**I wrote this almost two months ago and just now got up the courage to post it. Tomorrow, or soon, I will tell you what I did about moving up. Or sideways.
June 5-8, 2012
This feels like a hard confession to write, possibly
because I want to be someone other than who I am. I do NOT want to be one of
those parents who complain about summer and school being out, especially not at
the beginning of the first week of summer vacation. Yesterday there was one
hour of school, and by dinnertime I was already dreading the rest of the
summer. The whining. The bickering. The constant constantness of children. They
talk all the time, keeping me from my own thoughts, and yet they do not add any
new information. The talk is just sound, biologically and diabolically designed
to be impossible to tune out. It could be used as a form of long-term torture
by the government, if amendment VIII to the constitution didn't forbid the use
of cruel and unusual punishment. This morning I went on an almost two-hour bike
ride, arriving back home at 8am. By 8:30 I had already sent my son to his room
because I just couldn't stand the constant little jabs and insults and taunts
directed at his sister. I was reminding myself on my bike ride, to psych myself
for another day, that really he's a good kid. Compared to any other
eight-year-old boy I've come across, he's really quite kind and focused and
gentle. But he's an eight-year-old boy. Boy, oh boy, is he an eight-year-old.
And the summer stretches out long long long before us.
So here I am, dreading summer. It doesn't help that my foot--the one on which I had surgery last year--is killing me again, on top of the sprained back and broken rib, of course. The sprain and the break are normal and almost healed. The foot is completely mysterious. I wasted a year of my life on it and then on surgery, and it's not better. So summer is taunting me like an eight-year-old brother intent on making me scream.
But injuries aside, I find myself dreading summer--not the summeriness of summer, but, specifically and horribly, all of the time spent entertaining and meeting the legitimate and made-up needs of children. Yesterday, well before dinner, I was suddenly transported back twenty-some years to before I was old enough to have a "real" summer job and did babysitting/nanny jobs in the summer. I remember one job in particular that was most of a workday watching a little girl named Allison, and maybe her brother, although I only remember the girl for sure. I have nothing in particular to say about the girl. I don't remember her doing anything horrible. I don't remember anything particularly wild or disobedient or difficult about her. She was probably a normal kid, maybe seven or eight years old. The thing I remember is that in spite of her being a nice enough kid, I really did not enjoy my babysitting career. I counted the hours, the minutes even, until I was off duty. And I felt that way about most of my day-time babysitting gigs. The night-time gigs I would count the hours and minutes until bedtime. And in the larger scheme of my life, I was counting the weeks until the job was over, the months until school was back in, the years until I could do something else with my life, something a little more...stimulating?
Fast forward through the rest of high school and college and graduate school and all sorts of interesting classes and "valuable" education, and here I am, stuck in more-or-less the same situation, always busy, always in demand, and at the same time so bored I sometimes consider whether I should beat my skull against the wall just to be doing something else, something at least slightly more interesting. In some ways my current situation is a bit better: there is no ambiguity about what is allowed, or at least less, since I am the one who decides such things, and there is no fear that the children are hoodwinking me that the real parents are OK with such-and-such. I can change the scenery: decide that we ARE running errands or going to a park. Sometimes I can actually talk to another adult if we meet at a park, although, mind you, those conversations tend to be interrupted repeatedly by requests to play on the slides or to push the swings or for snacks. But in many ways, the parenting gig is even more hopeless than babysitting. There is no off-duty coming in a couple of hours. The end of the "work day" means...nothing. And there are no weekends. The job is not going to end, at least not for many years. You don't walk out of the house at the end of the day or week with a pile of cash. When you go on vacation, the kids come too, and they bicker and whine and ask for snacks from the back seat. Worst, though, is the knowledge that this is it. I don’t have some brilliant and interesting career ahead of me. In spite of my masters degree, I’m not even confident I could get a job if I had time for one. This is the fulfillment of all of my teenaged fantasies about the future, about the time when I have a graduate degree and a husband and my own life. Joke's on me. I may have a graduate degree, but it turns out the golden era of my adult life is almost exactly like the time when I was fourteen and helping someone else live her life. Only now I don't have dreams of the future to sustain me, and I can't go hang out with my teenaged friends after dinner every night. The truth is that my life is so tedious most of the time that even when another adult arrives I have nothing to say interesting enough to engage in actual conversation. My current situation is so intensely boring that when I desperately dig around for some little tid-bit to offer up in the name of adult interaction, even my most interesting item causes the eyes of my listener to glaze over and elicits little more than an obligatory nod or grunt of assent before the would-be listener's attention reverts to whatever it can find of more interest. I’ve taken to breaking ribs just to have a conversation topic. Apparently, that’s what I do when I’m bored.
So here I am, dreading summer. It doesn't help that my foot--the one on which I had surgery last year--is killing me again, on top of the sprained back and broken rib, of course. The sprain and the break are normal and almost healed. The foot is completely mysterious. I wasted a year of my life on it and then on surgery, and it's not better. So summer is taunting me like an eight-year-old brother intent on making me scream.
But injuries aside, I find myself dreading summer--not the summeriness of summer, but, specifically and horribly, all of the time spent entertaining and meeting the legitimate and made-up needs of children. Yesterday, well before dinner, I was suddenly transported back twenty-some years to before I was old enough to have a "real" summer job and did babysitting/nanny jobs in the summer. I remember one job in particular that was most of a workday watching a little girl named Allison, and maybe her brother, although I only remember the girl for sure. I have nothing in particular to say about the girl. I don't remember her doing anything horrible. I don't remember anything particularly wild or disobedient or difficult about her. She was probably a normal kid, maybe seven or eight years old. The thing I remember is that in spite of her being a nice enough kid, I really did not enjoy my babysitting career. I counted the hours, the minutes even, until I was off duty. And I felt that way about most of my day-time babysitting gigs. The night-time gigs I would count the hours and minutes until bedtime. And in the larger scheme of my life, I was counting the weeks until the job was over, the months until school was back in, the years until I could do something else with my life, something a little more...stimulating?
Fast forward through the rest of high school and college and graduate school and all sorts of interesting classes and "valuable" education, and here I am, stuck in more-or-less the same situation, always busy, always in demand, and at the same time so bored I sometimes consider whether I should beat my skull against the wall just to be doing something else, something at least slightly more interesting. In some ways my current situation is a bit better: there is no ambiguity about what is allowed, or at least less, since I am the one who decides such things, and there is no fear that the children are hoodwinking me that the real parents are OK with such-and-such. I can change the scenery: decide that we ARE running errands or going to a park. Sometimes I can actually talk to another adult if we meet at a park, although, mind you, those conversations tend to be interrupted repeatedly by requests to play on the slides or to push the swings or for snacks. But in many ways, the parenting gig is even more hopeless than babysitting. There is no off-duty coming in a couple of hours. The end of the "work day" means...nothing. And there are no weekends. The job is not going to end, at least not for many years. You don't walk out of the house at the end of the day or week with a pile of cash. When you go on vacation, the kids come too, and they bicker and whine and ask for snacks from the back seat. Worst, though, is the knowledge that this is it. I don’t have some brilliant and interesting career ahead of me. In spite of my masters degree, I’m not even confident I could get a job if I had time for one. This is the fulfillment of all of my teenaged fantasies about the future, about the time when I have a graduate degree and a husband and my own life. Joke's on me. I may have a graduate degree, but it turns out the golden era of my adult life is almost exactly like the time when I was fourteen and helping someone else live her life. Only now I don't have dreams of the future to sustain me, and I can't go hang out with my teenaged friends after dinner every night. The truth is that my life is so tedious most of the time that even when another adult arrives I have nothing to say interesting enough to engage in actual conversation. My current situation is so intensely boring that when I desperately dig around for some little tid-bit to offer up in the name of adult interaction, even my most interesting item causes the eyes of my listener to glaze over and elicits little more than an obligatory nod or grunt of assent before the would-be listener's attention reverts to whatever it can find of more interest. I’ve taken to breaking ribs just to have a conversation topic. Apparently, that’s what I do when I’m bored.
My mom, the re-teller of family stories, has countless
times told us and others how she knew I needed to be moved ahead a year in
school: I started coming home every day with a new injury. Once I had wedged myself into a garbage can. Once I stuck my finger in a pencil sharpener
to clean the crayon out of it. I came
home covered in band-aids with scraped knees and bumps on the head and a
restless mental hunger that drove me to constant reading and badgering my
parents into teaching me long division.
My first grade teacher didn’t find me a thrillingly exceptional student,
but my mom, a very good mom, knew. I was
bored. My physical well-being, not to
mention my intellectual growth, necessitated that I be pushed ahead. I needed a change. I needed a challenge. I needed to be using my strengths.
This week, as I sat in the podiatrists office waiting for
an explanation on my mysteriously still very painful foot (I don’t feel
satisfied that I received a good one,) I fumed about how in the space of
approximately two months I’ve sprained my back, broken a rib, gotten two
infections, and reinjured my foot.
Mother, I think, it is time to
move up a level, to find something else to do with myself, some sort of
challenge for my mind before I smash up my body beyond repair and start in on
someone else.
When one is in elementary school, moving up a level can be
a matter of simple math: in the case of my childhood, I moved from grade two to
grade three. In my current situation,
math does not seem to be the answer. For
some reason I don’t think going from two children to three children would work
quite as well. No, it’s far more
complicated and involves some difficult choices. I will have to release some of the blessings
of my current life in order to pursue another.
I’ll have to rebuild bridges that, if not burned, have certainly been
neglected and fallen into extreme disrepair.
I don’t know what moving on looks like from here. I only know that something has to change if
any of us is going to come out of this summer unscathed.
