Everything Happened | vol. 233

Activity creep

My parents were willing to pony up the cost of any activity we were interested in as long as we stuck with it for the whole season, or session, or whatever. This was one expression of how you did good middle-class parenting in ‘90s. I did Girl Scouts, church youth group, soccer, softball, basketball, piano lessons, piano competitions, band, swimming.. One time I saw a flyer for swing dance lessons on a cork board at the library and my mom took my pre-teen ass to the community center to rock step triple step kick step with grown adults?? Some of my coziest childhood memories are of my mom driving me to these places, listening to the trumpets blare the “All Things Considered” theme in her Astro van.

Once the activities were school-affiliated, and thus less of a logistical lift on the family, I went even harder. Being home was stressful so I wasn’t. By the time I finished high school, my unaddressed anxiety and undiagnosed ADHD had me in full Max Fischer mode: president of every club and failing every class. I would skip school but still show up at the end of the day to run the meeting for the literary magazine. It was a mess. I always managed to pull my grades up by the end of term and I was a great at standardized tests so my chaotic chickens never really came home to roost. Except that I was on edge all the time.

After four years of intense AP classes and aggressive after-school commitments, college saw me flame out terrifically. Was it flaming out, or was it relishing the opportunity to comfortably sit still? My dorm roommates were never around meaning I could commit fully to watching endless daytime TV and smoking ditch weed. I was confused by my peers’ zeal for campus involvement. Didn’t you guys already get into college? Why join the local Amnesty International chapter when you could just go to the Amnesty parties?

I never regained a taste for being busy. The less busy I was, the less I could tolerate busy-ness. Now, did bloated swaths of free time also, paradoxically, make me anxious? Yes! So I had three kids in order to pull 15-hour days in perpetuity ha ha ha ha :( Wherever you go, there you are etc etc

A tweet that should be in the Louvre

One thing I knew for sure about my life as a parent is that I would not be pushing my kids into activities any sooner than I had to. I had a precious window of their babyhood and little kid-ness where they didn’t really have a life, and thus could continue to be an add-on to my life, my interests, my priorities. My lifestyle was already so colonized by caregiving, why would I voluntarily make my 3-year-old pretend to play a sport at a set time and location.

Then, of course, you know what happened four years ago, when my kids were 4 and 1, and suddenly I longed for the option. Toddlers in a music class at the library sounded utopian, actually. Kids with missing front teeth eating orange slices on the bench in matching jerseys was aspirational. I had turned my nose up at these things, and now I wondered if they were ever going to exist again.

We started small with guitar lessons when Desi was 6. My guy couldn’t hang with guitar and the teacher suggested piano instead. We did piano. It was ok but he couldn’t handle practicing at home and I couldn’t handle forcing him to practice. So I didn’t. We’ve been on and off with music lessons since then. Right now, we’re off. I think in fourth grade, when he’s big enough to walk himself from school to lessons alone, we might be back on.

Then it was soccer, and only in the fall. Practices during the week and games on Saturday, sometimes multiple practices a week. I decided our family could only manage one practice a week, and even that felt like a lot.

The other day, a mom of Jane’s friend mentioned that her daughter is in Girl Scouts and I thought………hmmmmm. Girl Scouts seems like an activity that is very much Jane’s speed, and Jane has never gotten to do a formal activity before. Honestly, I kind of think of Jane’s “activity” as having asthma because I have spent so much time one on one with her at pulmonologists and hospitals dealing with it. This feels like all the more reason to give her a “thing” that isn’t “chronic disease.”

But then is it music lessons for Jane too when she’s 6? Does Desi do (grimace) Cub Scouts? Do you see how it starts? I always wanted to avoid that careful scorekeeping version of parenting where every kid gets the same thing, and thus every kid knows that nothing is ever really for them. But then you have kids and you watch as they keep score hungrily. They are old men in the cheap seats at the ballpark with golf pencils and scorecards, writing it all out longhand.

Something I have to remind myself is that just because everyone else seems to do it, that doesn’t mean it’s not intense. Nick and I both work full-time regular degular jobs and have a household to [poorly] maintain. Meals have to happen, trash has to make it to the curb, and our big kids still require one or both parents to act as prison warden to get them to bed. We basically run an inn/boarding school as a hobby. And then wake up and do our real jobs, the ones that pay us.

And in the meantime, we are supposed to stay horny for each other? You can see how peppering in some extra-currics for the kids and its accompanying gear, dues, and timetables goes way past “edging” into a realm closer to “erotic death by shared admin.”

One time a woman cornered me at a party when Desi was a toddler and my only child. She was feeling on the fence about kids. She was married, had plenty of money, there were no real barriers to her starting a family, just her own sense of ambivalence. She was targeting me because she had ID’d me as someone “cool” who had seemingly not become lobotomized into only talking about stroller brands and school lotteries. She wanted a vision of a lifestyle that was not what she had seen happen to her friends.

“You and Nick don’t just, like, do kid stuff all weekend, do you?” Oops, you tried to peg me as not like the other girls. But I am exactly like the other girls, babe.

Well, when we had a baby, a portable purse dog basically, we pretty much did all the same things that we did before, just not late at night. We went to brunch. We bopped around the flea market. We played him our favorite records. How cool were we?

And then he became a real, full person and doing things that would be especially engaging for him became more fun than trying to awkwardly wedge his chaos and exuberance into the things that used to be fun, that were fun when we did them without him. Keeping him entertained brought us a slow drip of peace which at that time in our life had equal market value to “fun.”

Anyway, what I told her was, “oh, no, we definitely do kid stuff all weekend.”

I won’t boycott activities forever, and I was humbled by really enjoying Desi’s soccer season this year. Like, sorry, but it’s fun to watch your kid really put the pieces together and enjoy themselves? Not even “fun” but fun. We’ll probably put him in it next fall again, and maybe Jane can join in.

But hopefully some other more type-A parents start organizing carpools or whatever. I have an inn to run.

yr mate,
Evie
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