Worrying versus having fun (on the Fourth of July)

In Portland, as in many parts of New England last weekend, the Fourth of July festivities took place on July 5^th instead, due to a very accurately forecasted hurricane-influenced rainstorm that dominated Friday afternoon and evening.

But my thoughts as we waited for the fireworks show to begin over Casco Bay were less about freedom, liberty and the birth of our nation than they were about apprehension, caution, prudence, and the spectrum that those various emotions seem to cover.

My anxiety was over the fact that a dream of Tim’s was coming true that evening: we had taken my parents’ motorboat out into the harbor to watch the fireworks. And this plan made me extremely nervous. I’m nervous about boating under the best of circumstances, actually. My father, my husband, and my son all greatly enjoy boating and are all confident and adept when handling boats, so throughout my life, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to be out on the water. And I’ve been on boats enough times when mechanical failure strikes to feel as if mishaps are more typically the rule than the exception, even though I know that’s not really true. It’s just that the times that something goes wrong are the times that stick in my mind, rather than the many successful and entirely enjoyable boat rides I’ve been lucky enough to experience.

And it’s not like anything really awful has ever happened to me. No tragedies or accidents: just the occasional engine failure. And mostly that was back when we had our own boat; it hardly ever happens on my parents’ boat.

But we’d also never gone boating in the dark before. So as we sat amidst a phalanx of bobbing vessels of all sizes, from cigarette boats to lobster boats to yachts to ferries, waiting for the fireworks to begin, all I could think about was how awful it would be to experience engine trouble late at night, in the dark, after the fireworks.

True, we were hardly alone out there. Dozens of boats dotted the harbor as far as we could see; both the Coast Guard and local police boats passed continually among the revelers. And thanks to the yearly fee my parents pay to Sea Tow, we were assured a tow back to shore any time we might need it.

Moreover, Rick and Tim thought I was being ridiculous to worry. They thought being on the harbor for the fireworks was the most ideal scenario possible. Tim had been pleading for weeks to give this a shot; Rick had finally capitulated when he saw what a warm evening it was shaping up to be and how calm the water was.

“Look at all those people crowded onto the hillside!” Rick said as we sat in the boat looking toward the sloping lawn where the whole city gathers to watch the fireworks. “We could be crammed into that crowd right now! Instead we’re out here on our boat!”

Yes, I thought to myself, but when the fireworks end, all those people need merely rise to their feet and count on their sturdy little legs to carry them home. Their odds of successful transport are close to one hundred percent, as long as they cross at the crosswalks. Ours are a little more dubious.

I wasn’t just being neurotic. We’d discovered water in the engine compartment when we opened up the boat earlier in the evening, and we’d had trouble starting it up then, after pumping it out for ten minutes or so. I had thought this was reason enough not to go out at night. Well, reason enough for me, maybe. Not for the brave and intrepid sea-goers in my family.

“Just enjoy the fireworks!” Tim instructed me as the first few sparklers exploded into the black sky.

“I am enjoying the fireworks,” I replied. “This is fabulous, being out in the harbor for the concert and pyrotechnics.” And it really was. On the boat, we were comfortable, all snuggled together in the bow, rocking gently on the waves with an unobstructed view of the sky. “But I’m also worried about the trip home.”

“Well, if anything goes wrong, you can still remember how much fun you’re having now,” Holly said reasonably.

And she was right. I could worry, or I could enjoy the fireworks. If I let myself have fun, I’d still have good memories even if the trip home didn’t go smoothly.

Actually, the trip home did go smoothly. We made it back to our dock and had an easy landing. The evening was perfect. All four of us had fun and nothing went wrong.

The next day, the engine started acting up again, making our successful evening excursion seem all the more fortunate, but it was manageable. Getting the boat towed to the marina was no trouble at all in the middle of the afternoon, close to shore.

And Holly’s advice stuck in my mind. “Well, if anything goes wrong, you can still remember how much fun you’re having now.” I suppose in a way, that’s the point of doing anything fun. You know it’s not going to last forever, but you know no matter how fleeting it is, you can look back on it later and feel happy all over again.

So I’m glad we went. Anxiety and apprehension may have been more present for me than a sense of celebration honoring America’s birthday, but it was a wonderful Fourth of July – on the Fifth of July – nonetheless. And I learned to maybe be just a little less anxious the next time we go boating after dark.

All new to me

Since fall of 2004, I’ve been receiving emails addressed to “Class of 2013.” This is my 14-year-old son’s official designation at the Carlisle Public School: class of 2013. So when I received an email last month addressed to “Class of 2017,” I was momentarily puzzled. 2017 – where did that come from? I wondered. A misprint?

Oh, right. We’re halfway through Tim’s eighth grade year. This is our first official correspondence from the high school he’ll attend next year – where he will, in fact, be part of the class of 2017.

The email was an invitation to eighth grade parents to attend tonight’s tour and presentation at the high school. And at first, I avoided putting it on my calendar. The whole idea of high school fills me with mild anxiety. It doesn’t seem to bother Tim a whit, but it is certainly bringing out my insecurities.

At some point recently, it occurred to me why this was. Tim started attending the Carlisle Public School in kindergarten and is now in his ninth year there. As such, he is following the same course I did. I graduated from the same K-8 school he’ll soon graduate from, but I did not attend the public high school, as he will. So next fall, for the first time in nine years – and effectively for the first time in his life, if we don’t count preschool – I’ll be sending him off to a school that wasn’t once my school. A campus with which I’m almost entirely unfamiliar. A cafeteria in which I’ve never sat down to lunch. An auditorium within which I’ve never attended an assembly. Hallways whose smells aren’t a part of my earliest memories. This will all be new to me – and within his first day or two there, Tim will know the school better than I do.

But when I finally took the time to read through the email and realize that tonight’s presentation was truly the first signal that Tim would soon be off to high school, I had to confront the fact that the anxieties were all mine, not Tim’s. He doesn’t talk about high school much, but when he does, he’s sanguine. He’s looking forward to a bigger campus, the possibility of playing freshman football, and having classes with some of the Concord kids he’s met through regional baseball teams over the years. And he’s not apprehensive at all that he’ll be off to a place with which his mother is unfamiliar – that’s my issue, not his. In fact, he seems to know more about it already than I do. A few days ago, for reasons I can’t remember, Holly asked him where high school kids go for Spanish class. “The L building,” he replied nonchalantly. 

“The L building?” I repeated nervously. The campus is that huge – they have Buildings A through L? Or even more?

“L for language, Mom,” Tim said. How he knew that I don’t know, but it turned out he was right. Foreign language classes are in fact in the L building.

By the time my younger child is graduating from eighth grade and getting ready for high school, it will all feel familiar to me. Maybe it will even feel familiar to her, as a second child. So tonight I’ll head off to the high school for the first time as a prospective high school parent, and maybe then I’ll feel less apprehensive. Last time Tim entered a new school, he was five years old and following in the same footsteps I’d set 32 years earlier. This time it’s all new. But he’s not concerned, and so I will try not to be either. 

Back-to-school, 2012

As I keep reminding myself, I’m not going back to school. They are.

And if they don’t seem concerned about it, I needn’t be either.

If they’re not lying awake at night thinking about it, there’s no reason for me to be.

My kids have never yet had a bad year of school, so on the face of it, there’s no reason for me to worry. But instead of thinking “Will this or that unpleasant thing happen to them again?”, it’s the opposite: I worry “Will this be the year? Other parents tell me of teachers their children didn’t get along with, terrible homework burdens, difficult relationships with other kids, unfair run-ins with the administration. I never have similar stories with which to counter. So I can’t help wondering: is our number up? Will this be the year?

But so far, no. Minor heartaches typical of preadolescence for Tim; minor inexplicable misunderstandings with friends for Holly, last year. But nothing so challenging that it kept any of us awake at night.

So I tell myself now is not the time to start worrying. The kids feel just fine about going off to school today. Yesterday they rummaged through their newly purchased school supplies to check off each item on the prescribed list and fit it into their backpacks (an old one for Tim, which he’s had – and loved – since fifth grade; a new one for Holly, brown with bright pink polka dots), and after dinner last night, at my insistence, they even packed up their own lunches: stuffing and leftover steak for Tim, yogurt and Pirate’s Bootie and cheese slices for Holly. Seltzer bottles for each.

Neither of them gave much thought about what to wear today. I remember tremendous excitement over first-day-of-school outfits from my own childhood, and judging from the photos my friends have been posting today, the tradition still holds true among many families, but my kids can’t be bothered. Holly chose a clean and neat but unspectacular outfit that she used to wear a lot last spring. Tim appeared in a familiar Hershey’s Park t-shirt that he wore more days than not last year. Long ago, we had a rule about no t-shirts with words on them for the first day of school, but it’s one of those things that just stopped seeming so important after a while.

This is Tim’s last year of middle school, and it’s also the last year he’ll attend a school with which I’m familiar. I attended his current school from kindergarten through eighth grade myself, just as he is; but next year he’ll go off to the public high school, whereas I attended private school after eighth grade. So next year I’ll be even more anxious about the unknowns, though Tim will probably once again be the picture of complacency.

I remind myself that they are in clean clothes, they know how to find their homerooms, they’ve packed nutritious lunches, and they have a full set of school supplies; there’s not much else I could have done this morning to send them off prepared. In an essay about parental involvement at schools in Sunday’s New York Times, Bruce Feiler attributed Dan Levin, a founder of a charter school network that runs 125 schools across the country, with saying, "If [a] kid is coming well rested to school, with his homework done on time, and is behaving well, the parents are doing their job."

Well, I know my kids are well-rested; they weren’t lying awake last night while I was. And they’re usually fairly reliable on the other two points as well. And so. Good for them not to be anxious, and silly for me to be. It’s a new school year, and I’ll just trust and hope that it will be as good as all the ones that preceded it.

Housework anxiety

Sometimes I wish the judges would just show up and resolve my anxieties once and for all.

My most trivial anxieties, that is: not the ones about my children’s future or our family’s carbon footprint, but the ones about my housekeeping abilities.

And perhaps it’s a sign of the current ethos, dominated as it is by American Idol and other judge-centric TV shows, that I feel like the best way to determine how I’m doing is to turn it over to a panel of critics.

I picture them showing up unannounced and walking through the house dispassionately but with purpose, brandishing clipboards and taking notes. I’d see my home anew through their eyes as they gauged the cleanliness of each nook and cranny. Stainless steel appliances polished? Check. Sills recently dusted? Of course. But what’s this sheen of stickiness on the stovetop? What’s up with the piles of homework strewn across the kitchen counter?

I can be confident that the beds are made….well, sort of. The covers are smooth, but please don’t check for hospital corners. That pile of mail on the hall table? It just arrived yesterday, I promise! Yes, I know there are too many boots by the back door, but it’s been a rainy, muddy week. And really, you wouldn’t believe how often I sweep the floors, but with the dog going in and out from the yard so often….

Given my housekeeping shortcomings, it probably seems strange that on some level I actually want these hypothetical judges to show up. But then at least I’d have some answers. Left to my own imagination – and working at home, surrounded by this particular environment throughout the duration of my work day – I vacillate constantly on whether our levels of tidiness, neatness and cleanliness register as mostly all right or mostly insufficient. Our house is a lot less cluttered than many homes I’ve seen. But we don’t have cleaning help, and I’m not someone who always remembers to look for cobwebs up by the skylights. And while it’s true that my kids’ possessions seem to flow one-way only – from their bedrooms into the family room and never the reverse – surely that’s what everyone’s kids are like, isn’t it?

Turning it over to a third party to make the determination is not the answer, I realize. I have to make my own peace with how I choose to keep the house, and I shouldn’t need to think about it from the perspective of an outside arbiter.

Sometimes it reminds me of something the labor-and-delivery nurse who taught our birthing classes before Tim was born said at the first meeting. “How many women do you know who have won awards for how successfully they went through the birthing experience?” she asked. No one responded. “Exactly!” she said. “There isn’t an award for it! You do your best, you do what works for you, and you hope for the best results, without worrying about whether you did it ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’”

The circumstances with housekeeping are a little different, but I still find her words useful. Unlike writing an article or driving a car, nothing depends on whether someone else thinks you’re doing it well or poorly. You just have to do it based on your own priorities.

My priorities? Clutter-free surfaces and sanitary kitchen conditions, and no clothes on the floor. As for the cobwebs by the skylights? Well, those spiders have to live somewhere. And if they’re up there, I can take it as proof that they aren’t on the kitchen counters.

Not-quite-full house

Tim was thrilled with the plan for his friend Austin’s 12th birthday party on Saturday night: laser tag at a nearby entertainment facility, pizza and ice cream for dinner, flashlight tag in the yard after dinner, and then hunkering down in sleeping bags with a bunch of his favorite guys. Past experience caused him to suspect waffles and bacon would likely appear at breakfast time, too.

So I can’t use any apprehensions on Tim’s part as an excuse for my own edginess as I locked up our house before going to bed on Saturday. I always get a little edgy when either of the kids is away for the night, even though I tell myself I shouldn’t.

Tim wasn’t far away, and he was in a house I knew well with a family I knew well. He was just as safe and sound there as at home, and I’m not by nature a worrier anyway. Besides, I love the idea of sleepovers. I have so many happy memories of sleepovers with friends from my own childhood. I should celebrate Tim’s opportunity to do this.

And yet when one family member is out of the house for the night, things just don’t feel quite right.

It’s a little hypocritical of me, because in theory I love the idea of the kids going off to do things without us. Not because I want to be rid of them but because I want them to have that kind of life, one replete with outside influences and opportunities to try different options. Growing up, even without traveling far I learned so much about diversity on the most granular level by spending time with families other than my own: families I babysat for, friends’ families, even relatives. I like it when my kids come home from sleepovers with interesting observations about a household practice or tradition different from our own.

But at the same time, it unnerves me just a little when I don’t know where they are or how they are doing. Walking past their empty bedrooms at night gives me a pang of anxiety: why aren’t they here at home in bed? Well, because they’re sleeping somewhere else for one night. And there’s really nothing wrong with that. Some parents whose children cannot experience simple joys like sleepovers, for any of a variety of reasons, yearn for the pleasure of knowing their child has been invited to a slumber party.

So I try to suppress my mild anxiety as I lock the front door and check that the oven is off. Barring unforeseen problems, Tim will be home in the morning, happy and tired, brimming with tales of the party but also glad to be home. I’ll be glad to have him home, too. Seeing your children head out for a night or two is a positive thing, but welcoming them home is even better, and it’s wonderful to know that chances are, all four of us will go to sleep under the same roof tonight.

Not to worry

For much of the day on Saturday, I looked forward to a late afternoon run. After a hot summer during which it was essential most days to run before about 9 a.m. because of the heat, the cool crisp air was enticing, and so was the thought that the temperature didn’t need to dictate what time I headed out. So I went to Farmers Market, did some cooking, tidied up the house, and then I headed out at about 4:00.

And just as I’d expected, it was a beautiful day for running – the sun was strong by that time of day, but not oppressive, and the sky was bright blue – except that almost as soon as I started, I began to worry that I’d get hungry in the course of the five miles that lay ahead of me. And while it might sound funny to say I was worried about hunger – it’s not exactly like I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from, and the truth is that I have enough of a fat layer built up that I could probably hibernate if I chose to – becoming hungry while out on a run is an unpleasant experience. It makes me feel weak and shaky and clammy, which is not a good way to feel miles from home.

So I continued with the run and continued feeling like I’d sabotaged myself by not having a snack before heading out, until gradually something became clear to me: I actually wasn’t hungry. I was just worried about becoming hungry. And the idea that this might turn into an unpleasant run was ruining what had in fact the potential to be a great run.

So I made myself stop worrying about how things might turn out and instead just enjoyed what was in fact happening.

The more I thought about it afterwards, the more I realized how easily and frequently I allow anxiety about what could transpire subsume pleasure at what is actually transpiring. When we went to Colorado last month, I worried in advance that for various reasons the vacation wouldn’t turn out well. It turned out to be a magnificent vacation, but once I got home I felt like I’d cheated myself out of the fun of the anticipation because I’d been so apprehensive.

Last week an even starker example took shape. I needed to write an email to a colleague asking for a problematic favor that I suspected he would reject. I spent weeks agonizing over the necessity of writing the email. I put it off as long as possible. And then I gradually came to realize that no possible outcome of asking the favor could measure up to my dread of doing so. No matter what he said – even if he said there was no chance he would help me – hearing that wouldn’t be as oppressive as the fear that had built up in me over making the request. And so finally I wrote the email – not so much because I’d conquered my fears as because time had run out – and indeed, hearing his answer wasn’t so bad at all, even though it wasn’t an unqualified “yes.” As I’d come to suspect, no answer could have merited the apprehension I’d allowed to develop.

In a way, I think of this syndrome as “Life as a dentist appointment.” I’ve long dreaded going to the dentist because I have sensitive gums that make routine cleanings extremely uncomfortable for me. I worry for weeks ahead of each appointment, and I usually go into a cold sweat once I get to the dentist’s office. And even though about three years ago my dentist discovered an anesthetic gel that all but obliterates my gum sensitivity problem during cleanings, I still have the same panicky symptoms approaching the appointment, whereas if I looked objectively at the fact that thanks to the new gel, the gum problem isn’t really an issue anymore, I could bypass the awful feelings – the pounding heart, the sweating – altogether.

As it happens, I have a dentist appointment later this week, and I’m commanding myself not to go into a tailspin of anxiety over it. I won’t let apprehension ruin even a few minutes of another run, either, and I’ll try not to let anxiety about outcomes get in the way of my work anymore. It’s easier said than done, but it’s a lesson that’s slowly taking hold. If you have the opportunity to go running on a beautiful day, I now try to remember, just take in the beautiful day; don’t worry about how you might feel a mile or two in. Because the reality is you might not feel that way at all. On Saturday, the gorgeous weather was a certainty; the clammy, ill feeling that comes with hunger pangs while running was only a possibility. I’m trying hard to learn to let the sure thing, and not the anxiety-producing possibility, be my guide.