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.
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