands clasped together, she started doing a skipping-sliding thing in her flip-flops, I think the joy she felt at holding hands was a big part of it. Her hair flowed and bounced behind her like a shampoo commercial. She felt safe and smaller and it filled us both with joy. We should hold hands every chance we get, while we still can.
I wish I could go back and talk to my new mother self and tell her all the things she should do differently. I would tell myself I shouldn’t let anyone who hasn’t had kids into our house in those first few weeks. That I will still feel the need to try to clean and do dishes and there just isn’t time for that shit but I’ll do it anyway. Then a friend who is not married and has no kids will breeze in with a gift and spend most of her time looking at me and wondering why I don’t look happier. I will feel like I am going to explode; I will feel worse than I already felt and I already felt plenty bad. I will wonder if, in addition to losing myself (I won’t know that’s temporary yet), I have also lost all my single child-free friends. How could they ever understand what’s happening to me? I won’t even understand what’s happening to me.
I should’ve made more friends immediately, as if I was a second grader. I shouldn’t have been too proud or too shy to ask for walking dates or coffee dates where we could nurse side by side. I needed that. I should’ve asked for help sooner, even though I was raised to not ask for help, so it feels like the worst thing I could ever do. Even worse than asking for money.
Someone—anyone—should’ve told me to be alone with my husband more. It seems so obvious now, but I’m talking 2004 and 2006, and superhot takes and listicles for what new moms should and shouldn’t do didn’t really exist back then. Did they? Those were wildly different times and how stupid is that? Why does the world have to move along so fast? Maybe one day it will move in reverse and we will suddenly embrace taking long wagon rides across prairies and we’ll write with quill pens and ink. Remember the calligraphy craze back in the 1980s? What was that about?
Back to the marriage thing. We lost each other. In a big way. And we waited too long to do anything about it. We thought that once we had a reliable babysitter and more money, we could make up for lost time. But a marriage is not a to-do list and you can’t just catch up in a flurry.
I remember friends of ours—actually they were my husband’s friends first, I met them on our first date, then they became our joint collective friends. I remember a conversation with the wife after they divorced—even now I still can’t quite believe they’re divorced; they were so fun and great together; they were easy to spend time with; I genuinely liked (and like) both of them so much—and she said, “It was just so hard after the kids were born. You think it will come back one day. I remember thinking, One day when the kids are grown we’ll look back on this and laugh. Instead, he told me he didn’t love me anymore and wanted a divorce.”
Sometimes you don’t look back and laugh.
Sometimes you just get a divorce.
I wish I had heard that story before we had kids or maybe right when they were born. I needed to hear that earlier, I needed to hear it often. I’m not sure how much we can do about it all now. Maybe it’s too late.
We each slept on the couch for months, trying to keep one or the other kid asleep. To say we were two ships passing in the night would be a disservice to ships passing in the night, which sounds downright sexy compared to what was actually happening. We would soundlessly pass one sleeping kid off to the other, or I would hand him a yowling baby with an angry, “I will throw this baby against the wall if someone doesn’t get her away from me.” We did all our sleeping and napping with kids on us at some point. We fed ourselves breakfast and read only the headlines from the front page of the paper, all while bouncing a bouncy seat with one foot. A one-man band. We swaddled and attachment parented the shit out of those kids and yet. Apparently we should’ve been doing some attachment marriage-ing as well.
Just because you can do something, just because you can push yourselves to the limit, just because you can work sixty hours or not take vacations or not go out to dinner with your partner or not even start the day with a hug and a kiss and a “Yeah, this is insane. But we’ve got this,” doesn’t mean you should.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I have said this like a mantra ever since.
I wish I could be easier on myself, although the evidence clearly shows being hard on myself works. I do get what I want, mostly. I do not get things handed to me, although frankly it would be nice at this point. Like you know how celebrities get goody bags stuffed with La Mer and tennis bracelets at award shows? They already have money, and lots of it. No one should be giving them shit for free. But now? I’d like a piece of that action.
I wish I could have just one day of knowing what it would be like to walk around with a supermodel ass. It must be amazing. I wish there was something like that, like instead of fantasy baseball camp there could be fantasy supermodel-ass camp. I would go to that. I’d pay double.
I wish I could know what’s going to happen next. But even if I had the opportunity to find out, even if someone could tell me, I would refuse. Even if they promised it would be great, I would be too nervous to find out.
I wish I could stop wishing. I wish I could just say thank you, this is enough. This is plenty. Look at me, being grateful.
Last
You Are All the Joy
Allow me to embarrass you. No matter what you believe, I actually don’t do this nearly enough.
You, both of you, are the soft hands that are getting rougher, from cartwheels and riding bikes, scrambling over rocks and grass like long-limbed crabs. Those hands have gone from stubby things that poke out of a mush of baby pudge to long, slender instruments. And although I keep thinking you must have the longest, most slender fingers on earth I realize that calling Guinness World Records over them is perhaps a step too far. Regardless, I admire them frequently. I never tell you that, because is it weird for your mother to admire your long fingers? I think it might be. But this is what we do.
You are the velvety, pillowiest cheeks. I have let my lips linger on those cheeks more than on any other cheeks before or since. And even though you are now eleven and thirteen you give me this much. You let me linger and kiss your cheeks. Not in front of your friends, I mean, you haven’t lost your minds. But at bedtime I can still do that. I can also hold your head in my hands and make smooshy goldfish faces with your mouths or beep your nose and smooth your hair.
Your faces have meant more to me than any other faces because yours are the only faces on this earth I saw first. Even before that, I felt them inside me and honestly, how weird is that? It’s getting weirder the more distant those days become and the taller you grow. Your faces were built inside my own body, an eyebrow from here and a nose from there; I’m not sure where those cheeks came from but I’m so happy they’re here. Although in your faces I see traces and features from our family’s past, I mostly just see you, in all your meandering weirdness and wide-open souls, your confusion and sadness, your fart jokes and naughtiness. Your love. I see the whole of you, as you are. And when I see your eyes well up, it hurts me more than if I was just crying myself. Seeing either of you sad is the saddest I ever feel.
You are the eyes that are the only eyes in existence to see how I actually am as a mother. So n
o matter what I write or post or tell other people, only you know the truth. I have failed you daily, I know. I have paid attention when you weren’t interested and not paid attention when you begged for my undivided eyes and ears. I wish I could go back and do it all perfectly or even start from this square right here, but I can’t. I have the best of intentions and then just let them fade, and now you are both at the ages where you call me out on it. “You said we would definitely do this today and I knew it wouldn’t happen. I just knew it.”
I don’t want to wish that one day you will feel overwhelmed, that you will feel the tug between your own life and the lives of your children and the goals you set for yourself and how none of that fits neatly together. If it’s a puzzle, it could only be the kind of puzzle that you get at a yard sale, a bag full of random pieces thrown together and good luck with that. But I hope eventually you will understand how I feel now, if only for a day, if only to know I was trying to do just enough to make it all work. Not do it all well and certainly not do it all flawlessly because obviously that’s impossible. But to be all in on Team Good Enough. Maybe there is never such a thing as good enough when it’s your own mother. Maybe the only way to know for sure is to have your own kids. It just seems with all our technology we should be able to leapfrog that a bit. Maybe a virtual reality “have kids” and “keep trying to live your own individual life” and “feel overwhelmed by all of that” experience could take the place of the home ec classes that are sporadically taught and still very much needed. The carrying around of a hard-boiled egg or a sack of flour bit doesn’t even come close.
Amateur Hour Page 21