Some people's kids

We don't have to totally ditch our dirtbag past to be good parents and work in schools

“Did you pack the sleeping bags?” Mariah asked as I drove us out camping. As we approached our destination. As our three-year-old and five-year-old picked fights in the back seat.

“I got the two that were just sitting there. Did you grab the other ones?”

“No. I don’t know where they are.”

“Shit, me neither.”

“Goddammit.”

It had been a long week. And we had cleaned the house Saturday morning before loading up for the camping trip. Because the house needed it. But we also needed to forget about the house, about trying to buy it, about our jobs at the school, plus the new jobs Mariah was applying to. Carrying all that weight tired us out too much to consider weekend adventures for most of the winter. But now, like an overloaded backpack, our only option seemed to be to shrug off the whole load and let it fall where it may—for the weekend at least.

That was our routine in college. We had such ridiculous adventures every weekend that we needed the week to recover from the weekend, instead of the other way around. Recently, though, I would have wagered we’d let those kinds of weekends fall by the wayside for good.

But now I realized those past dirtbag selves had been cocooned inside our grownup parent skins, and were now tearing out, like the cockroach alien in Men in Black stepping out of the farmer’s body that it had used as a disguise.

Now, the dirtbags were out. These were the people who forgot a lot of things but made even more memories. These were the people who ground their coffee in a sock by smashing it between two rocks. Then put the sock back on. So we weren’t turning around for more sleeping bags.

We were with our kids, and we would show them how we do things.

But it took me a moment to remind myself of that. If I were taking care of other people’s kids, as I am on weekdays, then I probably would have gone back for the sleeping bags. But I could also blame my lack of mental capacity and patience on all that time I’d spent with other people’s kids.

An evening the previous week, I’d just picked my kids up from the playground behind their daycare and walked them inside to get their gear out of their cubbies. I heard one of the workers at my kids’ preschool getting frustrated with her own kids for taking out too many toys so near the end of the day. I’m not sure she heard us enter. But I understood. She saw me and said, “I spend all day being patient with other people’s kids and then I don’t have any left for my own.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. For years I’d seen how Mariah was when she got back from her day working in education, but now I knew the feeling a little myself. The feeling that we’re using up all our patience on other families, or just on our jobs in general. It makes for some frustrating Friday nights, when neither us nor our kids have the energy for patience, let alone planning a weekend adventure.

This makes me consider a workplace without kids. If I wrote all day during the week, I suspect I would have more patience for my kids on nights and weekends. But I’m also compelled to do something to contribute to the educational system my kids are soon to enter. Beyond just paying taxes. What would it say if I sent my kids to a place that I couldn’t stand myself? I like to think that I’m making school a little more tolerable for kids. Making it a place that I can stomach sending my own kids to. And I’m doing that by bringing a little bit of my dirtbag side into it.

I don’t think it’s necessary to “dress down” for gym. I’ve hiked and climbed and camped and fished and slept in jeans, so why not wrestle and play dodgeball in them? Why not get a little (or a lot) sweaty at recess, and just let it dry while sitting in class all afternoon? Maybe it’s not professional. But my job title is paraprofessional, so maybe it’s at least that. I got a black eye yesterday. I have mat burns on my elbows. One of my finger joints seems to be permanently swollen. And I don’t get paid a whole lot. But the flip side of that is that I don’t get paid enough not to have fun. Certainly not enough to enforce every school rule and policy. I hope my kids spend some of their school days with some people with similarly dirtbaggy attitudes.

In my post Mr. Jake’s Fight Club, I mentioned the native Tlingit people knowing the importance of getting away from one’s kids, so much so that traditionally aunts and uncles took the brunt of child rearing after the kids reached a certain age. This helped avoid parents being too hard on their own kids, or too easy, or both. Like many, I’m probably doing both. But why doesn’t spending time with other people’s kids give us more patience for our own?

I think the hangup is that this is not traditional Tlingit society. We are not spending time with other people’s kids as we se fit, but in the modern educational system. Constraints on the curriculum often make it feel both busy and boring. With standardized testing seemingly always just around the corner, there’s little leeway for teachers to delve into topics they’re specifically interested in, and specifically skilled in. Let alone the opportunity for students to do the same. This is far from how I imagine Tlingit aunts and uncles aim to teach their nieces and nephews. And it’s far from the adventures I would incite. I get that a standardized curriculum is important to a degree, but when teachers are encouraged to teach the same thing in nearly the same way, and students are encouraged to learn the same thing in the same way, everyone gets the sinking feeling that they’re replaceable if not downright redundant.

So while I mostly enjoy being around other people’s kids, and while my kids have an ok time at their preschool, and they learn to play well with others and get a good preparation for probably at least 12 more years of school, my kids aren’t spending their days how they would with me (or Mariah, or their aunt or grandparents). And I don’t spend my days with other people’s kids how I would if it were up to me. Except I take them outside sometimes even when I know they have work to do, and to the mat room for wrestling and dodgeball, in hopes that they will be able to focus a little easier after moving around, or at least that they have another reason to show up at school.

But I am not taking them skiing when there’s snow, biking when there’s clear road, or fishing when the water looks nice. We are not having adventures in wild places. We are not learning to live off the land, as is still possible here, almost as much so as it was traditionally for the Tlingit people.

Camping with our kids, we were not working from a standardized curriculum, we were doing our dirtbag thing.

“I could just sleep in the car. Or burrito myself in the tent fly,” Mariah offered.

“Yeah, I’ve done that. Remember when I left for my month-long trip in the desert and forgot my sleeping bag? I wrapped myself in my tent and there was frost on it the first night.”

“Yeah, we’ll figure it out.”

And we did. We walked barefoot on the mudflats and saw barnacles and clams sticking their tongues out in the shallow tidepools, eeking every morsel out of the open water they wound up with, even at low tide. Levi slipped and fell face-first in the mud and we had to change him into his spare clothes within half an hour of getting out of the car. We found a good place to put the tent that night, and Mariah burritoed herself and our shivering dog in the tent fly and slept some. Tephra and I squeezed into the same sleeping bag and she literally slept tight against my chest and I slept some. Levi got his own sleeping bag, promptly slid to the bottom and snored for most of the night. We woke early with the light and warmed up with multiple rounds of hot chocolate and coffee, before reheating the cheesy beans and rice from the night before.

It wasn’t perfect, but it’s a good memory for Mariah and me. And our kids, I think. Though it might be frowned on to put other people’s kids through our kind of adventure, I sure hope other people will for our kids. That’s how the tribe is supposed to work.