Row, row, row your boat

Screaming down the stream

An intermittently truthful proclamation.

The problem with promising you that I was going to write Thinking Thursday pieces on Thursday is that I actually have to own up to my thinking on Thursdays.* I did not do this last week. I gave you the excuse that I was trying to finish an audiobook, which isn’t entirely untrue, but it’s also often that I just don’t want to unpack the bigger shit that’s going on.

This kind of writing, as I learned in the MFA, is like diving into an intense therapy session where you have to play the role of both counsellor and client.

“Hello, Self. What brings you in today?”

“Hi, Self. Life is hard.”

“No shit.”

I don’t know if you go to therapy, but if you do, you probably don’t go twice a week. Or even once.** All that to say, this stuff doesn’t just pour out of me like a gift from God. Every once in a while, sure, though usually at horribly inconvenient times like when I’m driving or in the shower. Most times, though, I have to drag it out, kicking and screaming and having it make all kinds of a fuss. Either that, or go in with a sack of hammers and beat it out of myself.

Today might be a bit of both.

I had coffee with a friend yesterday. We were talking about the chasm that can exist between the life you have before kids and the one you are dealt after.*** I’m sure a lot of people go into parenthood imagining how it will be. I don’t suspect anyone goes in thinking it’s going to be a walk in the park, but they might at least suspect they will have some control over the outcomes, provided they follow the teachings of whichever parenting guru they choose as their prophet.

The variable a lot of us fail to consider in these blue sky planning sessions is the unpredictable personality/health/quirks/drivers of the particular human you’re building in there. It’s like a 40-week (more or less) project where most of what’s happening is a secret even to you. And even after it comes out, you really won’t know what you’ve got for years to come. And then once you think you know what you’ve got and how to handle it, it’ll change. You are never the one who’s six moves ahead in this chess game. They are. And, until they are teenagers, they don’t even know they’re playing!

This was the crux of my coffee date conversation: the absurdity of hope. For her, the hope that, after the kids and family existence were established, she could go back to the things that made her HER. She could get back to rowing, put her degrees to good use, find her own path. Not once did her Choose Your Own Adventure mind-map lead her to believe she would be dedicating her entire existence to the well-being of a child with disabilities while also carving out pieces for her older child, her marriage, her friendships, her dogs. And good lord does she carve with her whole being. A more genuine hug, you will never receive.

What am I really getting at here?

<<pauses to think … and make coffee … and get the bag of hammers>>

Once again, I have a child in my house who should be at a camp but instead is in bed due to some kind of physical ailment which may actually be an emotional ailment but I actually have no fucking clue. Maybe it’s both. Junior High starts next week and there is a LOT riding on this. A LOT. A mountain’s worth of a lot. We are all trying to walk towards it with this blind optimism, hoping and praying that history shall not be our guide. But it’s a bit like putting a dog that likes to eat children into a daycare and hoping everything’s gonna work out fine. This time, things will be different.****

This isn’t just about him finding peace. Joy, even. It’s about all of us. It’s about me, and the selfishness of this realization is heavy. I don’t want to wake up and hope with my whole being that my child will say yes to life today. I just want to wake up and hope he puts on clean underwear. Is this what most of you hope for when you start a day with children? That they’ll come down for breakfast when called, or remember their jacket, or talk to you like you’re human? I honestly don’t know what’s normal. But maybe there’s no such thing.

Maybe we’re all on this same river, just rowing different boats. Maybe some of us periodically lose our oars. Or develop a leak. Or get turned in the wrong direction. And that’s when we wave frantically to another boat and say, “HEY! I need help over here!” Or, at least, that’s what we’re supposed to do. But because we’re all busy rowing our stupid boats, and we understand everyone else is desperately trying to do the same thing, we choose not to reach out. We know in our hearts, the plight of the other is just as hard as our own, so why would we make them row even harder just to keep us from sinking?

I don’t want to get all religious on you, but I was raised with a lot of God influences, so it tends to come out every once in a while. In this situation, I am for some reason reminded of the poem, “Footprints in the Sand,” about a man who dreams that life is like walking along a beach with God. Most times, there are two sets of footprints as they walk together, but during the most painful times—he sees only one. The man asks:

“Lord, when I needed you the most, why did you leave me?”
And you might know what God said back.
God says back, “those were the moments I carried you.”

We are not supposed to carry ourselves. I don’t think that’s the point who/whatever was trying to make when they launched this giant social experiment called humanity (can you imagine the funding request?)—to see how we’d all handle it alone. Maybe this is why they eventually invented coffee, not only to keep us awake, but to give us a reason to be together. For while we may not be compelled to ask each other for a bucket to bail out the boat, we’re certainly inclined to reach out over the promise of a flat white. If someone just happens to bring a boat-fixing kit along for the ride, all the better.

*Ideally, I would not actually do it on Thursday, but I only write on deadline so here we are.

**Kudos to you if you do. I’m already sick of myself here.

***Coffee dates with me are super fun!

****This is not me saying the child is akin to a rabid dog. It’s more an analogy about being an idiot.