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falcongrrlTwo days ago, I took the kids over to my mom's house for a relaxing day out on the lake, fishing.
Events attended with a toddler and preschooler, unless said children are in a deep, coma-like sleep the entire time, are never, ever relaxing.
Oh, when will I ever learn?
My eldest is not the type to relax, just on principle. Right now, as a matter of fact, he's watching fishing on ESPN (and no, I'm not kidding)and I'm watching him. Excited jumps, screeches of "Get him!" remind me of my dad's mom when she watches the Dolphins play (the football team, not the fish...or the finned mammals either, for that matter).
My son's high of anticipated glory turns to complete dismay in an instant. "Why can't I ever catch a fish? Why can't I catch a BIG fish? Like him!!"
"You're four," I want to tell him. Four should be an age for grasping earthworms buried in moist soil, for the shock of a small tug on the line. At four, fishing should be either incredibly fun or pathetically boring, period. It should not be a fucking spectator sport.
"He got one! A big one!" my son shouts joyfully. Followed by... "Oh no." I hear tears in his voice.
"What is it?" I say, alarmed.
"I want to taste a bass. I've only ever tasted salmon and I want a bass," he says sadly. "But it's just on TV. They can't give me a big fish." He looks at me in despair.
Drama, excitement, adventure...who says there's nothing interesting on TV anymore? Here at my house, fishing has the advantage of simultaneous drama, both on and offscreen. It's better than Melrose Place.
(The interchangeabilty of the characters, however, is very similar. Instead of bleached-blond big-breasted women in short shorts, you get stocky sandy-haired men wearing long khakis, nascar-reminiscent shirts, and baseball hats with funny flaps. I can't tell any of them apart; even the names - Bob? Bill? Jeff? - are similar. But I digress.)
Lest you think drama is only relegated to TV fishfests, there was plenty of it at my mom's house as well.
My mom has a lake in her backyard, with a small brambly island in its center. There's a woodsy peninsula stretching out next to her house, effectively dividing the lake into two parts. The view is beautiful, and on less exciting days I love to sit out on the screened porch and watch herons and egrets take flight.
Ideally, I think of fishing as a chance to do nothing while looking at least semi-productive. Grab a cane pole, stick a worm on it, put it in the water, gaze at the cork, and proceed to meditate upon the meaning of life. After a few minutes of this, if you should become bored, reading a good book (while sitting on the aforementioned pole, should you by chance get a nibble)is another option.
"A fish bites when you least expect it," my grandmother was fond of saying. It's an axiom of hers I've taken to heart where fishing is concerned, and doubtless it's advice that could be applied to other areas of life as well.
But this Friday, floating out on the lake in a paddleboat with my mom and two kids, I'm not even remotely close to my calm quasi-fishing ideal.
All of my energy is directed at making sure the toddler doesn't drown. On the surface, it seems like a simple enough task. However, on the surface is precisely where my daughter doesn't want to be. She doesn't seem to grasp the incontrovertibility of breathing air. Perhaps she was an amphibian in a previous life.
At any rate, mesmerized either by her own reflection or some siren beckoning to her from the depths, she leans over and glides right into the water, face first, without a pause.
Shocked, reflexes finally kicking in, in what feels like slow-motion, I haul her in. She's my own wet sputtering sea-nymph of a catch. She coughs and gasps in surprise, her mouth forming a narrow "O". As water streams down her hair and neck, I struggle to breathe myself, to force my heart back into some semblance of normal rhythm. She's wearing a life jacket, of course, but it doesn't do her much good when she's suspended face down over the water.
"She's okay, she's okay," I repeat to myself, forcing air back into my own tense lungs, simultaneously worrying about amoebas, bacteria, viruses floating invisibly in the muddy water.
As an isolated incident, it wouldn't have been so bad...but apparently she likes the feeling of semi-drowing, does my girl, because she tries it over and over again the whole time we're out there. And I - scared and sweating in the Florida heat - am determined to not let her be the one that gets away.
My mom and my son fish on. I should mention that my mom and I are also managing to pedal and steer the boat, albeit awkwardly, and that at times I am nursing E in an attempt to keep her attention away from the lascivious lake. Multitasking. My mom and I joke that the sight of me, topless on the boat, and of my mom, inadvertently bending over, may have the elderly gentlemen whose homes dot the lakeside reaching for binoculars, or their own chests.
We somehow manage to go all the way to the other side of the U-shaped lake and back again, keeping E in the boat the whole time (with a couple of near-misses) while following my son's fishing directives as best we can. When we finally arrive back at the dock, exhausted, we're listening to a concert of whines. E's peeved because she's still on land; Daniel, because he has yet to land a fish.
Enter beer. My stepdad's come back after his golf game, prior to the driving range practice portion of the evening, with Corona for all. Corona Light. It tastes like oddly-flavored water to me, and I'm amazed I've ever liked the stuff. It's probably healthier than Bass, though, which I usually have. (That would be the ale, incidentally.)
My mom orders a pizza, anticipating stepdad's arrival soon. They're having a last hurrah before starting a diet on Monday. In the meantime, I take E into my mom's lavish bath, drawing the water deeply, piling in the salts and the lavender bath gel, keeping the temperature temperate for my delicate girl. We splash around, me bathing the beauty and shampooing her hair, rinsing off the smells of the lake. Her wispy strawberry blond fluff and my long frizzy dark-auburnish strands transform into dark, sudsy masses.
A bath always feels divine.
Later, dried off and dressed, we meet my mom and the four year old (still fishing after all this time) and my stepdad and his friend out on the porch for pizza. As we all watch, two fishermen putter up in a bass boat, a tin piece of nothing with a tiny motor that costs a lot more than it should.
We exchange the usual pleasantries and questions. It's obvious, by the practiced way they flip the line into graceful arcs, the quick steadiness of how they reel it in, that they're experienced, maybe even good.
While I'm watching one cast (neither are particularly attractive, but I'm somewhat mesmerized by the loveliness of the movement), the other pulls in a decent-sized bass. Leave it to me to miss the crucial moment. I deal in poetry, not prescience.
My relaxed mood ends abruptly as the four-year-old begins to yell, fists clenched.
"NO!" he says at the top of his voice. "NO! Those are our fish!! They're MY fish and YOU CAN'T HAVE THEM! STOP IT! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!"
I'm aghast at the fact that I've raised this imperious banshee, who's ripping into two grown men for having the audacity to catch a fish. I like to think he has better manners - more goodwill - than this.
The fishermen, for their parts, are trying unsuccessfully not to burst into hilarity at the shrieks of their tiny landlocked rival.
"Shh...you can't talk to people like that, honey," I say, right before he bursts into frustrated tears.
It's at this point that I finally understand the depth of the insult, the injury. My mom soothes him as I am unable to, murmuring things about "next time" and a what a good, patient fisherman he is. I feel like shit, frankly. Scum from the pond below.
Stepdad and I look at each other.
"I just liked watching them," he shrugs.
"Yeah, me too," I say, feeling slightly better. Stepdad is a Republican, while I'm a liberal anarchist; it's surprising we have so much in common.
(Did I just say liberal anarchist? No, I'm sure I didn't. It must be a glare on your screen.)
Later that night, before leaving, I'm talking with my son. I'm trying to forge meaning from the incident without fucking up too terribly. In parenting, as in fishing, there's often a thin line.
"Okay, let's pretend that two guys go fishing together in the same boat," I say. "This one guy catches fish after fish. I mean, he's got like 10 of them. His friend is right there next to him. How many fish does the friend catch?"
This is starting to sound like some bizarre math problem.
"I don't know," my boy says sullenly.
I move into the punchline. "Zero!" I smile at him. "He doesn't catch a single fish! Isn't that silly?"
"So then," I continue, "the next day, the same two guys go out. And the one who didn't catch anything before, guess how many he catches?"
He smiles, waiting.
"Fifteen!" I shake my head in mock amazement. "And the other guy, the one who caught ten before, how many does he catch?"
"Twenty?" he guesses in a small voice.
"Nope. He doesn't catch anything at all. This time, his friend catches all the fish and he doesn't even get one!"
D giggles. "You're silly, Mommy."
I turn serious. "See, that's how fishing works. You don't know if you're going to catch a fish, ever. You never know what will happen."
I think that life is like that too. Despite the obvious reap-what-you-sow component, in the end, a lot comes down to simple chance, infinitesimal drifts and patterns that we just don't see.
"Honey, if you can't handle it, maybe you could try another sport," I say gently. "Maybe fishing's not for you."
Yet, here it is Sunday, two days later, and we're back to watching identical anglers go at it in our living room.
Cross D's ambition with my restlessness, and this is what you get: a four year old who thinks that hard work should and will pay off, but who can't be satisfied with any outcome. There are, after all, always bigger and better fish swimming someplace underneath you.
D's singlemindedness with my constant dissatisfaction. Perhaps this is how Dr. Frankenstein felt.
In the end, perhaps it comes down to this: there's fishing, and then there's life.
And oh, I have so much to learn about them both.
To learn, and to teach.
A+
Events attended with a toddler and preschooler, unless said children are in a deep, coma-like sleep the entire time, are never, ever relaxing.
Oh, when will I ever learn?
My eldest is not the type to relax, just on principle. Right now, as a matter of fact, he's watching fishing on ESPN (and no, I'm not kidding)and I'm watching him. Excited jumps, screeches of "Get him!" remind me of my dad's mom when she watches the Dolphins play (the football team, not the fish...or the finned mammals either, for that matter).
My son's high of anticipated glory turns to complete dismay in an instant. "Why can't I ever catch a fish? Why can't I catch a BIG fish? Like him!!"
"You're four," I want to tell him. Four should be an age for grasping earthworms buried in moist soil, for the shock of a small tug on the line. At four, fishing should be either incredibly fun or pathetically boring, period. It should not be a fucking spectator sport.
"He got one! A big one!" my son shouts joyfully. Followed by... "Oh no." I hear tears in his voice.
"What is it?" I say, alarmed.
"I want to taste a bass. I've only ever tasted salmon and I want a bass," he says sadly. "But it's just on TV. They can't give me a big fish." He looks at me in despair.
Drama, excitement, adventure...who says there's nothing interesting on TV anymore? Here at my house, fishing has the advantage of simultaneous drama, both on and offscreen. It's better than Melrose Place.
(The interchangeabilty of the characters, however, is very similar. Instead of bleached-blond big-breasted women in short shorts, you get stocky sandy-haired men wearing long khakis, nascar-reminiscent shirts, and baseball hats with funny flaps. I can't tell any of them apart; even the names - Bob? Bill? Jeff? - are similar. But I digress.)
Lest you think drama is only relegated to TV fishfests, there was plenty of it at my mom's house as well.
My mom has a lake in her backyard, with a small brambly island in its center. There's a woodsy peninsula stretching out next to her house, effectively dividing the lake into two parts. The view is beautiful, and on less exciting days I love to sit out on the screened porch and watch herons and egrets take flight.
Ideally, I think of fishing as a chance to do nothing while looking at least semi-productive. Grab a cane pole, stick a worm on it, put it in the water, gaze at the cork, and proceed to meditate upon the meaning of life. After a few minutes of this, if you should become bored, reading a good book (while sitting on the aforementioned pole, should you by chance get a nibble)is another option.
"A fish bites when you least expect it," my grandmother was fond of saying. It's an axiom of hers I've taken to heart where fishing is concerned, and doubtless it's advice that could be applied to other areas of life as well.
But this Friday, floating out on the lake in a paddleboat with my mom and two kids, I'm not even remotely close to my calm quasi-fishing ideal.
All of my energy is directed at making sure the toddler doesn't drown. On the surface, it seems like a simple enough task. However, on the surface is precisely where my daughter doesn't want to be. She doesn't seem to grasp the incontrovertibility of breathing air. Perhaps she was an amphibian in a previous life.
At any rate, mesmerized either by her own reflection or some siren beckoning to her from the depths, she leans over and glides right into the water, face first, without a pause.
Shocked, reflexes finally kicking in, in what feels like slow-motion, I haul her in. She's my own wet sputtering sea-nymph of a catch. She coughs and gasps in surprise, her mouth forming a narrow "O". As water streams down her hair and neck, I struggle to breathe myself, to force my heart back into some semblance of normal rhythm. She's wearing a life jacket, of course, but it doesn't do her much good when she's suspended face down over the water.
"She's okay, she's okay," I repeat to myself, forcing air back into my own tense lungs, simultaneously worrying about amoebas, bacteria, viruses floating invisibly in the muddy water.
As an isolated incident, it wouldn't have been so bad...but apparently she likes the feeling of semi-drowing, does my girl, because she tries it over and over again the whole time we're out there. And I - scared and sweating in the Florida heat - am determined to not let her be the one that gets away.
My mom and my son fish on. I should mention that my mom and I are also managing to pedal and steer the boat, albeit awkwardly, and that at times I am nursing E in an attempt to keep her attention away from the lascivious lake. Multitasking. My mom and I joke that the sight of me, topless on the boat, and of my mom, inadvertently bending over, may have the elderly gentlemen whose homes dot the lakeside reaching for binoculars, or their own chests.
We somehow manage to go all the way to the other side of the U-shaped lake and back again, keeping E in the boat the whole time (with a couple of near-misses) while following my son's fishing directives as best we can. When we finally arrive back at the dock, exhausted, we're listening to a concert of whines. E's peeved because she's still on land; Daniel, because he has yet to land a fish.
Enter beer. My stepdad's come back after his golf game, prior to the driving range practice portion of the evening, with Corona for all. Corona Light. It tastes like oddly-flavored water to me, and I'm amazed I've ever liked the stuff. It's probably healthier than Bass, though, which I usually have. (That would be the ale, incidentally.)
My mom orders a pizza, anticipating stepdad's arrival soon. They're having a last hurrah before starting a diet on Monday. In the meantime, I take E into my mom's lavish bath, drawing the water deeply, piling in the salts and the lavender bath gel, keeping the temperature temperate for my delicate girl. We splash around, me bathing the beauty and shampooing her hair, rinsing off the smells of the lake. Her wispy strawberry blond fluff and my long frizzy dark-auburnish strands transform into dark, sudsy masses.
A bath always feels divine.
Later, dried off and dressed, we meet my mom and the four year old (still fishing after all this time) and my stepdad and his friend out on the porch for pizza. As we all watch, two fishermen putter up in a bass boat, a tin piece of nothing with a tiny motor that costs a lot more than it should.
We exchange the usual pleasantries and questions. It's obvious, by the practiced way they flip the line into graceful arcs, the quick steadiness of how they reel it in, that they're experienced, maybe even good.
While I'm watching one cast (neither are particularly attractive, but I'm somewhat mesmerized by the loveliness of the movement), the other pulls in a decent-sized bass. Leave it to me to miss the crucial moment. I deal in poetry, not prescience.
My relaxed mood ends abruptly as the four-year-old begins to yell, fists clenched.
"NO!" he says at the top of his voice. "NO! Those are our fish!! They're MY fish and YOU CAN'T HAVE THEM! STOP IT! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!"
I'm aghast at the fact that I've raised this imperious banshee, who's ripping into two grown men for having the audacity to catch a fish. I like to think he has better manners - more goodwill - than this.
The fishermen, for their parts, are trying unsuccessfully not to burst into hilarity at the shrieks of their tiny landlocked rival.
"Shh...you can't talk to people like that, honey," I say, right before he bursts into frustrated tears.
It's at this point that I finally understand the depth of the insult, the injury. My mom soothes him as I am unable to, murmuring things about "next time" and a what a good, patient fisherman he is. I feel like shit, frankly. Scum from the pond below.
Stepdad and I look at each other.
"I just liked watching them," he shrugs.
"Yeah, me too," I say, feeling slightly better. Stepdad is a Republican, while I'm a liberal anarchist; it's surprising we have so much in common.
(Did I just say liberal anarchist? No, I'm sure I didn't. It must be a glare on your screen.)
Later that night, before leaving, I'm talking with my son. I'm trying to forge meaning from the incident without fucking up too terribly. In parenting, as in fishing, there's often a thin line.
"Okay, let's pretend that two guys go fishing together in the same boat," I say. "This one guy catches fish after fish. I mean, he's got like 10 of them. His friend is right there next to him. How many fish does the friend catch?"
This is starting to sound like some bizarre math problem.
"I don't know," my boy says sullenly.
I move into the punchline. "Zero!" I smile at him. "He doesn't catch a single fish! Isn't that silly?"
"So then," I continue, "the next day, the same two guys go out. And the one who didn't catch anything before, guess how many he catches?"
He smiles, waiting.
"Fifteen!" I shake my head in mock amazement. "And the other guy, the one who caught ten before, how many does he catch?"
"Twenty?" he guesses in a small voice.
"Nope. He doesn't catch anything at all. This time, his friend catches all the fish and he doesn't even get one!"
D giggles. "You're silly, Mommy."
I turn serious. "See, that's how fishing works. You don't know if you're going to catch a fish, ever. You never know what will happen."
I think that life is like that too. Despite the obvious reap-what-you-sow component, in the end, a lot comes down to simple chance, infinitesimal drifts and patterns that we just don't see.
"Honey, if you can't handle it, maybe you could try another sport," I say gently. "Maybe fishing's not for you."
Yet, here it is Sunday, two days later, and we're back to watching identical anglers go at it in our living room.
Cross D's ambition with my restlessness, and this is what you get: a four year old who thinks that hard work should and will pay off, but who can't be satisfied with any outcome. There are, after all, always bigger and better fish swimming someplace underneath you.
D's singlemindedness with my constant dissatisfaction. Perhaps this is how Dr. Frankenstein felt.
In the end, perhaps it comes down to this: there's fishing, and then there's life.
And oh, I have so much to learn about them both.
To learn, and to teach.
A+
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-27 07:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-28 03:21 am (UTC)My mom said that as a child, I was afraid to take a bath because I was convinced I would go down the drain, heh heh...
C.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-11 02:41 pm (UTC)(and writer)
From Michelle/Ava's Mom