Becoming a Weirder Parent On Purpose
a letter in which I hype myself up to do this
This morning in the car my older kid told me he wasn’t eating his goat cheese because kids were saying it looked gross in his lunch. We had a conversation about how most interesting and beautiful things in the world come from people being brave enough to like something that someone else doesn’t like. The interesting things come from people letting themselves be weird. For example, Iggy Pop, I said. (I don’t know enough about Iggy Pop to know if he is weird, tbh. But that example came to me because my kid loves him.) He smiled and he seemed to be buoyed by it. We’ll see if he eats the goat cheese.
We need to be weird, I need to be weird because it feels like our lives depend on it?! Like not being weird enough is why our planet is dying??? It feels like when I remember I can be weird (and maybe get to be / should be?), a lot of space for new creativity opens up.
I was noticing my tendency to feel more afraid of being weird in this time than I used to, which is probably a combination of many things, including (as my wise therapist pointed out) I spend a lot more time engaging with adults I probably wouldn’t otherwise, as necessitated by my kids.
Things that don’t seem weird to me at all, (in fact I feel I might be at my most tame outward expression phase of my life?), appear weird in some of my contexts lately. Like for example just having people over and not having any planned activities? Or inviting people to the beach or the park and not going to a playground (we go there sometimes too) but just going to be outside together? Or thinking that the teen coaches yelling instructions to 6 year olds that they do not understand, does not count as adequate soccer coaching. Or prioritizing not doing too much, not rushing from one activity to the next. Or refusing to ride the intoxicating wave of bay-area-hubris-induced fear that my kid will be “behind” on anything he doesn’t start at 4 years old. (I don’t always refuse to ride it. But I try to step off when I notice I’m on it.)
I also feel a confinement in the social experience of hanging out with other parents. Again I am sure it is a combination of so many factors but I feel this sense that so much of life is off limits to discuss when I’m hanging with other parents while we’re with our kids, or even if our kids are off playing. To me the most interesting, alive things to talk about are the vulnerable parts and or the questions, and it feels like there’s just not space for it, or it would be intrusive or inappropriate to bring up these topics, or something. I have access to these conversations in other places, but it’s dissatisfying because a lot of my social time in this season is with other parents. (I want to be weirder / riskier / bolder here.)
I don’t talk about these experiences as much as I have them, because I’ve been in an evolution with my relationship to feeling like an outsider. There’s a compelling kind of suffering to loneliness, and sometimes we (I) put myself there as a twisted kind of comfort? In the way that our psychological habits / dysfunctions can feel comforting. So I am skeptical of the sensations of loneliness in myself. I try to honor it, but not live there too long, because a big truth for me is the fellowship of humanness, as in we are so similar, and if I’m spending too much time in difference, I’m probably in some exceptionalism delusion.
AND! I’m speaking to these parenting isolations to commune with you about them, as in maybe you experience them too? Or your own version, without even being a parent? And maybe it feels good to name them? I don’t say as much about the things that I think are fucked up or wack lately because I especially don’t want to implicate parents in some way that’s not generous enough. We need to be more generous with each other: I also feel this strongly.
All the things at once. So.
I’m not cool with the low standards we have for the care of our children - like this soccer league coaching is wack. It’s completely disconnected from any beneficial point of participating in a team sport. I re-experience this heartbreak around how uninspiring so many things that are offered for children are, as my kids get older and I drop into these different worlds for kids. It shouldn’t be surprising because so many of the worlds for adults are at best uninspiring! But it still feels especially painful to introduce my kids to worlds and be like, oh yeah, you have to figure out how to deal with this shitty vibe too. And that is a value for me - to support my kids in dealing with shitty vibes - nurturing their confidence that they can do so. But still sometimes I want the vibes to not be shitty. I want the vibes to be like, wow, this is magic. This is building the world we want.
Sometimes I feel like we’re all just fucking blacked out. Like is everyone just cool with this?! Like is everyone cool with paying money to drive across town on Sunday morning to watch our kids run around on micro-plastics and get yelled at by hung over, over-worked 20-year-olds and/or avoid silences by looking at our phones, and then receive an email from the president of the soccer company (?) non profit (?) start up (?) (hahahaha feels like it), telling us what drills to get our kids to practice at home? I’m not cool with it.
I’m not cool with how it feels to like to be a part of modern (USA / bay area / parenting) society one has to frantically run around from activity to activity avoiding… everything? Ourselves? I’m not sure what. Who even knows what we’re avoiding anymore.
I’m not cool with, in fact I am still devastated by seeing 2 year olds on screens in a restaurant. Please please know that I am not trying to shame parents for this. A million factors contribute to this which have everything to do with corporate power and so little to do with personal lifestyle choices. But I want to say I am not cool with our confusion that there is a lack of miracles of organizing and care in a room with other people making food and bringing it to us, or talking to each other, or looking at all of the forces of physics and life to look at in a restaurant.
I want to say I’m not cool with it because it feels important to say everyone deserves better. Our kids deserve better. And maybe to name that it’s shit is a way of being weirder and a way of being weirder is toward including more creativity about how we view our lives. To name that it’s shit is a first step toward imagining how it might be instead.
For example, I dream of a soccer program where the coaches coach from an understanding of the beneficial purposes of team sports - fun, embodiment, learning a new skill, the existential joy of practicing something and seeing your own improvement, expanding one’s awareness to other people on the field, learning how to work together with others toward a common goal. That coaching might look like: learning the kids’ names. It might look like explaining the vocabulary of soccer more than once to people learning it for the first time. It might look like smiling at the kids. It might look like breaking the game down into smaller steps. It might look like working with smaller groups, especially at first. It might look like choosing different words if you yell something to a kid five times and they don’t move. It might look like less yelling. It might look like trying to do less in one hour.
Or for another example, I dream of a restaurant situation / society in which there is more tolerance for children, so that parents don’t feel like the only acceptable behavior for their kids is to screen out. (In fact I experienced this very dream in real life in Michigan at That Early Bird. There is a small corner with books and toys for kids, for when they need to get up, which is usually sooner in the meal than adults.) I dream of a society in which childcare is more accessible so that adults can go out to eat in an adult vibe restaurant without their kids if they need to. Or maybe a society in which people could work less, and/or a culture in which hanging out at each other’s houses without having to produce or pay for an activity or clean up was more common, so that if kids couldn’t sit still in a restaurant, adults could still be with their friends and share meals.
I’m not even dreaming big enough, or weirdly enough here, I feel. But being more willing to dream of things at all feels like another step on my path to more weirdness aka less planet dying.
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Another one of the ways I’m trying to act on my aspiration to be weirder (or less self-conscious about my “weirdness”) is in my practice of less avoiding in general. My own habits of avoiding are very large and old and less avoiding is a tenet of my personal codependency recovery. When I stop avoiding and turn toward whatever it is - usually just an emotion which exists in the gamut of human emotions - I almost always find relief. Even when what I also find is pain. Usually I also find - there wasn’t as much to avoid as I thought. The avoiding is a low grade anxiety that is kind of smoke and mirrors. And the longer I avoid, the bigger the necessity of avoidance feels… it’s the wizard of oz over and over - the loudness of the scary voice and then you look behind the curtain and it’s just a person! When I put down avoiding, a new world opens up. In that world, less compulsions arise, and more space to consider what is actually happening, and more delight arises. More acceptance. More appreciation.
I’m very cool with how my kid’s friend stayed with him during the soccer practice, telling him what words meant, staying by his side. I’m very cool with how I learned about one of the soccer dad’s years in Cambodia. I’m very cool with the soccer mom who offered bb jr a juice box. I’m delighted and devastated by everything all the time. Can we speak this to each other more, be weirder together? That is what I want. I want to be weirder with you.
