Pertinent to my Interests

My oldest went to sleepaway camp last week. It was five nights away, the longest he has ever been away from us.

I had been dreading this ever since we signed him up in January. What if he couldn’t fall asleep at night? What if the other kids were mean to him? What if he disliked the activities or his counselors disliked him?

He was so excited, and it turned out he had a great time. But the long week of fretting about him brought some memories to the surface, memories of the other times I have had to let him go and send him out into the world.

When he was about two years old, I signed him up for a drop-in daycare in the neighborhood. At the time I was overwhelmed by the demands of a toddler and a baby at home; someone had recommended the drop-in daycare for a respite, and I happily signed him up. But I cried on the first day I dropped him off.

“What if the other kids make fun of his Elmo lunchbox?” I anxiously texted my friend from the daycare parking lot. “Casey, he’s two,” she replied. “They all have Elmo lunchboxes right now.”

I coped only a little bit better when he went to full-time Kindergarten three years later (at least the Elmo lunchbox was long gone by then).

“It’s just, how can we send him out into the world?” I asked my husband when he very much wanted to be asleep. “The world doesn’t know how amazing he is on the inside. They don’t love him like we do. They have no idea.”

And it’s true: the world does not care about our children the way we care about them. We cannot change this. And I had always thought that my job as a parent was to provide that foundation of love and support so he always had an emotionally warm place to return to.

But I’m starting to think the key is actually to teach our kids to love themselves the way that we love them. To light the fire inside rather than forcing them into lifelong dependence for sympathy and warmth from their aging parents.

I am thinking very hard about how to gift to my son my love for him and all his imperfections, and how to wrap it up in a way that makes it easy to take it out into the world.

I never know how to answer this question so I’m going to write about it and see if this helps me to organize my thoughts.

Where to start? The job search is confused. The job search is disorganized. The job search lacks both direction and motivation.

I do not need to work. Financially, we are more than secure with just my husband’s income.

I do want to work. I am bored. I miss having a life outside of home and family. I miss earning money. I miss being part of a team and feeling competent.

I don’t want to work. I enjoy my time and I enjoy my freedom. I like having extra bandwidth for sick kids or personal projects. I have time to exercise, time to meal plan, time to clean things and organize things and research things and bring the kids places. I like grocery shopping on Monday morning instead of Sunday afternoon.

I do want to work part-time, but the part-time gigs suck. All the interesting jobs are full-time.

I do want to leave the house and go to an office, but I don’t want to commute too far.

I would like to make decent money, but I’ve been out of the workforce for ten years. Most of the jobs I qualify for are paying $20/hr. Is it worth it to disrupt our lives for $20/hr?

And we return to the first point: that I don’t have to work. But what weighs most heavily on me is this:

What will people think?

Staying home with the kids was already an unusual choice for my socioeconomic class, but allowable. I was clearly very busy with the children and the house. It’s okay to step away from a career to raise little kids, but is it okay to not step back in? I’m sure my working friends wonder what I do all day long now that the kids are in school (and that is a good question). My husband probably wonders too but he also hasn’t cleaned a bathroom in almost a decade so wisely chooses not to ask that question out loud.

What would people think if I just didn’t work? Would they think I was stupid? Would they think I was boring?

What would I think?

I read Loretta Lynn’s memoir last week. It was an interesting look into a particular place and time and music genre, and her rags-to-riches story is compelling.

I was struck by how often Loretta wrote that “I ain’t no better than anybody else.” The entire second half of the book (the half after she experienced success) is dusted with this phrase, and it seems genuine. She never felt that her success made her superior.

It got me thinking about the nature of humility. Humility sure looks good when it’s accompanied by success. Rich people, famous people, beautiful people, creative geniuses, math geniuses, do-gooders: if anything they shine a little more brightly with some humility thrown in the mix.

But what about the non-successful? Have you ever heard a regular, non-successful person proudly state that they ain’t better than anyone else? You’d probably just shrug in their general direction. Yeah. We know. We can tell by looking.

Humility: looks good on the red carpet at the Met Gala, but just seems odd behind the counter at Starbucks.

We went to Hobby Lobby for the first time today. On the way there my youngest asked how long the drive to “Hobbit Habit” was going to take and that is what we are calling Hobby Lobby from now on.

Well, it’s great.

It feels like everything about those early, soul-crushing years of having children was a terrible investment which is now paying off in a big way.

Here is an incomplete list of things we have done today:
1. Sat together reading quietly in the living room.
2. I went to the gym. The kids stayed home.
3. The three of us went to a playground together. I stood up exactly one time in order to throw away garbage. I corrected behavior exactly zero times.
4. Went to the library. We all went our separate ways and met up later.
5. Kids got smoothies. No drama.
6. We shared a cookie. No drama.
7. Kids got haircuts. No drama.
8. Kids vacuumed and dusted the main floor. No drama.

The fact that I am even sitting down at my computer and composing this blog post should tell you something about how this summer is going. These elementary years are a whole new level.

Now, the kids have only been out of school for a couple weeks. I might have to write about this again in August and see how I’m feeling then (my guess: more worn down and frustrated with the state of the house). But there is no way it will compare–even slightly–to how I felt back when I was a full-time stay-at-home parent to two toddlers. Back then I felt trapped, exhausted, overwhelmed. The days were so long and unending.

Time is going so quickly now; it’s frightening how the hours are slipping through my fingers. Now I just feel grateful that I have the luxury of spending this summer with my kids.

I really prefer the dark and quiet of the winter solstice, but I’m told we can’t have year-round winter so here we are. The sun is like a toddler going through some terrible sleep regression. Still up at 9 PM. Up again at 5:30 AM. The whole family suffers.

The winter solstice always seems like a perfect time for a backyard fire and hot drinks in the dark. Celebrate the darkness by creating light. But how does one celebrate the summer solstice? Should we hide in the dark basement this evening and have cold drinks?

Actually that sounds nice. Cold drinks in the dark basement and maybe a horror movie. Celebrate the light by creating darkness.

It’s the last day of school here, exactly a week until the longest day of the year, and my ability to sleep soundly has vanished.

Summer sleep is the worst. Too much heat, too much sun. The kids understandably struggle to go to bed when the sun is still up. The thin quilt on our bed just doesn’t feel right. In the evenings people walk up and down my street talking loudly as they return from the restaurant on our corner. My mosquito bites itch more in the evenings. And did I mention that it’s light out constantly? There is only so much the blackout shades can do.

The real nail in the coffin of my sound sleep is the very nature of summer itself. The kids are home all the time, the house is constantly a mess, and I am always sweaty. We travel back and forth between the cabin and our home in the city all summer long and damned if I can remember which place is running low on butter. Which adult is supposed to have the car today? But I still have to remember to go grocery shopping and do allowance and scoop cat litter and arrange social activities for everyone.

The dark and cold of winter is so much better for my sleep. And the solid rhythms of the kids back in school. Grocery shopping on Monday morning. Piano lessons on Wednesday afternoon.

I thrive on habit, not on novelty, and although I am looking forward to having my kids home all summer, I am also looking forward to starting the long slide toward the solidity of the winter solstice and my good sleep.

I just got hassled by a panhandler on my way into Target. He called me beautiful and then told me I needed to smile more to make more friends, all while shaking his cup of coins at me.

Do you know how many times I have been told by strange men that I need to smile more? This sort of shit used to happen all the time when I lived in New York City. Constantly. It was background noise to sidewalk life and I just ignored it completely. I did not smile more.

But I’ve been living in Minnesota too long and I’m not used to this anymore and what I really wanted to do was tell him to fuck right off but I didn’t because the stupid second amendment means I never know who has a gun. Also I probably shouldn’t start shit with big crazy men on the street.

I left Target through the other door so I could avoid him on my way out. And fuck you, I’m still not smiling.

Yesterday I volunteered to help clean and organize a closet at my kids’ school. This is exactly the sort of volunteer gig I like; I would much rather sort through piles of toner cartridges than have anything to do with the carnival.

Shoved in a low corner was small box labeled “archives.” I was surprised to find six beautiful photo albums inside, the oldest dating back to 1931.

These albums contain a lot of what you would expect: pages full of class pictures, event invitations, and newspaper clippings. But there are some surprises too. There’s a copy of a questionnaire sent home to parents about their child’s sleeping habits, TV habits, and allowance. Copies of the PTA budget. And my personal favorite: a letter sent from the principal spelling out the circumstances under which students were allowed to eat lunch at school rather than go home for lunch (subzero weather or with special teacher permission only).

That letter was sent in 1955, and back then it must have been quite normal for students to go home for their lunch. But whoever saved that letter must have had a sense of history. Did she know how much the world would change in the next seventy-five years? That we don’t expect children to walk anywhere by themselves anymore? That there are very few stay-at-home parents left who are around to make lunch for their school-age children in the middle of the day?

She could not have known how shocking that letter would be to the PTA parents of 2023, but she chose to save it anyway. She also thought someone might want to know that the entire PTA budget for the 1951-1952 school year was $993.50, and you know what? I do want to know that.

So now I’m trying to wrap my head around what it means to have a sense of history. I think it has something to do with appreciating the mundane details of our daily lives. Something to do with recognizing the impermanence of it all.

And yet… I am still going to recycle pretty much every piece of paper that comes into my house. So much for my sense of history.