On my mind: snowboarding and babysitting

Honestly, skip this post if you are unprepared for rambling irrelevance. I apparently needed to exercise some demons today. Oh, and find a friggin' babysitter.

It would be a total lie to say that I took to snowboarding as easily as I thought I would. I knew it would be hard and that I would fall, but I imagined by the end of the day I’d be pretty proficient, able to at least handle the small hills without many wipeouts. And I might have been had it not been for the thousands of pint-sized skiers and shredders who hit the hill Sunday afternoon and totally freaked me out by either going really fast around me, really slow in front of me or by wiping out as many times as I did and lying in the snow dramatically after each fall, a little hazardous slalom course, the likes of which I certainly wasn’t ready to handle.

But all in all it was as fun as I thought and I did eventually feel like I got the hang of it. Had I not been so worried about taking the children out and having to face off against their eager parents watching from the bottom of the tow rope (and by worried I mean if I hadn’t thrown myself eagerly into the powder every time I saw anyone in front of me in order to avoid collision), I’m pretty sure I would have spent a little more time upright. I can’t even talk about Nate, who looks like he was born on a snowboard after only two times out. He was up on the chair lifts and down parts of the hill I didn’t even get near enough to look at, but he was also patient and supportive of me wiping out on the seedling hill through the best of the morning. This is huge for me: I usually HATE when he’s better at something than I am and can’t stand to have him instruct me, but this time it really worked for us and I didn’t call him condescending once.

The full injury count is hard to assess at this time because I stupidly went to an insanely tough conditioning class at the gym on Monday, so I’m not sure if the sore muscles are due entirely to one of the other. But I did knock over Cameron, my faithful and wonderful 18-year-old teacher who wondered several times if I was deaf or just unable to follow instruction. I hit my head a lot (next time a helmet for sure), overworked my legs, bruised my knees, knocked my shoulder hard and overworked my quads, and Nate either pulled a muscle or worsened a very small hernia he has had most his life. Who the heck cares? I can’t wait to back on Thursday night. I watched the X Games for inspiration and find myself standing in my snowboard stance while doing dishes or just hanging out, and I’ve been dreaming about weaving down the hills—toe - heel, toe - heel—the last few nights.

Nate and I were lucky on Sunday to be able to go boarding together because Laura (pronounced Yo-ra by darling C) was kind enough to offer to spend the whole morning with Clementine, a morning which must have been a hell of a lot of fun because C now asks for Yora morning, noon and night. Having Laura and her clan so close and so involved in our lives is a saving grace—they are the closest thing to family we have in Detroit, and that is something I’m really missing as my life with a kid gets more and more back to normal. It’s not just that I miss hanging out with my family…although I really do…it’s that I’m finding it hard to find a sitter for those still-rare nights (or days) that Nate and I actually want to leave the house together. Alone. Just the two of us. No Clementine.

I do work in a high school, so it’s not like there is a shortage of kids around. And it’s not like I’m still the neurotic new mother who won’t leave her kid with anyone. Sure, I would like to leave C with someone she knows or can come to know (we’ve had a few one-hit wonders), but the real problem is the extra expense of a sitter. It’s hard to justify a $20 movie night that ultimately costs $40 and is replete with constant cell phone checking, the possibility of interruption and the nagging sense that we’re on a schedule, that we MUST be back when we say we will. I have Laura, but anyone who has someone like that in her life will tell you it’s a careful balance—you never want to take advantage, to overuse that go-to person to the point of fatigue. I feel like I need to protect Laura for the important stuff, the big stuff, not just the dinners out and little errands. I know she’d balk and say whenever, whatever, but I just can’t abuse that.

The real issue, I think, is that when I’m looking for a sitter I feel the same pit-of-the-stomach dread I felt when I was in a doctor’s office recently and read some common-sense article about how all parents should have a will in case of disaster and an emergency bank account with 6 months of expenses in it. Holy shit, I thought, we are totally unprepared for anything out of the ordinary—job loss, death, anything.. And although not being able to find a sitter so we can go out Friday night is hardly on par with this, it does make me feel totally vulnerable, at the whims of another person, a little bit out of control. It’s hard for me to ask for help—I’m always worried I’m inconveniencing someone or asking too much—and even when I do ask, it’s hard for me to trust that it will all work out in the end. Hiring someone is easier than asking a friend to help out, but even that isn’t foolproof. How many times as a teenager did I flake out on a job? Karma is a bitch, baby.

Let me remove my wrist from my forehead a minute: I do realize the sitter conundrum isn’t dire. I realize that if we did run into some emergency, something unexpected, the people we know are awesome. I have no doubt that we’d be covered in the face of a catastrophe. But what about when we had theater tickets (with Laura) and our babysitter backed out that morning? Who do you call then without feeling like you’ve abandoned your kid with the first warm body you can find? More importantly, how do you justify leaving your kid with a series of strangers all the time? And how do you ask your friends with kids of their own or busy lives to rearrange everything so you can go out and be footloose? All of our friends around here who have kids also have grandparents and families that sit for them, so it’s not like we can trade a night for a night. Our friends who don’t have kids are either too busy or just not interested in kids and would be totally traumatized by a night alone with my picky, lovely little girl. If we lived in a neighborhood that wasn’t the white trash hole ours is, I imagine I could have some sort of bohemian co-parenting arrangement with the great family down the street or next door, an open door kind of thing that made life a constant sleepover, an easy give and take. These utopias surely exist somewhere, right?

This would be so much easier if we lived near our families (even though they are scattered all over). I’d feel so much more relaxed, so pleased knowing she was hanging out with her grandparents, her cousins, her aunts and uncles. Even if we didn’t do it a lot, it would be so nice to know that the option was there in case we ever did get a whim. Nate and I are doing a tremendous job dividing labor and splitting the work up—I get out as often as I like while he stays home with C (and vice-versa, though he is such a hermit I have to force him out). The problem with all this splitting and dividing is that we’re doing very little together these days beside pass out on the couch after a long day and let insipid TV shows decay our brain and once lively conversation. Of course there are no easy solutions—my sister lives close to my mom and has more than once admired my life as a pioneer in family-free lands. I guess I should just quit my bitching and get back to the constant phone calls in search of SOMEONE to sit.

Again, sorry for rambling.