Remapping Desire Lines

  

I wrote to a friend recently that, after having kids, we allow someone else to take our outward-facing position on the world. 

At the time I wrote this, I was just thinking of a way to explain to my friend, who has no kids, who is traveling the world working on his PhD dissertation, what my world is like these days. I should also mention that he and I met while working with a traveling acting troupe in Argentina and I’ve only seen him once, and very briefly, since those halcyon days which, it would seem, he is still living. I was also trying to be succinct given that I was working on a hand-written letter, and I knew if I didn’t finish it soon, I’d never get it in the mail. 

But the phrase keeps coming back to me, keeps demanding that I consider what it means: “our kids become the part of ourselves that faces the world”. 

When I was young, I sought out new experiences from an early age, not because I was adventurous, but because I was never comfortable in a routine. In kindergarten, I was fine independently playing, but I would cry when I was asked to do something specific, no matter how fun. There was something about having to do something, the request, which is actually a command. I didn’t like the necessity of it. 

Which is not to say I was a brat who answered every request with a grating “no!”. I was almost the opposite, a gentle kid (I think) fairly lost in lala land. When my mom asked me to come in for dinner, or get ready for a bath, I assented, usually. 

But at school, I had trouble with the mundane tasks I was asked to do. I had trouble getting started with them, and once started, unless I could find some personal reason for completing them, I had trouble staying on task. However, this was in the early years of school and there were kids with worse attention problems than mine. I was also a decent reader (living in a house where books were more prominently placed that the TV), so my lack of attention was balanced by my ability to score well on standardized tests, and my teachers left me alone.

However, once I discovered that I could get out of my seat and go talk to other people, my relationship with my teachers became more antagonistic. They wanted me to get back in my seat, and I responded with calling their bluff on the value of the work we were doing. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I spent a lot of energy on what could’ve been put toward trying to learn on basically being a jerk in class because I couldn’t find any personal value in the work we were doing.

It was just me. I had some lousy teachers, too. People who saw nothing but the problem in me and focused their energy (which could’ve been spent thinking of new ways to present stale material) on punishment. Detentions, notes sent home, and red marks indicating disappointment on my papers became the basis of my academic experience. This was balanced with my creativity if play both with friends at recess and when at home—when I wasn’t sulking in my room after bringing home another bad report.  

When I got older, and the world began to open, I rushed at any opportunity to explore it. I was still pretty young when I circumnavigated the busy road I lived on by bushwacking through the woods that surrounded our suburban neighborhood to get to the nearest shopping center. I was amazed at finding myself in the real world alone. I was free to roam through the grocery store, the video rental store and even the parking lot; there was no timeline, no need to get into a car and rush off to the next place. 

I walked through every aisle of the once-mundane grocery store, feeling like each product, each box on the shelves had been remade. The lines painted in the parking lot, the jangle of the bells on the door of the video store, the warmth of the sun. Getting there on my own, the world was transformed from background to opportunity, and it fairly radiated with possibility. 

As I got older, I began to push hard on the parent- and school-imposed limits of my world. I stopped bothering to go surreptitiously through the woods and just biked down the busy road with no shoulder to get to the shopping center. I went against traffic figuring that way I could at least see the car before it hit me. Eventually, my friend Eric and I began to ride to the malls and downtown, which was relatively empty following the economic depression of America’s Rust Belt of the 1980s and early 1990s and very fun to explore. These places amazed me with the wealth of experience they offered and at that point in my life—probably about 13—I became enamored with “place”.

If you know me, and even if you don’t, you know what’s coming, by 19 or 20, I was frequently bouncing between Chicago, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh. Even without a car, I found ways to go to new places, and when I got there, my favorite thing to do was walk around.

I could never understand why friends of mine was so reluctant to take these marathon walks from one end of a city to another. Walking was the best way to meet a place and to see the ephemera which are so crucial to understanding a place. From the window of a car, every place looks very similar, from the sidewalk in Albuquerque, you can see the sand of the desert, in suburban Sacramento, fertilizer grains from the over-watered lawns, iron pieces in the sidewalk bleed a rusty excretion, and blacktop forms waves and ripples in the summer under the weight of truck traffic. 

My perambulatory way of life reached its zenith when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and I spent all my free time wandering around the eminently walkable Armenian countryside. Armenia was probably the best place to make use of my passion for walking, maybe the only place (other than the Appalachian Trail a few years later) where the interest could actually be used as a skill. Through walking, I was seeing differently, and I began to write about what I saw and process the information in a new way. The more I wrote, I could see that these walking forays were an important way of understanding not only landscape, but people, culture, and life. I’m not sure if I wouldn’t been able to see that in my own country in quite the same way.

In the years that followed, my walking efforts were supported by my wife Gina who walked with me through Abasto in Buenos Aires, Barrio San Jeronimo in Asuncion, across the jungle in the middle of Ko Tao, and down Clement Avenue in San Francisco—to name a few. 

Today, we have a catalog of experiences to share, organizable by place, by walks, by wanderings. We found starfruit trees, hilltop views, hidden beaches, giant lizards, and libraries surrounded by parks; we found such wonderful things. We were great partners in this exploration. I still count myself incredibly lucky to have found someone who seemed to appreciate wandering and walking as much as I did. A lot of people like to walk, but they don’t want to spend Sunday walking through miles of concrete, under the unrelenting tropical sun, only to wander through the aisles of an out-of-the-way grocery store.

Before our daughter was born, we returned to California to make a place for her. For a while, we were still able to walk and wander. Initially, she didn’t like to be in her baby carrier, and she’d cry until we forced to return home. Gina and I were ecstatic when, at only three months old, she finally allowed us to walk from one neighborhood to the next. It had felt like an eternity since we’d taken a real walk! I think most people wouldn’t have cared much about this, but to us, it was a major victory to maintain an important part of our lives which we had previously faced leaving behind. 

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I was still wandering, still taking bike rides around the bay, still riding out to the small town of Blue Lake, still taking biweekly rides to a grocery store the next town over, all while Gina stayed home with our baby girl. For time’s sake, I shifted to bike riding, but I was still all over the place, when I should’ve been learning to stay home. 

My big transition came when our son was born a little over two years later. For a while, I tried to keep rambling around after bedtime, or during nap time, but, often, before I left the house, someone would wake up, or I’d get home late and find Gina trying to manage an infant and a toddler, and I had to admit to myself that I would find this difficult and exhausting if I were in her place, and so I needed to take some responsibility and stop taking every little opportunity to leave the house and expanding it into permission to take a three-hour bike ride. It took me a while to see that this is what was required of me. 

I think this is where a lot of men, especially younger men, can go wrong. I can almost state as a fact that, had my daughter been born before I scrambled down the goatpaths of Armenia, before I climbed the wall up from the Bay of Kotor on a rainy night, before I lived in a tent for four months, never sleeping in the same place twice in the same amount of time; if I hadn’t found scorpions crawling over rocks, and signs for landmined areas at the edge of the path I was on, and had knives and guns flashed at me, I wouldn’t have been able to settle into my responsibility as a parent. The absence of the memory of these things would’ve tugged at me mercilessly—as mercilessly as the need to find them tugged at me in the first place.

I’d like to say that having children has quieted the impulse to explore the world to its battered fringes, but it hasn’t. I know that, were it possible, I would still pursue a path into unknown, and I’d bring my family with me. As a new dad, I tried to do this many times. I applied for jobs in Armenia, Ukraine, North Carolina, and Colorado without thinking much of the consequences if I were to take these jobs, that is, what it would cost to upend everything and move away from California; I only scented more adventure, more exploration, and I couldn’t resist it. But each time, I had to realize that I couldn’t follow the impulse to any kind of outcome. And every time, I found myself in an agonizing situation of having to turn down the opportunity, and after a while, I persuaded myself it would be best to stop wearing everyone down by embarking on what, by now, were pointless endeavors over and over. It was a lesson that took a long time to learn, about as long as it had taken me to find the value in the work we were doing in school and use that—rather than the requirement, or the grade—as motivation for doing quality work. 

Eventually, I did become comfortable in school, but I had to do it on my terms. I had to mix the assignments with what I was learning of the world through my personal exploration. Simply, I usually had to find my own reason for completing the assignment. A grade, or approbation were never enough for me. It was only when I learned that I could use my understanding (burgeoning as it may have been) to explore a concept, did I begin to enjoy it. In AP English in high school, you read 1984 thinking about the proles’ neighborhood as being like the streets you wander with your friends, away from the school and home and the watchful eye of Big Brother; you read No Exit in college thinking about how everyone on campus is trying to simultaneously impress and give the impression that that are not trying to impress, how each one of us is trying to be a beacon for the others; in graduate school, you read Classical Rhetoric and you think how the words we use are capable of multiple meanings and that this is what creates problems when texting, the affect necessary to completely decode short messages is missing. When I saw the value which resulted from laying critical concepts over my daily life, I was intrigued with what I read, and what I’d been assigned. 

I like to think the lessons I have learned are something like desire lines, the paths we create, often shortcuts, between established paths, when landscapers fail to anticipate (or ignore) how people will move when they plan a park, or college campus. The grass will eventually be worn down, then killed and replaced with dusty, single-file paths. The more we walk them, the wider, the more entrenched they become. When we make discoveries about what works for us— such as walking to discover or applying personal experience to assignments—we begin to create these desire lines in our minds.

But because we have worn down these pathways doesn’t mean that they need to be paved over, or that we need to eschew the sidewalks altogether in their favor. After having kids, I tried for years to maintain my desire lines, until. I realized that I was no longer moving in the same direction, and treading them, though they were familiar and reassuring, was taking me in a direction no longer aligned with my destination.  

It may be cliché, but it’s true that nothing can prepare one for having children, unless, of course, you are the type of person who has long anticipated having children, in which case, you will probably find all you have been anticipating to be true. For those of us, who act more impulsively, who never planned on having children, but one day awoke to realize we wanted to hold a little hand when crossing the street, or share the things we love with someone who might do something novel with them, having children has consequences which reach until the end of life and there is no way to anticipate the ability of another human being, one who is part you, to continue to influence and effect your life. You can have one, or nine, having kids guarantees that your life will never again be your own in the same way that it was. 

I have been continually readjusting myself and my orientation to the world to accommodate my kids, and, I have found that the purpose of this is to move them to the foreground, while I move myself to the background. This realization began when I started to think twice about taking that evening bike ride, so I’d be there to help with bedtime, and when I started turning down overseas jobs, so that we could stay in less stressful place to provide a more nurturing home. As my children moved to the fore of my mind (where they probably should’ve been all along), I changed my way of expecting, and the world I had built up, a tapestry of exploration, shrunk down to something more manageable to mete out to my kids piece by piece, thread by thread. 

This is not to say that I stopped doing things for the sole reason that I wanted to do them. I don’t want this to read like admonishment for anyone who has kids who still pursues their own interests. No, it is only that I had to reconsider the outcomes for my impulses and, yes, sometimes, I had to check these and rethink them because some of them would benefit only me and, in that sense, would become problematic for everyone, me included. 

The walks I take are shorter now, but I still take them, pushing a stroller wagon, loading up on books from Little Free Libraries, eating borage flowers growing in people’s front yards and arriving at a playground. It is the same walk taken at home, in San Francisco, or Victoria, BC because it’s the walk that benefits everyone, doesn’t mean we don’t still find new things along our route. And, the things we find, well, they allow us to start crafting new desire lines, crossing from the well-traveled sidewalks down to the swales and swards in between where we find our own reasons for being there.

I no longer face out, because I am no longer the one determining where we go. Sure, I pick the time to leave (well, sorta’), I pick the destination, but when the way, the pace, and discoveries that lie along the path belong to my kids, I have to admit, despite the agency I may feel, my role is not the same as it was six years ago. 

Before having kids, I would’ve lamented this change, and I don’t know that I ever would’ve willingly chosen it, but now that I am experiencing it, like so many other changes in life, it is both inevitable and wonderful. The only experience better than figuring out how to make sense of the world you’ve been handed, is watching someone else, watching your children, do this over and over. And, one day, when the time is right, perhaps we will move overseas again, because that, too, could be part of my kids’ pathmaking, given who their parents are.