Skateboarding in Samsara

Last week, I had a minute to call a friend—I’ve had a few of these moments lately, driving like 18 miles to work, I’ve gotten used to ensconcing myself in the car, like someone dropping into a couch after a long day. You jerk open the door and enter the temporary room, sealed off from the world. There’s the radio, but after driving for the last couple of months, I’m on to the patterns in the radio. It was only made to be listened to in 3-minunte doses and its repetitive nature is frustrating, but not to the point of accepting silence in its place. If I haven’t had the foresight to put on music of a podcast before getting into my moving lounge, I can’t do it while in transit; the process of searching, picking through results, and selecting them is too complicated while moving through traffic—though I have risked it a few times. 

So, the phone it is, and while the drive isn’t really long enough to reconnect with the people I’d like to, it has allowed me to leave the bubble of my routine, if only for that moment while so deeply ensnared in it: the commute. 

My friend and I were talking about kids; now that we both have them, we are not the same people, and so any conversation brings this to the fore as we struggle to retain something of who we were when we first met, to convince the other that we haven’t changed that much, to convince ourselves. But it’s no good. We are different people. So my friend said, “when you have a kid, they become a part of you, they add on to you. You can’t be the same when you are with them, and when you are apart from them, you can’t go back to the way you were before they were in the world.” It is a somewhat complicated idea, but it goes along well with the idea that when you have a kid, you have broken off part of yourself, to walk around freely in the world—something I thought about a lot after having kids when things I used to enjoy seemed no longer worth the effort, or even confusingly uninteresting. 

Kids change how you orient yourself to the world. But, for the first few years at least, you think “when I have some time to myself, I’ll get back to being the ‘me’ I was before them.” That is, I’ll go back to going to shows, skateboarding, taking long walks around new cities, even going out with my friends at night, but you can’t because without that piece of you that is your kid, you no longer feel whole when engaging in these activities; you feel like part of you is off somewhere else and you—the you standing in the sought after moment— is a little more of an automaton than it used to be. 

I have also come to feel more comfortable as an older male with my children. I am a dad, and I like being seen this way. Other than the time I take on weekend mornings to write and skate a little, I live for the benefit of my family, or try to. It is weird when I am in the world alone and people perceive me as just “a guy”. I want to tell them that I have kids. That I am more than this. I suppose this is why men are stereotypically known for having wallet photos of their children that they like to show people. I work with students, many of them young women who I feel might be slightly distrustful of me, of suddenly finding themselves alone in a small office with me; I feel the photos of my children help to mitigate this. They see that I have kids and probably realize that my head is full of shopping lists, Little League, and skinned knees or something. They don’t have to worry I will try to hit on them.

So, I have lost the ability to really lose myself while going out at night, but there are still a lot of similarities in my life. As the breadwinner, I’m out of the house at least 40 hours a week, and because I have to absent myself for work, it’s easier to ride that momentum and continue certain volunteering efforts as well. On Saturday mornings, I help to clean up the local bike path, every year I organize a Coastal Clean Up, and occasionally I’ll attend some kind of meeting. 

My wife, on the other hand, is at home all the time. She is always watching the kids. Even when I am home, and she could have a break, it is hard to get out of the habit of overseeing the household and its functions. I am not entirely to be trusted; I don’t even know the correct place for the towels in the linen closet. And why should I? My regular working process takes place in an entirely different world. 

My wife told me the other day that the order, by descending happiness, was something like:

• Married man
• Single woman
• Married woman
• Single man 

She said she thought of all her aunts who don’t have kids, live more or less, at leisure,  and thought that there was some truth in this—even though it was just some clickbait absurdity. 

I sang the Carter Family song “Single Girl Married Girl”, in which the lives of each are compared through warbled lyrics like “single girl goes to the store and buys, married girl, wears just any kind”. When my wife and I didn’t have children, we sang that song to each other jokingly, but I was immediately stung by how true it had become. I am out in the world, feeling awkward without my children, but given my work schedule, and sleeping, (roughly 40 and 56 hours respectively) and the time I carve out for myself, let’s say maybe 6 more hours, so 102 hours. A week is 168. There are 66 hours I am with my kids. My wife, on the other hand, is always with them. She sleeps with the baby, right now she is waking up and making them oatmeal, even when the older kids go to school, she spends a significant amount of time in transit, back and forth to pick them up and drop them off. Even if she didn’t have a baby with her, there wouldn’t be much time to get involved in anything that required any amount of focus and, of course, the house always needs to be cleaned, the laundry always needs to be done.

Meanwhile, I am driving around talking about how strange I feel without my kids, precisely because I am away from them more than I am with them! Precisely because I have this time to muse about having children shows that I have not been changed that much by having children. I am different, sure, but my daily life has not been altered in the way it has been for my wife. 

Even while I write these words, I am at the café, I woke up at 5:30 and didn’t want to sit around and wait for everyone else to wake up, so I just drove over here. Would my wife have this same luxury? If she woke up and drove off, I would wake up very disoriented and, truthfully, I would wonder how long she planned on being gone for with a bit of irritation. Because I am always gone anyway, I figure, what’s another couple of hours in the morning on my day off? Especially when it helps me get back in touch with who I used to be. 

For the past year or so, I’ve been taking one morning each weekend to write and skate a little. It may seem unnecessary, but through these activities, I feel revived, I feel like I reclaim a little of what brought my joy and defined my nature before I had kids, when I was only an individual, without pieces of myself loosely orbiting around me. 

The writing—as you can see—doesn’t always go well, but it allows me to revisit old stories and recast them, audit them and make something new of them. It also allows me to arrest pieces of the present from their marshalled routine, hold them up and say “wow!” in a way that I just can’t do when I live them. And, what can I say, I also like drinking my coffee somewhere new; on clear days—which are rare—you can see the mountains from the café windows. I’ve seen some great sunrises stream over my little café workstation. 

And then the skating. Waaaaaaay back when I lived in San Francisco (the second time), Mikey and I used to meet to skate the West Oakland park on weekends and Jason called us the “geriatric skate club”. That was fifteen years ago. God knows what he’d say now, but contrary to making me feel old, skating is the only thing that makes me feel like I’m moving away from death and decrepitude. Rather than remind me of my mortality, when I get out there, get comfortable and start hitting the ramps as fast as I can, it’s like going back in time. When I’m able to land tricks I previously couldn’t, it’s like I’ve stolen them from fate, like I’ve gone back in time to make them happen.

Any Buddhist will tell you—or anyone with profound religious convictions—that trying to fulfill yourself is an empty pursuit. Striving after accomplishments, only makes us hungry for more accomplishments, sitting down a minute to scroll through social media, only makes us want to continue scrolling, eating that piece of cake, only makes us want more cake, well maybe not right this minute, but eventually. And all of these things are hollow. They’re just moving us down the conveyor belt toward death, just passatempi until the inevitable. The only way to break out of this cycle is to stop seeking any kind of fulfillment and become comfortable just being.

I see the logic in this. Yes, most goals feel hollow after they are met. Yes, the second donut isn’t as good as the first, but dammit if skating well doesn’t actually make me feel better, not through a sense of accomplishment, but just through a sense of enjoyment. When I skate, I enjoy the feeling of adroit movement over surfaces, the quick lift of going up a transition, the feeling of conveyance when you hit a rail and slide effortlessly over it and the brief freefall of riding off a transition and being pulled quickly toward the ground, only to come back up again—skating is kind of like playing with gravity. And doing it doesn’t make me feel a lack, it makes me feel a fulfillment, almost especially because I am older and not that good at it. I’m really just good enough to enjoy it without further attainment.

I try to make it home before it’s too late, but I get caught up and before I know it, it’s 9 or 10am and the kids have been up for hours. My wife, if she was ever going to get a break, should’ve gotten it this morning, but I was out pursuing that which is not even a pursuit. 

Single girl, single girl
She's going just where she please
Oh, she's going where she please
Married girl, married girl
Baby on her knees
Oh, baby on her knees

Skating is also the sole activity from my previous life that doesn’t feel fraudulent or lacking without having my kids be with me. Mikey came up a few weeks ago from the city at my invitation to go to a show. I tried to get into the music, but the bands are always taking themselves a bit too seriously, and the breaks between sets are hard to navigate. I don’t seem to know when or how to break off conversation with new people, or I read too much into it and imagine that, as these young people talk with me, they don’t even see me; when I’m without my kids, I seem to encounter a hesitation in people I strike up conversations with. Like, many of them would prefer to not be talking with me, or are looking through me even as they speak to me. 

Toward the end of the show, there was a tap on my shoulder, and a hoarse whisper in my ear. The band was playing, so I was completely incapable of hearing it—especially now that I’m older and have trouble differentiating background and “foreground” noise. The person tried again, but, without any context, I couldn’t even guess what they were trying to tell me. Then, I guessed it, and they affirmed my guess and with rather curt gesture of two hands spreading air: ‘move away from me’.

I had my back to this person. We were in a room about 20’x20’ with probably 40+ people. The band was playing, everyone was ‘dancing’ and, yet, I was being asked to move away. It was so unprecedented, I could only shake my head and take a tiny step closer to the person on the other side of me. But it made me feel sad, it made me feel like I didn’t belong. When I skate, there is no one to make me feel this way. No matter how bad the skating goes, I enjoy it. 

After the show, I came home and couldn’t sleep. Mikey got the extra room, so I slept on the floor in the kids’ room. I lay there trying unsuccessfully to sleep, just aware of my kids’ regular breathing, these pieces of me lying there comfortable in the darkness, dreaming their dreams, beginning their own constructions of the world, largely informed by the work my wife did getting them through each day, shepherding them to sleep.

Meanwhile, across the hall, she likewise tried to cross the night, getting as much rest as she could, intermittently waking to feed the baby and soothe her back to sleep. Of course I was at my happiest state, I thought. I had both worlds. I could go to shows, be dissatisfied, or go skate, and improve my mood, and then go home and be part of a family, be reabsorbed as someone with a purpose, a responsibility. No wonder then that a single man is lowest on the score of happiness (according to the clickbait graphic I gave earlier), as they age, they continually feel the push of the world against them, but with no refuge, as I was now enjoying on the floor of my kids’ room. A single man must continually confront their increasing irrelevance. My single male friends, like Mikey, all embrace this, they are creative and have found relevance in these creative pursuits. But my relationship to creativity has always been a bit more fickle and, I suppose, I seek to belong more than I am willing to acknowledge.   

I heard my infant daughter wake up and cry, and my wife roll over to soothe her, and I thought about the cost of my comfort, as I so often do, even if I have no idea to mitigate that cost. In the Buddhist sense, at least my wife is much closer to enlightenment than me. From her position, she is able to see the bones of the world, she can strip it down to the bedrock and face it, while I still cover it with as much distraction as I can. 

The difference is that, to me, children are just another aspect of a busy life. I love them, they are a part of me, but they are one facet of many in my existence. To my wife, they are existence. They strip away from the illusion of anything else. Is it any wonder then that women should be less happy once they have been thus “red-pilled”?

I think of this, waiting for sleep to come, but it never does. And about 5am, at the first light, I get up from the floor to meet the new day and go back to work, on to the next distraction. 

Parent/Child Communication Strategy

I have this memory of sitting in a Japanese restaurant in Disney World’s Epcot Center, with this thin, pathetic feeling weighing on my lap while my dad fumed over my reluctance to eat tempura.

It could’ve been a different dish, but the idea is the same: we’d been having a great time when suddenly, it was time to eat. While my parents, being adults, who’d cultivated an appreciation around eating, had looked forward to this portion of the day—had been anticipating it while I was riding Space Mountain for the third time—I had been completely oblivious to it. As a kid, eating was something totally perfunctory like going to the bathroom; when the urge came, you just did it. No reason to get worked about it beforehand. 

Sure, if there was ice cream or and meal with fries eating could be made enjoyable, but it wasn’t something I had cultivated any appreciation around now. 

Ramped up from the overstimulation of the amusement park, I wasn’t very interested in focusing my attention on a plate of something I didn’t recognize as food—southern Michigan, where I grew up in the 1980s and 90s wasn’t exactly an epicurean wonderland and the only non meat-and-potatoes-centric food I’d ever known was Mexican or Chinese. 

I don’t know what I said, but likely, I claimed to not be hungry; my hope secretly being that when my parents received the report that I wasn’t in need of food, they could consent to abandon the restaurant plan—an honest mistake— and return to the much more attractive amusements of the park which was, of course, right outside the doors of the restaurant!

It didn’t go this way, of course. I remember being yelled at. I remember feeling small and sad and wondering what I’d done to deserve such shoddy treatment when we were supposed to be having fun—when we’d been having fun all day. The change had come so rapidly, how could I, at six, have seen it coming. 

The only answer was that my dad was too quick to anger and showed his anger too strongly. For thirty-five years, I’ve carried that memory around with me as an injustice. Never imagining how I could share any part of the blame because real empathy generally comes from experience; how are we to know what it is really like for our parents until we have become parents ourselves? 

I’m not sure if everyone’s memory works this way, but mine was, until recently, very reluctant to find any fault with my childhood self. I fully acknowledge that from 10 to 17 I was hard on my parents, and no longer innocent, I was just as culpable as anyone else, even as much as an adult when I knew very well that I was doing something wrong—which was often. I wasn’t always able to help it, but that’s not my focus here. 

Until about 10, I looked upon myself as an angel who was only seeking to understand the world in this beautiful, wide-eyed way. If I was yelled at, if anyone was even upset with me, they were to blame. And I’ve carried instances of this around with me—like the above—as examples of how no one has a perfect childhood. I never felt I deserved to feel my dad’s anger. It was a heavy-browed, smoldering kind of anger and it scared me. My mom’s anger was something lighter, more exasperated and her efforts to hold my behavior in check never left any psychological marks. I assumed it was only natural that someone should tell me to stay in my seat and that it should be my mother. But when my dad said it, it came out differently, and I was afraid 

I now have angelic children of my own, all well under 10, who have led me to understand exactly how their behavior can cause you to raise your voice in a Japanese restaurant, yes, even while at Disney World, even while trying to have a fun day and create beautiful memories. Where I once dismissed my parents’ disciplinary actions as hasty and impulsive, I understand now how much restraint they had employed to keep from yelling at me a lot more than they did. 

In my memory, our good time had been interrupted for this boring, adult interlude of silk screens, lacquered wood, and bamboo. I sit still and am told to choose something from a menu which is incomprehensible to me. With no pizza, burgers, or fries, I don’t know what to order. My parents agree that tempura is something I will like. Ok, fine tempura. When it arrives, it is unfamiliar. I don’t know what it contains. I have never seen a food item that looks like this. I don’t want to venture to try it. My excitement after having been in the park all day is obscuring any hunger I may feel and yet I’m being forced to eat this unknown stuff. Feeling pushed into a corner, I turn to the only defense I have, I refuse hoping that this rough detour from galivanting around the park will soon be behind us and we’ll again be under the glowing lights, laughing, smiling, looking for all the world like a commercial.

To my parents the scenario was very different: being in charge, the entire experience to them was much more banal and exhausting. Parking, hotel, ticket purchases, transportation to the park, where to go once in the park, lines, and, importantly, proper care of their six-year-old and eight-year-old kids in 85-degree weather under a full Florida sun all day, including hydration, rest, food and sleep. Add to this that there are two parents who might not always agree on the best way to go about this, and each decision becomes something in which four opinions are introduced, four opinions which rarely coincide and have a tendency to annoyingly overlap, each ignoring the other (Imagine all the following lines overlapping each other a bit):

PARENT 1: “Ok, let’s take a break in the shade over there.”

CHILD 1: “Can we get ice cream?”

CHILD 2: “But we just took a break!” 

PARENT 2: “We’ll get ice cream, but then it’s time for a break.”

CHILD 2: “Awww, man!”

The decision to eat was likely late in coming—though it was summer, I remember it was already dark. We’d probably found an activity which everyone had been enjoying and, considering this was my parents’ aim in spending a large sum of money on the trip, they were loath to disrupt the moment which had been their very aim. But, the kids had scarcely eaten a thing all day, and they’d been out in the sun, and, well, they’re getting a little whiney—probably time to eat. But where? At this hotdog stand? Maybe the kids will eat that, but it’s more junk, and they had junk for breakfast (Here I can hear my mom (in the past) and my wife (in the present) saying, “all they’ve eaten all day is pancakes!”) “Ok, ok, then where? Hey, look there’s a really nice place that’s got _______ (insert parent’s favorite dish) right near here…what’s that? The kids wouldn’t eat that? Oh yeah, right, ok. Well, forget that.”

Without kids, my parents would never have been tromping around an amusement park all day. They’d done this solely for the benefit of my sister and me. And now that they had an opportunity to find a bit of enjoyment in it—say in eating something they liked—that, too, had to be forgone for the sake of the kids who would not be interested in eating such fare.

Meanwhile, my sister and I are yanking on them, pleading with them to get back in line for another ride, distracting them from making any decision, raising their blood pressure and cortisol. Before kids, my parents had come to greatly appreciate the act of finding a restaurant, now it has become stressful, and they wonder if it is even worth it. This makes them feel like they’ve sacrificed a part of themselves, and, potentially, will make them feel obdurate about enjoying at least one thing in spite of their children’s wishes. 

Finally, they arrive at compromise. It’s a bit of a long shot since the kids haven’t ever eaten Japanese food, but the parents are hoping that their kids will somehow understand that this is a unique situation and not everything is burgers and fries. Also, they might be hoping that their kids will evince some kind of cosmopolitan tendency, some kind of juvenile refinement and just eat the damn food.

Now they at the table in a crowded restaurant. They have committed, but they are having their doubts about this decision. The kids are squirming. They aren’t even looking at the menu. They are looking around, as if for the exit. It doesn’t help that, outside, the rides are all lit up and the music is blasting, and a costumed Mickey and Goofy are actually beckoning from a window and when the parents try to wave them away, or at least show that, “look, the kids just need to get something in their stomachs” that the costumed characters, probably just teenagers with chips on their shoulders about similar restaurant scenes wiggle their fingers in their ears and shake their rear ends.

The food arrives and, predictably, the kids won’t even look at it. The goddam tempura was $54! The kids have no idea how lucky they are to be eating at this restaurant in the park. When I was a kid, my parents would’ve smuggled in smooshed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and we never would’ve been in Disney World in the first place, we would’ve been at the county fair. These kids don’t know what they’ve scoffing at. I’m working my fingers to the bone so they can have a great childhood and now they’re bouncing up and down in their seats, making a scene. The other parents, whose kids are all very quietly eating their tempura—Jesus, look, that kid’s even got a napkin tucked into his shirt!—The other parents are all staring. They’re all thinking, “what brats those two shmoes are raising! Just another family that our taxes will end of paying for: free school lunches, unemployment, and probably jail, too.” 

The parents’ food has also arrived, it looks good. Hell, it is good. They’re trying to enjoy it, realizing that they’re actually really hungry after walking all over the park all day, and this moment off their feet with a good meal is exactly what they are in need of. The kids have decidedly turned up their noses at the food and, for lack of any distraction, are now on to begging to be allowed to go back to the rides. They can’t understand for the life of them why, if they are done eating, the whole family can’t all just get up and leave. “What are we sitting around all these kimonoed waiters for? Pirates of the Caribbean is right over there and, look, the line is really short right now!”

The parents try to just ignore this and salvage a scrap of enjoyment from their meals, but the incessant beseeching to return to the park is wearing on them. The kids think maybe the signs of change they detect might mean their parents are going to relent. In reality, it means their dad is getting close to losing it.

Let’s not overlook that the parents are now unconsciously trying to bolt their meals and, semi-consciously, they are aware that this rushed way of eating has become their norm. That this whole process has already been shifted to accommodate the kids (ie. sped up) and now the kids are demanding more accommodation. They are demanding to do away with the practice of eating altogether, at least when in amusement parks.

The little boy, with the sugar and artificial dye from cotton candy in his blood making sitting still almost impossible especially in this boring setting which, after the unprecedented sights of the day, decides to have a look under the table and realizes it might be temporarily diverting to slink all the way underneath. Why, it’s sort of like a cave down there, like from Pirates of the Caribbean. The other parents, hell, even the waiters at this point, are watching the kid sink under the table and thinking “wow, can you believe what some people let their kids get away with!” The dad, no longer able to bear the whole scene hisses “get up!” through teeth clenched around a California roll he hasn’t tasted. The boy, hearing the warning in the voice, scrambles to get up, hits the table with his back, knocks over the goddam water carafe which why the hell do they always have to bring one of those things over at a table with kids!? It’s like an invitation to disaster.

Everyone in the restaurant sees. The table is flooded. Good food is ruined. Water drips from the white linen tablecloth and, without thinking, the dad bellows some kind of warning at the kid, something which is more the product of embarrassment, hunger, irritation, and resulting brain chemistry that has been pushed and pushed until it boiled over. The words aren’t important. It’s the way it is said. A mother, who is infinitely forgiving, would never behave in that way no matter how irritated, but the dad, less patient, has now revealed something of his true character forcing the kid to wonder, for the rest of his childhood and well into his adult life, whether his dad, who could act in such a way could possibly love him. 

Thank god I had kids of my own so I could understand how one could feel such irritation and such boundless love at the same time. One does not preclude the other, hell, they almost go together, which would make no sense to me if I hadn’t experienced it. 

…

And so I try. I clench my teeth and try not to let too much anger into my face when my own wide-eyed and innocent kids, unable to focus on the meal, knock over the water, or the silverware while digging around under the table, but I know it’s not likely that I’ll respond in the right way every time. I can only hope that they’ll be a little more insightful than I have been, and it won’t require their having children of their own to understand how much I love them no matter what I say or do in a moment of vacation irritability.  

I also consider the possibility that perhaps some institutions—for example going out to eat—are best reconsidered. The time has passed when I could’ve brought my children bodily into my adult routines with me (and now that there are three, they’d mutiny anyway) and the luxury of eating in a non-fast-food restaurant is really best left to those with a bit more awareness of what their limbs are doing. Hell, even as an adult I knock the water over sometimes.