Welcome to another installment of “a small talk question sends me into a philosophical quandary for days” wherein I try to sort out my thoughts on quiet days and my continuing bafflement with how people think about children.

I feel like I was prepared for the majority of things that would come at me once I became a parent, even prepared for the unknown. But one thing that has kept me continually perplexed through our oldest and now as we work on the second installment is just how many times people would want to take my children away from me. Now, I am not saying they are kidnapping or removing them from my custody, but just the seemingly heinous number of times people, places, and/or ads want to remove me from my children’s company.

I suppose I should explain the context for this. A few weeks ago now, was my oldest’s birthday. First time we planned an event birthday (inside because it’s 9,000 degrees during summer birthdays). He wanted to have a bowling party. To back up again, I grew up in a familial organization in which every holiday or celebration was the fuse for some major event to occur so that there would be a reason someone wasn’t attending something. Instead of just saying, “I don’t want to do that” chaos would ensue.

I realized this past week that, even though I am decades removed from that–having now lived out of it longer than I had lived in it–my nervous system is still not having it. Usually it’s pretty manageable if things are smaller and taken care of at home or not, well, out. Planning the event part was not any of that and by the morning of the event I was so high strung and so concisely tuned to my environment scanning for danger I could see electrons forming covalent bonds. It was like walking into the Matrix. And to make matters worse, I didn’t know that the bowling alley had simultaneous parties going on and when we got to the bowling alley and another vehicle pulled up with party balloons I am pretty sure the world turned to shades of quarks and whatever they might be made of. IT was like walking into the code in the Matrix. I honestly didn’t realize I could have been so tuned up, and walking into the place I could read every micro-expression and knew which kids lied about brushing their teeth that morning and which adults were committing tax fraud.

If you don’t come from this particular stock, then you may not realize that you just don’t “come down” from this kind of thing when everything starts going smoothly or whenever the events are all finished. It takes a looooooonngggg time, and it is exhausting. And having a bunch of people in town for an event exacerbates the entire process. Which is where the really innocuous question comes in. The party was on a Saturday and the grandparents where in from out of town, staying in a hotel with a pool, so my wife and kids all went to the pool that Sunday morning to swim with them. I stayed at the house moving furniture because that is the sane way to exert control over something. Actually that is only part of this issue the other part is that we were finally able to find a china cabinet to put in the front room to display lego builds and things really did need to be reorganized. Kismet.

Before they left to go back home, one set of grandparents came back by to pick up old toys to take to their house for their other grandchildren to play with. And my wife’s stepfather asked “Enjoying a quiet day? I’ll bet you don’t get many of those?” And I absolutely get the tenor of the question, but I can still feel the chemical composition of the air and it sent me into a deep dive into what that actually meant and back to thinking about the times someone has said “oh isn’t it great when they get old enough to play by themselves and you don’t have to be in there?”

It’s not quiet days I crave, it’s peaceful ones.

First off, my kids are cool, I like hanging out with them. Secondly, we live in a soul sucking world in which someone else’s clock manages what we do with our time and most of the year I don’t see them that often during the week. In fact, back before school let out I did a little timekeeping and while my wife and daughter were home a bit before six and their started bedtime routine at seven-thirty we had dinner and kitchen cleanup and I was able to physically be present with my daughter for about 12 minutes. Just running that as an average means I get a grand total of one whole hour with her on Monday through Friday. In what realm of existence is this conscionable???

Now that my son is in school I get a little more time with him because I pick him up from school and we have the time together before I have to cook dinner before my wife gets home with my daughter. But it’s still not a lot of time, and it’s not rested time because we’ve both come off of a day at work and a day at school. The situation is similar, though reversed for my wife. So weekends are what we have. And they aren’t lasting as long as they used to.

So, yeah, when we have things to do, I try not to do them on the weekends but it isn’t exactly that I can get into play with my kids when I do have the time. Growing up mainly around adults seems to have severely stunted my ability to play. Not to mention the constant looming background vibration that at any moment someone in the house is going to yell “shut up” to the kids playing noisily in the playroom, or complain about the splash pad and the pool killing the grass in the back yard. It’s my house and no one does this, but the specter is still there.

Summers are an even more riotous tangle of time management though I do get to spend more time with my son as he comes to work with me part of the day a few days a week. He’s been helping me with exhibits for a few years now and has even branched out on some smaller exhibits of his own in some small cases by my office. I am going to add those to the Cabinets of Curiosity page on here to keep track. Summer is when I see more and more options to drop off kids and summer camps and a host of other ways to offload the offspring. And I get it, not everyone is off during the summer like my wife who is a teacher, and not everyone can bring their children to work with them. Even some people who work the same place I do don’t have the room or projects to facilitate someone in the office. Making exhibits is more interesting for kids than, say, spreadsheets.

We have worked out a schedule where both kids are home some days with both parents, some days one kid is home all day with one parent, and some days one parent (not me) has the day to themselves, so what I am really complaining about? It’s less complaining than trying to make it make sense. I think a lot about all the old “& Sons” businesses their used to be where kids come in as part of the enterprise of their family (sometimes even if they didn’t want to), and how that meant there was effectively a lot more time spent together. Even growing up on farms kept the family interaction, and unless someone moved away the family compound grew, (for good or ill).

It’s hard to explain to people who grew up spending loud time together, or went on trips or things like that that sometimes just being in the same house is enough to be together. I was telling my son last night that when I still lived in the town I grew up there were times even as an adult I would take my book to my grandfather’s house and we’d sit reading. Sure, we’d talk when I got there or if we stopped for lunch or something, but there were a lot of “quiet” days, but they were days together, they were peaceful.

There are enough things battling to fill our days, and I do want my kids to experience nature and parks and trips but I also want to be able to be fully present in those events as well, and when they get planned from the outside, no matter how well-intentioned, it’s problematic. One of the things we have always tried to do is to fiercely protect their sleep, and now as they are getting older, I am trying to fiercely protect their boredom. I think it’s working as the oldest has said, “I am going to go think before I do my art,” and he gets that the down time is where the ideas for the “do” time comes from.

We don’t have enough of that down time. Specifically because there is so little of time to begin with. The desire to fill all of that limited time with something, or anything, is real and is detrimental to mental and physical health. And I am not sure exactly where the need for people to take my kids to give me time to myself comes into play. I don’t need time away from my kids, maybe some time away from worrying about their safety and well-being while they are playing would alleviate a bit of that nervous tension but that’s just part and parcel of parenting. I am not talking about helicopter parenting, I am talking about letting them do dangerous things carefully, and having free play, but still knowing that at any moment things could go south. And, honestly, they need to, so they can develop the appropriate methods for dealing with setbacks and getting hurt, not to say I want to pencil in an ER visit, but still.

My problem stems from the fact that I want to be with my children but I don’t want to be around other people. Which is why this is a 2700 word stream of consciousness from two weeks of sporadic notes and not a treatise on parenting in the 21st century. The larger point is I am sure there are other people who are feeling the same way as the conveyor belt of life is constantly speeding up and we’ve already got as much chocolate as we can hold. There has to be a better way.

This doesn’t even get to the insane amount it costs to have your kids out of your house. And the mental stress of picking a daycare. We have been extremely fortunate with the ones our kid have been in, save the earliest one my son went to. And to be fair that one was great until he wasn’t an infant anymore. It might also be useful to point out that if you can afford daycare for your kids you can keep that budget line in and send your kids to private school. Homeschooling tends to be on the increase which would be great if it weren’t the religious zealots leading the charge to make sure their children aren’t exposed to anything but the twisted curricula that keeps them all as far from free thinking, free expression, and free will as possible.

The solution is rather simple: we need to be financially independent. Really. Having someone to cook, clean, garden, shop, would go really far in extending those same 24 hours everyone has. And yes, there are people that you can pay to do these things, but as far as cleaning, I am in less need of my baseboards being dusted than I am for someone to unload and reload the dishwasher every day. I could hire someone to mow the grass, but they would need to mow around all the wildflowers and the sunflowers, and I am not even sure about the legality of someone cooking you food every day. Are personal chefs bonded and insured?

Digressions aside, I’ll say again, I don’t need quiet days, I need peaceful ones. Loud peaceful days watching my kids play, or even hearing them play through the walls or open doors. Or watching them read their books or play cards. That’s the need, not the thing I need or want to be saved from. Just knowing they are there is enough, really. And it gives me more opportunities to work through my own outlying issues in the comfort of our own house. I’d also like to instill in my children that you don’t need to constantly be doing something or constantly be away from the house to enjoy yourself. I know I wanted to be away from my house as much as possible and would have probably even loved year-long school, but I have also endeavored to be the house that didn’t replicate that feeling.In fact I think that one of the reasons I have bought so many books for my kids is that they were my escape back then, and I wanted them to have the same outlet in case I screwed up and ended up with a domicile in which they needed it too, only to later realize several things about that, not least of which that they don’t need to. Thank goodness. But hey we still have a lot of really cool books.

I get plenty of time to myself later at night after they’ve gone to bed and I stay up and read or write. In fact I can get an order of magnitude more time to myself before midnight than I have with my youngest during the week. I’m already dealing with enough of being the less fun parent because my time at home is taken up making sure the house is running in order and that we eat on time and everything. It doesn’t make the work any easier when my kids aren’t home, it just makes it lonelier.

Don’t misconstrue this, either. Being alone is fine. There were years before I was married and had kids that I was alone and things were quiet. There are people who freak out when their friends have kids and no long are the person they used to hang out with. “They’ve forgotten who they were” or “Their kids are their identity now” which is a bizarre thing to say out loud because yes, once you become a parent (if you are working on being a good one) you aren’t who you were, you’ve changed your identity and your responsibilities have changed. When we had the first dr. appt after our son was born one of the other new mothers in the waiting room was talking about how she was going to leave her then week old with her mother so she could go float the river. These two are non-congruent existences. You are different now, your priorities should change with them. And if you do things right, your kids will want to be a part of what you are doing. This is true whether you are floating the river or making dinner. Though one is probably not as child-friendly an environ as the other.

Kids don’t want kids’ things. They want adult things kid-sized. This goes for toys as well as experiences. Maybe that’s why I don’t dig the whole take the kids out while you have a day to yourself thing. My oldest has been helping cook since he was 18 months old. It’s also a little bit more time I can steal away to spend with him, in a way that isn’t overwhelming to me, and does it increase the efficiency of baking? Absolutely not. But it does bring peace, even if it is dressed up as floured-covered chaos. But that’s why we have our chef’s caps and aprons.