Like a Living Room for Everyone

“Even though we’re stuck here, we’re having pretty much fun,” Clayton says. “It’s cozy.... Like a living room for everyone.”

We are in the Greenville airport, on our way to Florida for a trip to the Magic Kingdom. All week I have fretted about this flight, which was scheduled to depart after the kids’ bedtimes. What had I been thinking when I booked it? Now we are delayed for hours; we won’t get to Tampa until the middle of the night.

“The middle of the night?” Dee Dee asks. “Literally?”  It is her favorite new grown-up word. Yes, literally.

I have expected over-tired kids, grumpy and desperate for their beds. But everyone is amazingly cheerful. They tactfully ignore the make-shift pillows I construct out of jackets and stuffed animals.

“What would we be doing now?” they ask again and again, amazed that normally they could sleep so long.

A few families with babies are stranded with us, and I watch the moms with a mix of envy and relief. During my solo trips to Florida when the kids were small, I could feel the adrenaline pumping through me long before I arrived at the airport; I was in a state of combat the entire trip. In comparison, travelling now feels like a piece of cake. Still, I watch the babies peacefully asleep in their moby wraps and strollers and am wistful for the time when my babies could sleep anywhere, and when I was all they needed.

I am not really fooled by my own longing. I remember a hike through the Minneapolis airport with Clayton and Dee Dee in the double stroller and Sylvia in the Ergo. My feet ached and my back sweated and all my mental energy was fixed on willing my children to sleep. Now I sit with my mouth hanging open while Don and the kids take crazy pictures with his Ipad.

By the time we arrive in Florida, all three are asleep. I can’t stand to wake them, so I hoist the dead weight that is Dee Dee into my arms and lug her off the plane. Don has more sense. The other two walk through the airport half-asleep, then collapse at the baggage claim. The airport is deserted but for a few straggling passengers and the heap of bodies, backpacks, and booster seats that is our family.

The roads are deserted. We should make it to my parents’ house in record time, but a road closure forces us down a street I am sure I have never seen before. My eyes are blurry from too long in my contacts and I can’t read the street signs, but at last we arrive. It is almost two in the morning. Don and I carry the sleeping kids inside to their beds. As they stretch out into the horizontal comfort of their air mattresses, a tension inside me eases. They are still in their clothes and their teeth are unbrushed, but for the first time all night I don’t feel guilty: they are safe in their beds at last.

Relieved, I pick up my toothbrush. It is a few seconds before I realize that the paste I have squeezed from the small travel tube in my washbag is not toothpaste, but anti-itch cream. I spit frantically into the sink.

I confess that I have not been on board about this trip. There are all the reasonable reservations: the expense, the distance, the impossibility of avoiding the madding crowds. But some of it is mere snobbery. Are we really no different from the gazillion other American families that have no better sense than to spend huge amounts of time and money on a vacation so cliché?

It doesn’t even feel like a vacation. It feels rather like one more hurdle to leap in the steeplechase of affluent parenting. Homemade organic baby food? Check. Enroll the kids in swim lessons? Check. Trip to Disney World? Check.

That is, that’s how it has felt to me. Don and the kids are brimming with excitement. We have bought our tickets, chosen our fast passes. Sylvia wanted to meet Elsa and Anna, but even though we have made our selections almost a month before the trip, the only available times are in the middle of the night-- literally. She settles for Rapunzel and Cinderella, I nudge Dee Dee into choosing Peter Pan’s flight, and Clayton-- big surprise--picks the Haunted Mansion.

Because of my skepticism about the so-called vacation, I am well-poised to blame Don for the whole thing when the trip derails. As the plane bounces through turbulence at take-off, I am sure we are all going to be killed-- and whose fault will it be? As Dee Dee fusses and fidgets against me, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep, I absolve myself of guilt. This wasn’t my idea!

The thing is-- the trip never does derail. The plane doesn’t crash. Dee Dee eventually falls asleep. The next day the kids seem hardly the worse for wear after their late night and disjointed sleep. They have slept, on and off, for only eight hours-- and yet they survived! To me, with seven years of being obsessed with their sleep under my belt, it feels hardly short of miraculous. We spend a great day at my parents’ house, enjoying the Florida sunshine and the garden; Clayton even goes for a brief, frigid swim.

And yet all that pales on Sunday, when we finally arrive in the Magic Kingdom. Even in the parking lot, we are ecstatic. We are in Disney World! So are thousands of other people; together, we swarm towards the parking tram. It is impossible not to be caught up in the excitement. Each year, three times as many people visit Disney World as the Sistine Chapel or the Grand Canyon. There is something inexplicably exhilarating about being one of them. When the castle comes into view from the ferry we take across the lake, the children screech with excitement. I smile, a little sheepishly, at Don. We haven’t even entered the park and already I have been proven absolutely, utterly wrong.

We ride the rides, catch the end of a Mickey Mouse show, watch the parade. It is all so undeniably false, from the fake princesses to the fabricated Main Street. Much to Sylvia’s disappointment, you can’t actually go inside Cinderella Castle, and when we see Rapunzel’s tower I can’t help thinking of Camelot in Monty Python’s The Search for the Holy Grail and muttering, “It’s only a model.”

But somehow, it doesn’t matter. It’s expensive and it’s fake and I still don’t think that a trip to Disney World should be some kind of mandated right of passage. But it is magical nonetheless. When Merinda from Brave smiles and waves right at me from aboard her extravagant float, I can’t help choking up a little. Riding Thunder Mountain Railroad with Dee Dee and Sylvia beside me, I can clearly remember riding it (my first roller coaster ever) with my mom when I was little-- my mom who never rode roller coasters. And gazing down at the London lights from our Peter Pan pirate ship, I can almost feel my grandmother’s presence beside me.

Our trip home goes no smoother than the one there. We are stuck in the St. Petersburg airport for over six hours. But the other travelers are familiar faces from the flight down, and soon enough they’re friends.

“They’ll be calling me Uncle Keith by the time we leave,” a neighbor jokes.

The airline orders pizza and gives away free drinks. The girls watch a Tinker Bell movie, their new Disney fairy souvenirs in hand. The kids listen to books, brush their teeth in the airport bathroom, and obediently try--and fail--to go to sleep in the nest I make for them underneath our seats. Sylvia watches a newborn baby for hours-- literally-- and Clayton entertains our new friends with his self-taught Irish dance techniques.

“This is as much fun as Disney World,” Clayton tells me seriously.

I gape at him. “Really?”

“Well, almost.”

You're Gonna Miss This

“You’re gonna miss this. You’re gonna want this back. You’re gonna wish these days hadn’t gone by so fast,” the voice on the radio croons. I look around on the floorboard of the passenger seat for the crushed box of Kleenex that usually floats around down there, but it is nowhere in sight.

“Clayton, is there a box of Kleenex back there?” I say, my voice cracking.

He pulls his hand in from the open window, pausing whatever game he was playing with his fingers in the wind.

“Mom, why are you crying?”

“Just this song,” I manage.

“But why are you crying?” he persists, laughing at me a little.

“Because you kids are growing up so fast. Because life just passes you by...” I choke out one cliche after another. “Because,” I manage finally. “Because I really enjoyed doing this with you. Having this time together.”

We are listening to Kiss Country because Clayton has asked for music, and almost every other station came in buzzing with static or not at all. And also because country music just seems right, since we are rattling down a potholed road, with the windows down and the trees flashing by.

We are driving home after Clayton’s first overnight backpacking trip. I wanted to take him last year, but somehow the summer passed us by. And as this year’s summer days dwindled, I was determined to make it happen, even if it meant squeezing it in between my Tuesday morning class and my Wednesday evening one.

Really, the timing is perfect; the woods couldn’t feel emptier. With three people a day moving to the Asheville area, most of whom share an enthusiasm for the natural world, this in itself is something to appreciate. I have pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road, not willing to risk getting us stuck in the large puddle that has formed at the entry to the small parking area. I have not backpacked since the kids were born, and already I can tell that my risk threshold has plummeted. I used to spend night after night alone in the wilderness, never once contemplating danger of any kind. Now, with Clayton in my care, worries whittle away at my brain. What if he has an allergic reaction to iodine? What if he falls off a log and breaks his leg and I have to carry him out? What if the backpacking stove explodes and I get hideously burned and he is scared?

But the empty parking area is comforting in its way; at least I can rule out the worrying scenarios involving other humans. And Clayton’s excitement is contagious.

“Are we backpacking?” he asks as soon as we pull on our packs.

“Yes!”

The weight on my hips feels wonderfully familiar. Clayton’s Spiderman backpack bobs along in front of me. His backpack holds the following: a change of clothes; his robot pajamas; a stuffed dragon with an LED flashlight in its belly; a few plastic zombies; a mystery novel; his favorite stuffed animal, Pooh Bear; a mini Where’s Waldo book; and a small waterbottle.

I have already jettisoned from his load his treasured purple blanket, a pillow pet, three hardcover picture books, and a couple of other stuffed animals.

“Dee Dee gave me her cat,” he tells me now as we walk along. “So tonight I can hold it and remember her.”

I hesitate before admitting that I have taken it out. “I”m sorry. I didn’t want your pack to be too heavy,” I apologize.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I put it back in.”

It rained heavily as we drove in, despite the dry spell that has left much of the county thirsty for a summer storm. But blue sky is peeking through the trees as we start out, and I am relieved to have missed the storm. Still, the woods drip with moisture.

“I guess they don’t call this a rainforest for nothing,” I say.

“Is it really?” he asks. 

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Where are the monkeys?”

“It’s not that kind of rainforest.”
“Is this a wetland?”

I laugh. “No. Although it is wet.”

“Aw. I want it to be a wetland.” Clayton is taken with anything Floridian. He likes the wetlands, and the palm trees, and of course his Baba and Mimi. He’s going to move there when he’s big, he says.

The woods seem particularly misty and magical this afternoon. Wisps of steam rise from the trunks of trees and fallen logs, and the ferns along the sides of the trail are a vibrant green. Clayton looks around appreciatively.

“I think leprechauns must live here,” he says. “Don’t you think?”

It feels like a gift to experience the woods as he does, their mystery and magic so intact. I have forgotten that I used to see the forest like that, too, imagining each secret hollow as the home of some enchanted creature. It is another cliche, I know, but it is one of the joys of having children, to be reminded of that.

Clayton hardly stops talking as we hike. He tells me about the Goosebumps book he is reading with his dad, and of the Goosebumps book he wants to write when we get back. He is disappointed that we haven’t brought along any paper, or we could begin work on it tonight.

“I go backpacking with my stuffed animals,” he tells me after a while.

“Pooh is in your backpack right now,” I say, misunderstanding. “So he’s backpacking, too.”
No, he explains, that’s not what he meant. He tells me how he takes his stuffed animals backpacking, feeding them blueberries and grapes from the plants in the garden, making them little beds in the grass when they are tired. It is so sweet my throat aches.

“Is the backpacking I do with my stuffed animals just pretend?” he asks after a pause, sounding worried.

“No!” I say, sounding more vehement than I meant to.

“Why did you say it like that?” he wants to know.

“Like what?”

“So seriously.”

“Because it isn’t. It’s just another kind of backpacking.”

When we come to the first stream we must cross, I am all nerves.

“Careful! The rocks are slippery! Hold my hand!” But he springs from rock to rock effortlessly.

The next creek is bigger. There’s a two-log bridge, but the railing has fallen off and the logs look treacherously slick. We cross on the rocks, instead.

“Wow,” I say, watching him bound across. “You’re really good at that!”

He regards me seriously. “It’s easy, Mom,” he says, bending down to point the rocks out to me. “Just put your foot there, then there...”

After a while, he starts to get tired, so I take the water bottle from his pack and carry it for him. Then we stop for a snack.

“I sort of wish I was a poor person,” he says seriously, picking the cereal pieces out of a bag of trail mix. We talk about that for a while. I try to explain what poverty really means.

“I mean,” he explains. “I just like this.”

He means the simplicity of it, and I nod, understanding. There is something so refreshing about the lack of things. Everything we need is on our backs, even Where’s Waldo and a handful of zombie toys.

Clayton is very concerned with the semantics of things. When, at last, we stop to set up camp, he is worried.

“Is this a campsite?” he asks. “I thought when you were backpacking, you didn’t stay in a campsite.”

The spot is perfect. It’s an open area off the trail and next to a creek, with a little gravelly beach. Just upstream, the water deepens under a tunnel of mountain laurel. But we are clearly not the only people to have stayed here. A fallen log has been rolled in for a bench, and there’s a small fire circle.

“It’s not a campsite,” I say carefully. “It’s just a place to camp.”

A few minutes later, coming back from refilling my bottle in the creek, I gush, “This is such a great campsite!”

“You said campsite!” he says, catching me out. “Is this a campsite?”

We have some version of the same conversation at least another five times. Finally, I lose my patience. 
“Should we take down the tent and go somewhere else?” I say.

“I want to stay here,” he admits. “I just don’t want it to be a campsite.”

We wade up the creek together, and Clayton swims briefly in the “swimming hole.” But the evening is not warm, and the water under the mountain laurel is cold and very black.

“Are there snakes in here?” he asks.

“Oh no,” I say, although I am relieved when he gets out.

We find a perfect leprechaun home under a tree, and again he laments the lack of paper. He would have written him a note.

The forest feels cool and damp, and Clayton huddles in the camp chair, eating his broccoli and quesadilla.

“Can we make a fire?” he asks.

I am dubious. There is plenty of firewood, but every stick is sopping wet. I have one small piece of fire starter. But my Girl Scout training has stood me well; I wasn’t the best firebuilder in three states for nothing. 

“Were you really?” Clayton asks me, impressed.

“Well, I won a fire-building competition at a tri-state encampment once.” 

Miraculously, I coax the fire to life. It is small and steamy; I teach Clayton how to blow into it from down low, and together we nurse it, feeding it tiny wet twigs until it is big enough for s’mores. Clayton eats three, farts, and announces, “I have to poop.”

We head off into the forest, shovel in hand. I had been relatively sure this would not happen; surely he would wait for the conveniences of home.

When I judge we’ve gone far enough, I start to dig a hole for him.

“I’m going to poop in a hole?” he asks. He is enthralled, joyous. “This is so fun!”

Only this afternoon he has complained about pooping: “I just want to get out of the bathroom and I have to keep wiping!”

Here, there is no bathroom caging us in, only the gorgeous green woods all around us, no other human being for miles.

A memory washes over me. I am camping by a river in northern California. It is my day off from the camp where I worked for a few summers, and I am alone. I remember scrambling up the steep hillsides, trying to get the requisite distance from the water. It is exhilarating. To be so young, yet to feel so grown-up and alone, with life reduced to such a wondrous simplicity. I’m sure I wrote a poem about it once.

“I’ve always liked pooping outside, too,” I say. We are both grinning.

“I hope I have to poop again!”

Afterwards, we return to our game of war, both groaning at how endless it is. Finally, we give up and switch to Crazy Eights.

The first card on the discard pile is a Jack. “Now, you have to put a jack,” I explain. “Or an eight.”

He discards a jack, and, with no jack of my own, I start to draw cards.

“I don’t think this is right,” he says. “Like this it would just be jack, jack, jack...”

We are both laughing. Finally I remember how to play. I can’t remember the last time I played cards. Don is so much better at this part of parenting. He is always playing games with them: Candy Land, Spider Eights, Don’t Break the Ice. He has even taught Clayton how to play chess. It’s difficult for me to be so focused on the kids, unless we are reading or out of the house. Too often, it is “Just let me finish this, and I’ll...” But there is always something else to do. Now, with our small bag of food dangling from a tree and our teeth already brushed, there is nothing else to do. It is a wonderful feeling just to sit and play cards with my son.

The light is dimming, and we tell ghost stories with Clayton’s dragon flashlight shining up from our chins. When my story ends, I ask him if he has another. He has bragged to his sisters that he’s going to stay up really late, and I have resolved not to enforce a bedtime tonight.

“Actually, I’m sort of tired,” he says.

We climb into our sleeping bags, and I make Clayton a pillow out of his clothes.

“You do strange things when you’re backpacking,” he says. “You poop in holes, you use dirt for soap, you make pillows out of clothes.”

I tell him a story about Dee Dee, how last night she was crying from her bed that her pillow wasn’t fluffy. So Don fluffed it up and turned it over, and she said, “Ahhh, as fluffy as a mouse’s bottom!”

When we finally stop giggling, we read a little of A Spy in the White House. But we are both tired, and it is ridiculously cozy inside that tent.

As we hike out the next day, we leave the trail to clamber down to a swimming hole at the base of a waterfall. It is cool, and we have not yet shaken the chill of the morning. But Clayton swims all the same. Like his Dad, he has his mental checklist: tell ghost stories with a flashlight shining on our faces, check. Roast marshmallows, check. Swim in the creek, check.

Afterwards, he is daunted by the steep climb back up to the trail.

“Just grab this tree,” I tell him. “It’s like a jungle gym. And you’re an ape.”

“I’m an ape!” he says, as if suddenly remembering, and in another second he is up.

“Climb up a cliff, check,” he says.

The best part is how Clayton points things out to me as we hike.

“Mom, look over there!” he says again and again, pointing to a particularly lovely spot of woods or stretch of creek. As I look at whatever he has seen, I am overcome with gratitude. He is like my personal coach for mindfulness.

“Pooh’s from this forest,” he tells me, seriously. “I’ll show you his house when we get to it.”

And soon enough, there it is, a little patch of grass on the side of the trail, with a tiny little log for a bench and a miniature sapling for a tree. Clayton sets him down in it for a moment, and then makes him walk along the trail.

“Look, Mom! Pooh’s hiking!” he says.

Maybe it is because Clayton seems so big now that this tugs at my heart the way it does. He is just so unself-conscious in his love for his little boy things, so serious in his understanding that they live in a world of their own, a world he has the privilege of taking part in. It is so sweet it makes my heart ache.

And so, I am well primed for You’re Gonna Miss This as we drive the gravel road towards home.

“Mom, why are you crying?” he asks again, grinning at me.

“Because I’m nuts,” I say, laughing at myself, too. But still, I think he understands.