Stuck Inside of the House with the Mountain Blues Again

When I raised the alarm this morning that it was time to get ready for school, Zebediah woke up screaming. I didn't hear what he was screaming because I was in the kitchen washing dishes, so I could go out for the day and not come home to a counter full of bowls crusted with dry oatmeal. (The kids like to eat the free school breakfast for some reason. It always looked horrid to me).

Yesterday, I had puttered disconsolately around the house for a while in the morning, thinking about going out for a bike ride, before finally starting off up toward the ski basin. I am always amazed how much easier it is to climb out of Santa Fe into the Sangre de Cristo mountains when you are not on a Bike Friday with a child or two and maybe some camping gear. Except for a couple of places that feel like they're going to wreck your knees, the climb is a pretty easy spin in low gear. I had puttered away too much time in the morning though, to go very far, so I stopped by Tesuque Creek near Hyde State Park, ate a Cliff Bar, and headed back home.

I did, during the ride, however, think how odd it was that I never really throw myself into what I enjoy. I love to be outside and in the mountains. At various times in my life, I've planned to be an Outward Bound Instructor, a fire lookout, a rafting guide, a Hot Shot, (which is the group that fights forest fires), and so on. I've gone as far as getting my Wilderness First Responder certification, looked into becoming an EMT, acquired the application forms to become a fire lookout, but I have never followed through.

I'm really not sure why. It always seemed that those jobs were for other people. It would be easy to blame my parents. I heard from childhood, "You're so smart you could become a doctor or lawyer." (I was part of that archetypal first generation of a family who goes to college). The problem was, I had no interest in being a doctor or lawyer. I had a desire to be a writer early on, but I had no sense of how one went about doing that. And then I had all these outdoor avocations and other side interests. I remember one time I wanted to take an auto mechanics class at the community college when I was in high school and my parents were aghast, and basically wouldn't allow me to do it. And during my second year of college, when I was studying Asian history at the University of South Carolina, my professor arranged a exchange program for me with a college in Northern China. All I needed was $1000. My parents said, "no way, you are not going to a Communist country." I also remember my mother telling me, "you can't do what you want to in life, you have to do what makes money." And she used to sigh a lot and say, "you can't get ahead by trying." A few years ago, I was struck by what an oddly counterproductive saying that is -- I catch myself sighing the same thing -- and I called Laura, my wife, who is, after all, a reference librarian, and after looking it up, she informed me the entire saying is "you can't get ahead by trying to get even." All my mother seemed to remember was "you can't get ahead by trying." (Edited to add: the house was a really depressing place to me when I was a little boy, and I spent all my free time in the forest and swamp across the street from my house, eventually wandering miles through the woods finding out how to get to other parts of town. Perhaps it's only natural that I still find a house a depressing place to be and still want to spend all my time outside in the woods).

I sometimes think I've walked a thin line between doing what I wanted to do and living up to my parents' expectations. However, I never really thought that much about my parents' expectations. But there is something in my personality that always keeps me just a little shy of doing the things that would really make me happy. I'm up on this ledge, not really doing either thing.

As an at-home-parent, I'm more or less miserable with the at-home part. Occasionally, I'll get on a sustainable kick, trying to change the way we live in the house to save energy, or water, or whatever, and that interests me a bit, but mostly I putter around thinking, "to hell with this house, to hell with the dishes, to hell with this laundry, to hell with the dogs," and I catch myself muttering, "I am sooooo unhappy."

But I'm not that unhappy, I guess. I've taken depression surveys years ago when I went to a therapist because I found being an at-home-parent was a surprisingly anger-inspiring career move, and they say I'm not depressed: I've got a mighty strong you-know-what drive. I love to eat. I sleep easily and deeply. I always believe life will get better. I have this strong urge to wallow in life like a pig in shit.

But something keeps me from really enjoying myself.

I felt so happy yesterday after coming down from the mountains.

I think that I have this neurotic feeling that, as an at-home-parent, I need to be at home. I can't be happily rolling around in the mountains, eating ramen and napping in meadows by beautiful streams while my wife slaves away at her librarian job. I need to stay at home and take care of the house, whatever that means, and try to write something that I can get paid for, (or maybe I should be working on becoming a doctor or a lawyer). Yesterday, I realized that in doing so, I was just keeping myself at the bottom of a great big pit. How can I create great anything if I assiduously avoid living the way my heart tells me? I can't just sit here every morning and force great writing out of me, but I've gotten into some guilt trip about reading, hiking, and bicycling. I hiked up Atalaya mountain at the edge of town a few weeks ago, but I was pounding out my frustration on the trail, and wearing my mountaineering boots, and hurrying because I had to get back down the mountain in time to get the kids, and I wore the two biggest holes in the back of my heels I've ever seen.

I've always wanted to be a bit like Zorba the Greek. So this morning, I had the bike all packed up with my notebooks and water, and I was going to head out as soon as the kids got off to school so I could get all the way up to the ski basin. (The weather here is gorgeous right now, with the temperature going up into the low 70's. Unseasonably warm, but gorgeous). I had my camera, I was going to take pictures and post a fun travelogue type of blog entry. I had my notebook, and maybe I was going to stop in my favorite coffee shop to write on the way back if I had the time.

But my son woke up shouting. Then Sadie came in and said, "there's something wrong with Zeb, he's standing in his room with his arms crossed, and he won't say anything but "get out of my room."

So I went back there with a kind, "what's wrong sweetheart."

He shouted at the top of his lungs, "I don't feel well, but if I tell you I don't feel well, you'll say that you just have to go to school anyway!"

After some more screaming on his part, I got him to say that it was his stomach that didn't feel well. I took his temperature, and the thermometer read 95.7. Anyone else out there find that digital thermometers just don't seem to work well? Anyway, to my eye, he wasn't sick. He's just never happy to wake up so early in the morning. And normally, yes, I would make him go to school, though he's getting to that age where he realizes that if he stands in one place and shouts, it's not really possible for me to pick him up and haul him to school.

He pretty much hates school this year. His kindergarten teacher made him the science coordinator and kept him busy running experiments and helping his classmates. His first grade teacher has him copying sentences like "Anorexic aardvarks advertise antacids" over and over again. And he's being tormented by some classmates -- not quite over the line into bullying it sounds, more like the type of behavior that would make some people roll their eyes and say "oh, you know how boys are" -- and the teacher tells him "no tattletales" when he complains.

I talked to his principal yesterday, and told her that I might pull him out and homeschool him for the rest of the year. She told me that they would test him for the gifted program and talk to the teacher about giving him more challenging work, and the school psychologist is going to try to resolve the tormenting. Basically, from what I can tell, his incredibly huge curiousity about the world is not being engaged. I'm still considering pulling him out for the spring. It would be easier on my planning if he wasn't getting "sick" on random mornings throughout the week, and I could finally resolve to do the whole boil-the-red-cabbage-down-to-make-a-ph-testing-liquid thing he's been asking me to do for a while.

I told him this morning that if he was sick, he would have to stay in bed. Now that I've blogged all my frustration out, maybe I'll stick him on the back of the Xtracycle and we'll go climb up one of the mountains near the city. At least I'll know, if he doesn't want to do that, that he really is sick, and I shouldn't be so angry, and if he's not sick, we'll have a good time.

One thing I will not do, however, is tell him, "you can't get ahead by trying."