But all this mental space occupied by parched grass and lush grass and yards (specifically the contrast between mine and my neighbors, who have managed to find the time to hack their wild turf into submission) has of course had me thinking about the Proximal Graminoid Axiom (“the grass is always greener on the other side”) although truth be told I subscribe much more devoutly to the Graminoid Corollary (“the grass is pretty goddamn brown pretty much everywhere”). Which extends well beyond the literal pastures, as we all know.
Yesterday was a blur (a metaphor I’m probably guilty of overusing, but if the lack of focus fits and so on) but it did occur to me that a large part of that was due to the particular stage of parenthood my wife and I find ourselves in, the daycare stage. I neither came to this realization nor bring it up now as a complaint, exactly, I’m just stating the goddamn brownness of the grass as a fact. I get up way earlier than my innate biorhythms would normally dictate, so that I can get to work early, so that I can leave work early, so that I can get to daycare to pick up my boy. And every moment from then on is some combination of supervision to keep him out of the nigh-infinite amounts of trouble he is capable of finding, and checking off the long list of things to do in the relatively small window of time before he has to go to bed (dinner, bath, diaper/pajamas, bedtime snack, bedtime story, lullaby/tuck in), followed by a limnal period in which he may or may not actually fall asleep in bed (if not a second lullaby/tuck in may be required), followed finally by a couple of hours that do not revolve around child care, unless we count the looming consideration that going to bed earlier rather than later is a good idea because the whole things starts again in the all-too-soon-to-come morning.
Maybe I can’t quite get away with saying that’s not me complaining, because it certainly sounds like complaining, but at the very least I will say that these are complaints that I am happy enough to have. The Graminoid Corollary is not a philosophy of misery in which everything sucks, it’s just a realistic assessment of the fact that every situation, even awesome dream-come-true situations, have their drawbacks, or challenges, or whatever not-complaining-but-really-yeah-I-am-such-is-the-human-condition term you’d care to put on it. Which in turn makes it kind of pointless to wish away what you’ve got, because what would you replace it with? Any other thing would have its own crunchy beige herbaceous carpet underfoot.
But still, the blur-days like yesterday make me wonder. We recently started having our house cleaned every two weeks, and on those days my wife takes our two dogs to work with her because we’re not about to subject the cleaning crew to our personal-boundary-oblivious mutts. The problem is that the dogs give loud voice to their displeasure at being cooped up in the vet clinic all day, and its best for the sanity of all parties, two- and four-legged, if I pick the dogs up after work on my way home rather than forcing them to stay the additional hours of my wife’s regular shift. None of this makes for a bad or even unreasonable plan, but I have to contend with the usual challenges in making it to daycare on time first, and then I can make the cross-town jaunt to my wife’s clinic (which sometimes can be fraught with rush hour headaches which are exacerbated by a back-seat toddler) and retrieve the beasts, and then it’s back home again although as often as not getting the little guy back in the car seat a second time so soon after one ride is a real slobberknocker. (I used to mentally picture an opponent in the mold of the classic St. Michael icon whenever someone evoked the Bible story of Jacob wrestling an angel, but now that I’m a dad, wrestling an angel totally means a fat little winged baby cherub, because MAN that is tough.) And by the time we all get home it’s later than usual which means the whole pre-bedtime run-through has to go double-time. Yes and yes and oh yes, I love having a son and having dogs and having the luxury of housecleaners, but there is a component I can complain about.
Obviously I wouldn’t trade it for not having any of the above, but I do find myself occasionally entertaining the thought of trading it for having an older, school-age child instead of a day care child. I actually have a line on that very exchange, in fact it’s pretty much a sure thing in about ten more years. I’m not so myopic as to think that there won’t be brown grass next decade, too. Right now I have no choice but constant hands-on parenting, which only morphs into a choice between constant over-parenting with a kind of grim (and misplaced) certainty that nothing is going to burst the bubble or some frequency of letting the kid take care of himself and all the attendant (also likely misplaced) neurotic flipping out while envisioning what he might be exposed to when out of my sight.
What I hope, when I think about it, is not so much that I’ll find the magical field where all the grass is green as green can be. I just hope that I can find the place where the brown grass is the kind of brown that I mind the least, maybe that really isn’t so bad at all. I honestly imagine that letting my son get himself to and from school and have his own life after school, while I have my own schedule again, will be pretty nice, even with all the worried uncertainty that comes along with all the attendant growing-up complications. Compared to the daycare stage, I think I might like it better, not that I’ll find it perfect, just preferable in certain days (and of course I make no claim whatsoever that I’ll be immune to the nostalgic sighs of remembering when the little guy was really little). The question is whether or not I’ll still think that when it comes to pass. But that’s the thing about tricks of perspective – it looks one way from way over here, and another way when you get right up there.
Be prepared: School-aged boys tend to play soccer, baseball, war, etc in the yard, making brown grass look good. My parents-of-boys used to say "We're raising kids, not grass."
ReplyDelete