Between The Photographs: An Ode to Selective Amnesia
My loves.
We took you camping last weekend. And to be quite honest I knew the moment we got into the car that our memories from this trip would be equal parts miserable/hilarious/delightful/excruciating. My anxiety leading up to the weekend was off the charts, imagining every possible scenario we could encounter and every disaster that could befall us, and I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that this catastrophic mentality is something that consistently pervades my thinking these days. Typically when I enter this unpleasant mental space I end up being both vindicated and pleasantly surprised, because maternal instinct is a real thing and, let's be honest, it is also capable of grabbing hold of very strange corners of your brain and twisting them into Stephen King-level imaginary horror story factories. So if you want to skip the rest of the story I'll give you a quick summary: nobody slept enough, most of us had fun (sorry, Lydia), and everyone is still alive.
But the whole experience really is worth documenting, maybe more for me than for you, because these are the days of our lives. Someday you will see pictures from this trip and think, "We were so cute! Look at us enjoying nature and smiling and getting along! It was sunny and we ate s'mores and played in the dirt and hiked in the mountains! You are the best parents ever and we are so grateful for all of the sacrifices you made in order to broaden our horizons and provide us with these beautiful memories and expose us to adventures and new experiences!"
And when you say all these lovely things (which, of course, you will) I may be tempted to remember this experience with a similar level of selective amnesia. This is probably an evolutionary gift that God gave us in order to ensure that we would continue to leave the house with our children and do things like go grocery shopping and camping and to the park, because if we remembered all of the moments with equal gravity we would never be so foolish as to try and do anything in public with our children ever again. I understand this principle, and benefit from it on the daily, but there is also a (probably completely masochistic and unnecessary) longing in me to remember how things felt in the moment. To recall the realities between the photos and the times when I didn't know how we were all going to make it through the next 5 minutes. It feels more whole for me to tell the story that way, so here it goes.
I tried to talk your dad out of going for several days prior to the trip. We were having something of a crisis with all of our kitchen appliances, we had just come off of an extraordinarily busy week doing local service projects with our church, both of you seemed to have the beginnings of some sort of gross snot situation, and we hadn't really had a spare ounce of mental energy to prepare ourselves. It felt so inconsistent to my soul that I would let these things keep me from doing something that I absolutely love to do and knew would be worth it in the end, but my anxiety was working overtime and I just couldn't seem to shake it. Thankfully your dad's stubbornness was far more powerful than my worst case scenario arguments, and before I knew it the car was packed and the sun was shining and there was nothing left to do but go. And go we did.
The driving part went better than expected, and thanks in no small part to children's Dramamine we even had a few moments of peaceful adult conversation before one of you (I'll let you do the math on this one) awoke demanding to listen to Willoughby Wallaby on repeat for the final 45 minutes of the drive. We had a few tense moments when you informed us that you didn't want to listen to that Willoughby Wallaby, you actually wanted the other Willoughby Wallaby (which - spoiler alert - was an entirely different song)...but with a little bit of I Spy and the promise of special colored Goldfish crackers if you could make it to camp without anymore screaming in the car you rallied like a champ and we rolled into the glorious golden Mazama evening ready to set up camp, eat some dinner, and settle in for the night.
We've camped in this area many times, taking advantage of the seemingly endless free and/or cheap places along the river in the National Forest. In our pre-children days when we didn't care so much about luxuries like pit toilets and picnic tables, we would save ourselves the whopping $8 a night and just pull off the road into a makeshift spot as many had obviously done before us. But these days, when our relatively small car was packed to the gills with no extra room for a table or toilet paper and a poop shovel, we decided we would fork over the $16 and find ourselves a nice little quiet corner of an actual established campground. My anxiety had just started to wane a bit as we encountered the road's familiar transition from pavement to gravel and passed a few little weekend roadside homes that others had made for themselves, and then we arrived at the first official campground along the road only to find it full. Not oh-man-that-spot-is-a-little-tight full, but there-is-literally-not-a-single-place-to-put-a-tent full. Huh. Oh well, on to the next one.
Which was, as luck would have it, also full.
My blood pressure was beginning to rise quite rapidly at this point, as I became increasingly convinced that we would never find a place to sleep and would probably get eaten by wolves. Your dad reminded me that there was another campground "at the top," a mere 10 mile drive over a rather sketchy road that would most likely take us another 30-40 minutes (which, in Raffi time, is approximately 16 repeats of Willoughby Wallaby - just a few repeats shy of inflicting irreversable brain damage). Once again we had no way of knowing whether or not said campground would have any space, but ain't nothin' to it but to do it, right? And even though it was now well past both of your bedtimes, you remained wide-eyed and virtually silent as we began our ascent up the bumpy road into the unknown.
Turns out, not many other people had braved this treacherous drive, so when we arrived at the Meadows Campground we found only one other soul and our pick of the campsites. Victory! I took a deep breath of namaste before realizing that it was 45 degrees and windy and we hadn't eaten dinner and still needed to set up our tents and didn't pack nearly warm enough clothes for this elevation and had not yet scratched the surface of what could possibly go wrong. As your dad began to set up the tents by himself in the howling wind and freezing cold, I attempted to feed the two of you a nutritious meal of half a slice of bread and copious amounts of the promised colored goldfish crackers. There would be plenty of time for protein tomorrow.
In case you can't see where this story is going, here's another spoiler alert: everything turned out ok. Did we get to bed super late? Yes. Was it colder than we were prepared for? Absolutely. Lydia, did you poop in the middle of the night and force me to undress all 17 of your layers and did you get an awful diaper rash? Sure did. Is it incredibly difficult to keep a crawling baby from eating all of the things on the ground? Indeed. Did you wake up with the sun at approximately 4:45am because there was not one iota of shade in our campground? Most definitely. Did we consider packing up after dinner on Saturday and driving home before we had to endure another frigid sleepless night? You bet. And perhaps the ultimate question...was all of this idiocy actually worth it? Honestly? Without a doubt.
Micah, by far the greatest joy of this adventure was watching you come alive. You dug holes in stumps (which you affectionately and enthusiasticaly referred to as "stunks"), you were perpetually covered in dirt, and your imagination was in overdrive. You splashed in the river and turned rocks into saws and chisels and ate s'mores and had quiet dance parties in the tent with dad and played with your flashlight until you fell asleep. All of the challenges of being almost 3 were still alive and well, but you you even played peacefully with your sister for a few minutes and that in and of itself is worth celebrating for decades. And through being tired and eating weird meals at weird times and sleeping in a tent for the first time ever and being totally out of your element and having a perpetual stream of snot running down your face and so many slivers in all of your extremities you were remarkably able to rally and that made my heart sing songs of hope for the ages. I felt a brief glimpse into the future where instead of just dragging you along into things that we love in hopes that you might someday love them too...you were actually able to experience and share this kind of love with us.
Lydia, again, I'm sorry. You were too cold and then too hot and then too contained and too sleep-deprived and too hungry to really enjoy much of anything. Your naps were interrupted and your butt was raw and we wouldn't let you eat any of the rocks. When you woke up in the middle of the night and I had to change your diaper, you shivered and howled because I peeled off all your cozy layers and there was nothing to do but hold you tight and snuggle you into my sleeping bag and I have to admit that I didn't hate that even though my left arm was numb for what felt like hours and I almost died when the sun hit our tent and the temperature jumped approximately 6,000 degrees. I take solace in the fact that you won't remember any of these unfortunate things and that by the time you're old enough to read this you will love camping so much that you won't care how awful it was the first time. Also I'm going to take you at your word because you definitely signed "more" several times during our last little excursion at the river.
It's a risky thing exposing our offspring to things we love so passionately, because there's a very real possibility that you will not end up loving them with the same fervor. You will grow up to be your own people with your own likes and interests and tendencies, and those may or may not align with ours which is, to be quite honest, sort of terrifying. But for now, we fight through the insanity of camping and hiking with two children under the age of three because it's a part of what makes us us and it's important that we share that with you. We are holding on to our selves by doing things that are stupidly hard and marginally successful at best, because it helps us stay connected to who we are underneath the fatigue and exasperation of this season of life. We need to remind ourselves that we can survive cold nights in strange places and that sometimes the best memories take a whole lot of work to create.
So here's to all of the beautiful photographs and all of the awful moments in between them, to lazy afternoons at the river and torturous drives home to reality, to dirty faces and seemingly endless screaming fits, to happy hearts and slivers and bug bites and stories you couldn't make up even if you tried.
And here's to selective amnesia. May the odds be ever in our favor.
We took you camping last weekend. And to be quite honest I knew the moment we got into the car that our memories from this trip would be equal parts miserable/hilarious/delightful/excruciating. My anxiety leading up to the weekend was off the charts, imagining every possible scenario we could encounter and every disaster that could befall us, and I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that this catastrophic mentality is something that consistently pervades my thinking these days. Typically when I enter this unpleasant mental space I end up being both vindicated and pleasantly surprised, because maternal instinct is a real thing and, let's be honest, it is also capable of grabbing hold of very strange corners of your brain and twisting them into Stephen King-level imaginary horror story factories. So if you want to skip the rest of the story I'll give you a quick summary: nobody slept enough, most of us had fun (sorry, Lydia), and everyone is still alive.
But the whole experience really is worth documenting, maybe more for me than for you, because these are the days of our lives. Someday you will see pictures from this trip and think, "We were so cute! Look at us enjoying nature and smiling and getting along! It was sunny and we ate s'mores and played in the dirt and hiked in the mountains! You are the best parents ever and we are so grateful for all of the sacrifices you made in order to broaden our horizons and provide us with these beautiful memories and expose us to adventures and new experiences!"
I tried to talk your dad out of going for several days prior to the trip. We were having something of a crisis with all of our kitchen appliances, we had just come off of an extraordinarily busy week doing local service projects with our church, both of you seemed to have the beginnings of some sort of gross snot situation, and we hadn't really had a spare ounce of mental energy to prepare ourselves. It felt so inconsistent to my soul that I would let these things keep me from doing something that I absolutely love to do and knew would be worth it in the end, but my anxiety was working overtime and I just couldn't seem to shake it. Thankfully your dad's stubbornness was far more powerful than my worst case scenario arguments, and before I knew it the car was packed and the sun was shining and there was nothing left to do but go. And go we did.
The driving part went better than expected, and thanks in no small part to children's Dramamine we even had a few moments of peaceful adult conversation before one of you (I'll let you do the math on this one) awoke demanding to listen to Willoughby Wallaby on repeat for the final 45 minutes of the drive. We had a few tense moments when you informed us that you didn't want to listen to that Willoughby Wallaby, you actually wanted the other Willoughby Wallaby (which - spoiler alert - was an entirely different song)...but with a little bit of I Spy and the promise of special colored Goldfish crackers if you could make it to camp without anymore screaming in the car you rallied like a champ and we rolled into the glorious golden Mazama evening ready to set up camp, eat some dinner, and settle in for the night.
We've camped in this area many times, taking advantage of the seemingly endless free and/or cheap places along the river in the National Forest. In our pre-children days when we didn't care so much about luxuries like pit toilets and picnic tables, we would save ourselves the whopping $8 a night and just pull off the road into a makeshift spot as many had obviously done before us. But these days, when our relatively small car was packed to the gills with no extra room for a table or toilet paper and a poop shovel, we decided we would fork over the $16 and find ourselves a nice little quiet corner of an actual established campground. My anxiety had just started to wane a bit as we encountered the road's familiar transition from pavement to gravel and passed a few little weekend roadside homes that others had made for themselves, and then we arrived at the first official campground along the road only to find it full. Not oh-man-that-spot-is-a-little-tight full, but there-is-literally-not-a-single-place-to-put-a-tent full. Huh. Oh well, on to the next one.
Which was, as luck would have it, also full.
My blood pressure was beginning to rise quite rapidly at this point, as I became increasingly convinced that we would never find a place to sleep and would probably get eaten by wolves. Your dad reminded me that there was another campground "at the top," a mere 10 mile drive over a rather sketchy road that would most likely take us another 30-40 minutes (which, in Raffi time, is approximately 16 repeats of Willoughby Wallaby - just a few repeats shy of inflicting irreversable brain damage). Once again we had no way of knowing whether or not said campground would have any space, but ain't nothin' to it but to do it, right? And even though it was now well past both of your bedtimes, you remained wide-eyed and virtually silent as we began our ascent up the bumpy road into the unknown.
Turns out, not many other people had braved this treacherous drive, so when we arrived at the Meadows Campground we found only one other soul and our pick of the campsites. Victory! I took a deep breath of namaste before realizing that it was 45 degrees and windy and we hadn't eaten dinner and still needed to set up our tents and didn't pack nearly warm enough clothes for this elevation and had not yet scratched the surface of what could possibly go wrong. As your dad began to set up the tents by himself in the howling wind and freezing cold, I attempted to feed the two of you a nutritious meal of half a slice of bread and copious amounts of the promised colored goldfish crackers. There would be plenty of time for protein tomorrow.
In case you can't see where this story is going, here's another spoiler alert: everything turned out ok. Did we get to bed super late? Yes. Was it colder than we were prepared for? Absolutely. Lydia, did you poop in the middle of the night and force me to undress all 17 of your layers and did you get an awful diaper rash? Sure did. Is it incredibly difficult to keep a crawling baby from eating all of the things on the ground? Indeed. Did you wake up with the sun at approximately 4:45am because there was not one iota of shade in our campground? Most definitely. Did we consider packing up after dinner on Saturday and driving home before we had to endure another frigid sleepless night? You bet. And perhaps the ultimate question...was all of this idiocy actually worth it? Honestly? Without a doubt.
Micah, by far the greatest joy of this adventure was watching you come alive. You dug holes in stumps (which you affectionately and enthusiasticaly referred to as "stunks"), you were perpetually covered in dirt, and your imagination was in overdrive. You splashed in the river and turned rocks into saws and chisels and ate s'mores and had quiet dance parties in the tent with dad and played with your flashlight until you fell asleep. All of the challenges of being almost 3 were still alive and well, but you you even played peacefully with your sister for a few minutes and that in and of itself is worth celebrating for decades. And through being tired and eating weird meals at weird times and sleeping in a tent for the first time ever and being totally out of your element and having a perpetual stream of snot running down your face and so many slivers in all of your extremities you were remarkably able to rally and that made my heart sing songs of hope for the ages. I felt a brief glimpse into the future where instead of just dragging you along into things that we love in hopes that you might someday love them too...you were actually able to experience and share this kind of love with us.
Lydia, again, I'm sorry. You were too cold and then too hot and then too contained and too sleep-deprived and too hungry to really enjoy much of anything. Your naps were interrupted and your butt was raw and we wouldn't let you eat any of the rocks. When you woke up in the middle of the night and I had to change your diaper, you shivered and howled because I peeled off all your cozy layers and there was nothing to do but hold you tight and snuggle you into my sleeping bag and I have to admit that I didn't hate that even though my left arm was numb for what felt like hours and I almost died when the sun hit our tent and the temperature jumped approximately 6,000 degrees. I take solace in the fact that you won't remember any of these unfortunate things and that by the time you're old enough to read this you will love camping so much that you won't care how awful it was the first time. Also I'm going to take you at your word because you definitely signed "more" several times during our last little excursion at the river. 
It's a risky thing exposing our offspring to things we love so passionately, because there's a very real possibility that you will not end up loving them with the same fervor. You will grow up to be your own people with your own likes and interests and tendencies, and those may or may not align with ours which is, to be quite honest, sort of terrifying. But for now, we fight through the insanity of camping and hiking with two children under the age of three because it's a part of what makes us us and it's important that we share that with you. We are holding on to our selves by doing things that are stupidly hard and marginally successful at best, because it helps us stay connected to who we are underneath the fatigue and exasperation of this season of life. We need to remind ourselves that we can survive cold nights in strange places and that sometimes the best memories take a whole lot of work to create.
So here's to all of the beautiful photographs and all of the awful moments in between them, to lazy afternoons at the river and torturous drives home to reality, to dirty faces and seemingly endless screaming fits, to happy hearts and slivers and bug bites and stories you couldn't make up even if you tried.
And here's to selective amnesia. May the odds be ever in our favor.
Comments
Post a Comment