Don't forget to have your own experiences

If you are a parent with young children, you're probably in a constant mode of managing situations and experiences. Here's a reminder that when you remember yourself, everyone wins.

Thank you for spending time with The Friscalating Dusklight. I know you are busy, so even taking a few minutes to read what I have written means a lot to me. If you can think of other people in your life who would want to read this, too, please share it with them.

Toward the end of last summer, our family decided to get a membership to the Minnesota Zoo.

Ever since our youngest daughter was old enough to have opinions about outings, we’ve done things like this. We rotate between annual memberships at places like the Science Museum, Children’s Museum and now the zoo.

It’s a fixed cost. You make a financial commitment up front; $150 a year for any of the various memberships seeming to be the general going rate. We’ve even started asking their grandparents to consider giving these memberships as holiday gifts to us.

Less stuff in our house. More memories to make. And we have a built-in, go-to place on countless rainy, too hot, too cold or randomly unplanned days throughout the year.

We are privileged to afford such things. We are lucky to live in the Twin Cities, with plentiful options. We didn’t have much by way of kid-friendly cultural entertainment as I was growing up in North Dakota.

But zoos were centerpieces of a lot of trips I took growing up, in part because I love animals. I’ve been to the Winnipeg Zoo countless times (yes, Winnipeg is the closest major city to Grand Forks, about half as far away as Minneapolis). For a long time in my youth, I relentlessly wore a Denver Zoo visor, a souvenir from a trip to Colorado to visit relatives.

All three of our kids love animals, too. As COVID concerns started to fade and we started venturing out more, Como Zoo in St. Paul became a popular family destination (though 75% of the time the kids tried to divert us to the Como Town amusement park next door, and 100% of the time after they discovered Dippin’ Dots at the zoo they demanded we visit that stand).

But we hadn’t been as a family of five to the “big zoo” until we bought the membership last summer.

I was extremely excited. I knew our kids were going to love it. I needed them to love it. I pre-imagined (a specialty of mine) how they would react to the size and scope.

They did love it the first time and on subsequent trips.

But like any big place that you take three young kids, at the zoo there are about 45 logistical challenges, 87 near-accidents, 22 times when someone is either hungry or thirsty, and way more trips to the bathroom than there would be if we were at home.

As parents, my wife and I end up spending a massive amount of energy managing their experience at the zoo and similar places.

Wait, don’t climb on that. No, don’t eat the popcorn that was on the floor. I’m not sure where the bathroom is, but we’ll find one after we’re done looking at the monkeys. That stuffed animal will be way less expensive if we buy it later at a different store, but that’s a good idea – let’s remember it for your birthday. We don’t hit our sister. You need to say you’re sorry or there won’t be screen time later.

It continues in a slightly different form when all their basic needs are met and we can actually appreciate the zoo. Listen, that wolf is howling! Can you hear it? Come over here, I don’t want you to miss it. The tiger is kind of far away. Do you see it? Here, I’ll lift you up. You want to do the scavenger hunt again? You kind of got bored halfway through last time. Are you sure?

This is true, like I said, anywhere we go with our kids. But it feels particularly acute for me at the zoo because I want them to love it and because there are a lot of moving parts.

Also: It’s because of me. I realized this on our most recent trip there.

I was so caught up managing their experience — sure, during times our kids needed it but also plenty of others when they didn’t — that I realized I wasn’t really present. Or, to be more precise: I was there for my kids but I wasn’t there for myself.

We had finished looking at the Komodo dragon and I could stop needlessly thinking that our 4-year-old son — who has an interest in but also the proper fear of Komodo dragons — would somehow overcome multiple barriers and hop into the pit.

We rounded a corner and hustled toward the flamingos.

But during a short interlude of relative calm, a feeling washed over me.

I was able to look at the flamingos as someone who likes flamingos and not just as a dad who was making sure his daughter who loves flamingos was enjoying herself.

I said this to myself, and I have repeated it countless times since then:

Don’t forget to have your own experiences.

It’s a great mantra for life, but it’s ridiculous to have to remind myself of it, right? What else is living but having your own experiences?

The speed and scope of modern life, a theme I have returned to multiple times already on this site, is part of the challenge in having genuine experiences.

Our kids (just like us adults) have been influenced by the pandemic in ways that we won’t fully understand for years or decades. Social media, politics and countless other factors have contributed to an underlying anxiety in our everyday lives.

The way I like to try to calm that anxiety is by feeling like I have control over a situation. And the way I can feel in control over a situation sometimes is not just to manage it but to overmanage it.

For fathers and mothers, some of the challenge of maintaining their own sense of presence and self is just the nature of how parenting has been for generations.

Parenting is work, and it is often selfless. You don’t know exactly what you are signing up for — if you don’t have kids yet, don’t trust any parent who tells you what to expect — but you find out quickly.

We want our kids to have great experiences. We want them to love the things we love, and we want to see that love through their eyes. This isn’t exactly living vicariously but in a way that reminds us that we have passed something worthwhile down.

I feel this way even when our oldest daughter delights in the seemingly random things I delight in: New pairs of socks. The way clean sheets feel the first time you crawl into bed. “Ah, it’s just the simple things,” she said recently, as my heart grew.

I was having an experience through her experience, which comes with great satisfaction but also at an imperceptible individual cost.

But I do think a significant slice of the struggle to maintain that sense of experience and self is the nature of parenting in this exact moment, the synergy of those two previous ideas.

Raising happy, healthy kids in today’s world is as exhausting as it is daunting. Since I have never been a parent at any other time, I can’t say for certain that it is harder than ever, but data suggests it is.

When that starts to feel overwhelming, though, I have returned lately to the importance of my own experience.

Let yourself exist. Let yourself be a little lighter. Some things can be easier if you just let them.

When I can live in this space, I’m not only a more satisfied person. I feel like a better parent.

Far from the zoo, just a couple blocks from our house, there is a corner store that the kids always beg us to stop at. We’ve been saying “yes” a little more often lately, including the other night.

I brought the kids and our pug down on a walk to pick up a few things and told them all that they could each get “one small thing” at the store, which almost always means a sweet treat.

They took forever to make the big choice of a small thing, but we weren’t in a hurry. Not everything is urgent.

The cashier let our pug come into the store and gave him a big treat. The one main thing we needed to buy wasn’t even in stock.

But we eventually left, and the kids were so happy. They love the small things. They love a late-evening walk with the dog. Our older daughter took off her sweatshirt to give to our always-chilly younger daughter, and I smiled at the generosity.

I felt the unseasonably warm but still cool March air, and I looked up at countless stars in the sky on a perfectly clear night.

It’s all an experience, and I didn’t even have to remind myself to have it.