Mostly, I feel guilty. I feel like I’m letting my kids down by not having them in activities and not having gotten them into sports when I had the chance. I feel like I’m the only person on earth who doesn’t have their kids engaged in afterschool stuff and sports. I keep telling myself that a) the pandemic fucked everything up in this department and once it winds down for real (spring?) I can make up for lost time, b) I’m not really in any kind of financial position to sign up for hundreds of dollars a month in activities, c) the kids are thriving and happy so who the eff cares? And yet.
We had a long, boring, unfocused weekend in which the kids were mostly in their pajamas with unbrushed teeth and I puttered around aimlessly. See, what had happened was…this was supposed to be our first weekend in the cabin. Which we all know can’t happen, and won’t happen, for months (contractor told me yesterday he’s not returning to do any work for at least two more weeks. Good times). Because I had to go to a wedding late Friday I couldn’t realistically make plans for us to do anything else - like camping or a short road trip or anything like that (I probably would have used our credit to stay at that cabin in Cambria we got canceled out of last May). And so I just left the weekend open. But that didn’t feel as good as I thought it would. The F is terrible at making plans, so we sat around all day in an endless round of “what do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?” while he futilely looked up things to do with kids in LA and restaurants, not finding anything for hours, until I suggested we go to this beer garden-type place with a play yard the kids could at least run around in. Upon getting there, the play yard was gone. I spent $120 on a very mediocre lunch (still don’t know how that happened), we went to a park where Theo fell off his bike into a rose bush and tore up his leg something awful, we came home and struggled to figure out what to do about dinner at nine o’clock at night. Then yesterday the F got to the important work of fixing all of our leaking/stuck bathroom fixtures (I’m very grateful he’s up to the task of tackling things like this) while I futzed around and read and de-seeded pomegranates. I somewhat redeemed myself by cooking us all dinner and making apple cider donut holes, but mostly I just felt like a big fat failure all weekend.
Why? Well, mostly dumb reasons - seeing everyone’s family fun pumpkin patch pictures, drive-in pictures, beach day pictures…again, everyone in the world, it seems, did something fun last weekend. Why didn’t we go to a pumpkin patch? Because the half-sisters reached out to us to go, and I’m waiting to make a plan with them. So that was off the table. And again, the home repairs were urgent so that had to happen (we couldn’t turn the cold tap on the bathroom sink hardly at all). But then there was a discussion in one of my mom groups about how to build resilience in children and much of the discussion was about getting kids into sports and activities. And I see how much these things take over adult lives - just Friday night at the wedding I had a discussion with a mom of boys about how much she hates having to drag herself to early morning games and practices and how if her husband hadn’t insisted the kids be in sports, she never would have done it. Some years ago the F suggested I get the boys into little league or some such thing - I said I would if he took full responsibility for all the games and practices and other crap you have to do, and that was the last I heard of it.
So it was a weekend of social media FOMO and mild shaming - something I typically avoid, but this topic touches a nerve with me because I do feel guilt about it and question if I’m doing the right thing by currently doing nothing. Part of me, too, is so intensely still hurt by our whole violin debacle that I’m just gun shy now about picking something for these kids to do, forcing them to continue when they inevitably don’t want to, dragging it out for everyone, only to be fired at the end anyway and all that work, money, and commitment goes right down the drain and was for absolutely nothing. To say I’m scarred by that whole incident is an understatement.
The question is, what do you do when your kids don’t seem to show much interest or aptitude in anything? Other than watching gamer videos? I always swore up and down I wouldn’t be the kind of parent that would just let their kids wallow on YouTube all day…and yet that’s exactly how we live, and I’m intensely ashamed of it. Yet I don’t know how to fix it. What, exactly, do you do with kids when they get home from school? I mean when they’ve done homework and eaten and all that? Is it terrible to allow them downtime after a long day? Do you need to constantly engage them like they’re still toddlers? (trust me…they don’t want this). Didn’t we all just veg out in front of the tv every spare minute when we were this age? Was that bad for us?
What I should be doing is just picking things for them to do and trying them out, like other parents. But the mental energy this takes - not to mention financial commitment - sounds utterly exhausting to me. What/when/where? How to do research on all these things, where to take them, what teachers to get, and right now with covid still in our lives, too…it’s just complicated. I want them to learn instruments, but they have zero interest in this. Theo might still be into sports - or maybe martial arts. He’s very physical. I could consider getting them into some kind of martial art; I think they’d both respond well to the discipline and physicality of it. But I do worry if they’d then spend all their waking lives beating the crap out of each other. This is the most likely option for them, but again I might wait at least until they’re fully vaccinated before considering this.
I look ahead to the next couple of months and, until our Thanksgiving trip, we have a lot of weekends with, frustratingly, one or two small things we have to do that make it impossible to go on an actual trip, and yet don’t take up enough time to make an actual fun weekend. We could have been spending time out at the cabin - that’s what this whole fall was supposed to be about. I’m so annoyed.
I started reading a book called The Lost Daughter which, as promised, has been a real gut punch regarding mothers and daughters, and in particular abandoning mothers and mothers who can’t differentiate between themselves and their daughters. Mothers who tell their daughters they never should have been mothers (WHY) and feel vaguely or not-so-vaguely competitive with them. As much as I often bemoan the fact that I’ll never have a daughter (out of earshot of my boys, of course!) - the F recently asked me if it was hard to be the only girl in the house, and I said emphatically, YES - there’s still a part of me that’s glad I have boys because it’s just so much less complicated. I don’t have to worry about differentiating from them - they are nothing like me; they are aliens. They will only become more alien-like as they get older and turn into men. I don’t understand how their brains work, what they want, what they think about. I do my best to be compassionate and nurturing while they still let me, but mostly I just leave them be because I believe that’s what’s best, and I want them to be independent. So we have the gender gap - they are men, and therefore incomprehensible to me - but, more worryingly, the generation gap, in which these children are growing up with social media and at their age I was still using a (shared) rotary phone. I truly feel like the only time we’re having a similar experience - all doing the same thing at the same time - is when we’re in the wilderness. It’s no wonder that’s where I’m happiest and most satisfied with family life.
Tomorrow is the middle school fair (zoom), and apparently middle school applications have to be in by mid-November. Schools still aren’t offering any kind of tours (covid), so it looks like I’m stuck doing online research (ugh) and watching tour videos to get any kind of sense of what these schools are like. I had started to get interested in this one hippy-dippy school until I read the Yelp reviews; like often happens with these types of schools, it looks like it’s loud and chaotic, and all the troubled kids who couldn’t hack normal public schools end up going there and bullying the other kids with zero repercussions. Yeah, no. This is a huge, life changing decision, and I feel completely overwhelmed and out of my depth. I’m so scared of making the wrong call and sending Bobby to a school where he’ll be miserable - or worse, harmed. And I have to make, and commit to, decisions right now that we then have to live with for years.
It’s just all so hard.
So here's thing thing with kids...there isn't ever a "right" answer.
ReplyDeleteMy son was only ever interested in Karate, so that's what he did from 3-14. He stopped training as a 2nd degree blackbelt and his focus became girls, video games and hanging out with friends. I probably should have made him do other things but he didn't show any interest and I didn't really have the time or money to so Karate was his "thing" when he was young and in the end he found his own passions.
My sister (a SAHM) & brother-in-law had their boys involved with everything (several sports, theater, piano, guitar, etc.) Her older son dropped out of everything "organized" around 14 and discovered hiking (and girls and friends) around 15 and hiking is still his passion at 20. Her younger son decided the only thing he loved in life was trains and refused to do anything unrelated to them around age 12. He's 17 now, still loves trains and plans to be a engineer for Amtrak. So after years of my sister & brother in law chasing their own tails and living lives so scheduled it was painful the kids found their own passions.
In the end all three kids figured out what they loved without our help. *shrug*
My boys are 9 and 6 and I choose the “lightest” leagues possible for their sports, we only do one at a time, and only if they LOVE it and are excited to go. For soccer, they have one practice and one game per week, always in the same place and time. Basketball will be similar and starts this week after a 2-month break from extracurriculars. These leagues are also a lot cheaper and don’t require uniforms or special gear.
ReplyDeleteI also don’t think there’s anything wrong with letting kids veg after spending 9-10 hours at school and childcare.