Cabin Fever

on snow days, being annoyed, and some currents

It's early morning as I sit down to write and we have snow on the ground. This is likely the only significant snowfall we will get this year, and its arrival has shut everything down, even causing major water issues in the city of Richmond. It’s not that much snow, but when you’re in an area that's not used to it, infrastructure is quick to collapse under the abnormal strains.

No sooner did the snow start falling on Sunday, did it become a slush ice mess; weighing down trees, threatening branches to snap on houses or power lines. But .. also quite beautiful, like a little bit of the magic of Christmas extended into the New Year.

The kids, especially the boys who are old enough to really enjoy it, have been in heaven. They want to stay up to watch the snow falling. They want to play outside all day even as they struggle to make much more than a slush snowman and ice ball to throw. They got not one, but five days off of school.

Attempts at snow angels …

I struggle when our routines get shifted. We’re all cooped up inside for a large part. I want to take the kids out, to be able to expend their energy, keep them from being too destructive. My dictum of the “value of kids being bored” comes into direct contradiction with my boys constantly fighting each other and it seems like, quite literally, trying to kill each other (or killing their little sister). OR taking it out on the house like when my son just yesterday tore a curtain rod out of the wall.

I’m a little annoyed. I don’t want to admit that.

Yes, I’m enjoying things and I’m also a little bit irritable.

What I struggle with often is that balance between “being the moment with your kids, yay” and also just, you know, day to day life. I think it's why I try to do short day trips with the kids as often as I can. When I’m at home, all I see is a never ending list of things to do, projects I need to get to or at least do part of. The never ending shit to do when you buy an older home. Yeah, I’ll do things with my kids but there is also … all of the other stuff waiting for me. And the last few days have been this to the extra degree, at home with not much else to do than channel the energies of the kids and feel bad about a list.

For some reason, I looked to age four with the boys as when things would even out and become a little bit easier. But instead, I find that the difficulty setting has been amped up in the last year or so and I’m actually nostalgic for ages 2 - 3 when they were smaller and easier to corral. Now it feels like I have these two wild animals whose energies feed off each other like a never ending source of power. I am out of my depth.

Writing is an anchor. A to do list is also one. These tangible things that I have to keep my days making sense in some way.

But writing about any sort of difficulty, or god forbid annoyance with kids, always makes me feel iffy. I think about my kids reading my writing when they get older with their mother describing how annoyed she is with them and I cringe. I struggle always with how much to write about my kids and how much to keep private about their lives. It's their lives and worlds, but it is also my world and experiences too and I haven’t found that balance yet. I struggle with giving in too much with the feelings of annoyance. I think about that balance between rumination and also not overlooking the loveliness each day and I don’t quite know where I fall.

So here is where I’m at with the lovely:

Watching my kids watch the snow fall at night, them running around in the freshly fallen snow, getting all snuggled up, my kids all wet and cold coming inside, my boys convincing me to sleep downstairs in my room for this week because the logic of snow = have to sleep in mom’s room applies, somehow. It's beautiful outside.

And to the other side:

My son pulling out the curtain rod on the front window after it seems like, trying to literally hang his full body weight on it. The small and big ways they have picked apart at the house can feel like it is a direct F you to me and any work I’ve done decorating or fixing things. i can't help but feel that way even if I know that it's wild to think that 5 years old have some sort of vendetta against my decorating (or shoot, maybe they’re trying to tell me something about my choices … ). Telling my boys for the millionth time to stop trying to kill each other or for that matter, to stop trying to body slam their baby sister.

Whenever I log onto instagram or some other social media and my algorithm starts feeding me the “mom” content I get stressed out. All by design! On one hand you’ll have the videos - complaining about every little thing, complaining about unfair labor in the home (god forbid a direct conversation there btw), or your kids, or the world being shit to kids. Then on the other hand - the don’t complain about anything ever variety. A complaint about kids is a reflection of your failings, you should be okay and happy to be composed entirely of responding to need, to sacrifice etc etc.

Is it a moral failing to sometimes find your kids annoying? Is it bad to say that parenthood can be difficult and you don’t enjoy every moment?

I’m a moral moderate on a lot of things because I feel like if there is a strong push, a strong resonance (with almost anything) then there is a bit of truth there, even if I don’t agree with it completely. I agree with both sides of the equation, simultaneously and contradictory. Yes, it's all hard and there's a lot that’s challenging and can even suck. Yes, maybe we shouldn’t live in feel sorry mode for ever. Maybe we should keep things in perspective.

With any other relationship the world gives space to ambiguity. You are annoyed at your friends at times and you also love them, these things that live together. We don’t extend that ambiguity with children so much. And it is different; children don’t have a voice in the same way as an adult, they don’t have the same rights and they are vulnerable by virtue of being children.

But also if you choose to have kids, do you even have a right to complain about it? I’m thinking of some of the more weirdly anti-kid, anti-natalist stuff you see floating around in the pits of the internet and I wish I could say I’d never encountered it “in real life” but I most definitely have in the real world as well. Any sort of larger fertility crisis conversation aside, it's kind of funny to me that our modern times has cooked this up. People have had kids when our survival was iffy at best - in famines and war and constant threats that made survival beyond tomorrow not guaranteed - and still people were out there loving and having sex and reproducing. All to reach now and our god forsaken discourses about children.

Kids are the dumping ground for much of our anxieties about well, everything. The changing world, politics, our own perceived failings, our own literal anxieties about other shit in our lives, our feelings about our own childhoods. We can fix the world's problems through how we parent, through The Children. Revolutionary home schooling or unschooling, living off the grid, being a tiger mom and push, push, pushing so your kids get into a good school and achieve better class status. Kids to solve problems interpersonally and worldly. Have kids because of the fertility crisis, don’t have kids because the planet is dying. Kids as the gateway to fix some sort of childhood trauma from your own life. My kids will achieve what I couldn’t in my life. Kids as saviors, kids as the locus of your thinly disguised self-hate anti natalist views. Kids are a perfect target precisely for their vulnerability and inherent lack of agency. They aren’t there to contradict you. And its kids' vulnerability which makes them targets in families for being annoyed or whatever bigger frustration the parents might have.

Most of the time when I read about some big and important new way we must raise the children which somehow connects to some bigger political issue, I find it exhausting. Why does it have to mean everything? Why does every act have to be some statement and the most. important. thing.

Everything is important, so nothing is important.

So I'm left in the middle of the maelstrom. I think my sons can annoy me because we’re around each other all the time and they have quite literally the genetic code to push my buttons in the exact correct and devilish ways. I think I’m annoyed in general too, a big part is that. I don’t think it's a moral failing if your kids annoy you or to talk about the more difficult parts of parenting; I don’t think life is made of all good and no struggle; often the most meaningful things are the things that are difficult and have grit. Not all of value in this world is what feels good all of the time.

But .. I'm not gonna worry about it too much. It's not that serious and it's all serious. I don’t have an answer or a resolution. It is what it is but also why do my sons have so much energy???

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Currents

Reading: The Fisherman by John Langan. I love this book. Its a horror novel, of the folk horror variety which is my favorite, and I just finished it. Its about two widowers who go fishing together and find a new spot and come in contact with a mysterious figure called “the fisherman.” I don’t want to say too much because it's pretty wild and good; worth the read if horror and fantastical is your thing. I don’t know that I’ve ever read so much about fishing. I don’t have a reading goal this year other than just - reach for a book more often. Try to have the scales be reading > writing.

Watching - The Danish National Symphony - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Screen time with kids doesn’t count if it's music, right? Or that's my logic and god knows if that makes sense. This is one that we’ve been watching and loving recently. I’m fascinated with how they make all the different sounds with this.

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until next time,

Morgan