Back in the day, when my husband and I were in our East Coast urban professional/academic stage, we enjoyed getting away from it all by backpacking. At the time, we didn’t realize that we were building mental and emotional muscles that we would need in our later work as parents. I believe we just found our normal lives too easy, so we had to go looking for ways to enhance the challenge.
Coddled by the luxury of microwaveable TV dinners, Starbucks, and the Safeway salad bar, we felt the need to enter a parallel universe where even the water had to be cooked on a folding white gas stove that took 30 minutes to assemble and light. Finding that sleeping on our apartment’s rock-hard futon wasn’t challenging enough, we would trudge six miles into the backwoods of Virginia to sleep on tree roots and gravel. I suppose it was essentially an ascetic experience, from which I’m sure we would have benefited spiritually had we not approached each backpacking excursion as something to be checked off a task list.
But then there came pregnancy, birth and infancy, and suddenly, we no longer needed to add artificial difficulty to our lives. Moreover, any dreamy notions we might have harbored of introducing our offspring to the beauties of nature through backpacking swiftly faded. We last attempted a wilderness weekend in the summer of 1996, with our ten-month-old son who was at that point still creeping along on his belly like a snake. Left more or less to his own devices for the five minutes it took us to pop up the tent, we fetched him back out of the dirt, clutching in both small, damp fists rusty bottle caps and cigarette butts, and with a filthy tummy that smelled vaguely of the stale beer-tinged urine of rowdy woodsmen. After 24 hours during which the baby, like some tow-headed manifestation of the infant Dalai Lama, was never again allowed to set foot on the ground, we concluded that parenting was plenty arduous enough with all the modern conveniences.
It was, therefore, a sure sign that our parenting challenge was in an ebb tide when I recently found myself waxing nostalgic over the REI spring catalog. Suddenly, I was picturing John and me boiling twice the water for four cups of reconstituted chicken teriyaki, and fantasizing about lying under the starry sky on our Thermarests, pointing out the constellations to two awe-struck campers.
Granted, I could also imagine the whining, arguing and protesting of our unwilling trail buddies as they were forced to trudge through the woods carrying their luggage on their feeble little backs. But by now, coping with griping is old hat. Maybe this spring is the right time to increase the level of difficulty.