Five minutes after my husband and I return from our first solo trip in years, I’m already plunging a toilet. “How long has this been clogged?” I ask my daughter. “I’m not sure,” she says. Somehow our twenty-one-year-old babysitter has kept three kids happy and healthy for five days straight, so I don’t really care about the clog. Afterall, in life, shit happens. And a few nights at an island resort won’t change that.
But here are some things the nights away did afford me: several hours to read each day (including first thing in the morning!); a hiking adventure (read: a treacherous mountain climb two hours up and two hours down) with my husband; a first experience with stand-up paddleboarding, something I’ve threatened to do for years; an hour of snorkeling after a ten-year hiatus; and meal after meal spent either by myself or with my husband and friends, no thoughts spared on screen time at the table or culinary predilections of toddlers. And yet, I can’t say I returned home recharged, reinvigorated, re-anything. I simply had a good time while I was away and crammed in as many things that I’d been meaning to do in the last several years as possible. I missed my kids; I also braced for reentry to the cycle of their care and feeding, especially in the particularly active month of “Maycember.”
Kathryn Jezer-Morton calls the stage of parenting younger children “camel mode”: “when you’re caring for young children and giving yourself over to their needs, you are crossing a metaphysical desert of the self, without water, like a camel.” Maybe this is what my Aunt Christine means when she says that she can’t remember a hit song from 1985 to 1993, the early years she spent raising her own three young children. Jezer-Morton suggests a parent’s “sense of personal sovereignty” still exists, tucked away somewhere inside the way camels store their water. I’ve felt this yearning for autonomy when days are steeped in pull-ups, late sports practices, and dishes. Throw in some aging parents to the young children mix and you can grow quite parched.
How does one exit camel mode? I already know a single trip doesn’t do it. Jezer-Morton says we must relearn how to feel desire again–“any kind of desire, toward anything.” I wonder if I return to earlier years–photos, stories, music, memory boxes–in search of desire, to make sense of what happened. Like I’ve been sucked up in a care-giving vortex and spit out, bewildered and sorting through the evidence. Reflection is a powerful tool, and perhaps the past can comfort and cajole us out of a rut–remind us of who we used to be. Maybe the point isn’t to rediscover though, but rather to reinvent. I’ll let you know in three-to-five years.
[books]
In Polite Company by Gervais Hagerty
Social Engagement of Avery Carpenter Forray
The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy
[things that caught my eye]
My love-hate relationship with racket sports has evolved into weekly tennis and pickleball clinics. I’m still pretty bad at both and loved Daisy Florin’s (author of My Last Innocent Year) take on being okay with being bad at tennis. Jill Smokler, founder of Scary Mommy, started a new magazine, She’s Got Issues. Intrigued by the story of April Burrell waking up after twenty years and what it may portend for certain psychiatric conditions.