Give me an H! Give me an O!

In September, we finally relented and let Samantha sign up for cheerleading. Or rather, Andy relented. I was OK with it from the time she expressed interest in it two years ago.

We had been reading off a newspaper flyer about all the kids’ activities offered by the city rec department: soccer (spoken with a hopeful voice), rock climbing, T-ball, gymnastics, cheerleading, ... . Samantha jumped at the word as if she had known what cheerleading was since birth. She was five at the time, and Andy said absolutely, positively, unequivocally no.

In truth, Samantha is a born cheerleader. She’s naturally loud — voted “loudest camper” at summer day camp this year — prone to spells of jumping around with arms flailing, and attracted to skimpy, sparkly outfits.

But the very idea of the sport, if I can call it that, gives Andy fits. He seems to think that eight weeks of cheerleading will start our 7-year-old down a career path to waitressing at Hooters. Or on the payroll of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

I, on the other hand, see the rec center program as an avenue to get cheerleading out of her system before an age where wearing tight outfits and cheering on the sidelines for boys to score a T-O-U-C-H-D-O-W-N really is loaded with sexual innuendo. Primary school cheerleaders aren’t sexual objects. They’re cute. Sort of. And why not let her see what it’s all about? To say no now could lead to her harboring the urge for a decade, then dropping out of college to pursue her unfulfilled cheerleading dream.

When I was a kid, cheerleading was the only activity available for girls, at least until high school, when field hockey and cross-country running were added to the menu. We didn’t even have to ask. Our mothers signed us up, and every Saturday in the fall, in their dresses and high-heel shoes, they drove us to the flood plain that served as an elementary school football field.

We thought our cheers actually helped the boys and that they would look over and see how cute we were in our pigtails and short skirts. We weren’t destined for careers at Hooters. We knew one day we were supposed to date those boys, but only if they asked first. We were housewives in training — attractive and supportive, cheering on the boys in their endeavors, without anyone — except our mothers — cheering our own.

By the time we were in high school, only the cool girls were picked to be cheerleaders. And the squad was as much a dating pool for the football team as it was a cheerleading group. With thick glasses, good grades, and no boobs, I was far from cool and way off the cheerleader radar. Not that I wouldn’t have jumped at the chance if asked.

Then my sophomore year, I went to prep school. Exeter had been all boys until 1970, and it never seemed to occur to anyone to start a cheerleading squad once girls were a part of campus life — probably because girls who win the math prize in public school aren’t typically the type to swoon after the quarterback. (And if we do swoon, we do so privately. No sense in setting ourselves up for public humiliation.)

At football games, a couple of potential theater majors with bull horns led the whole student body — or at least the students who attended the games — in loud intellectually elitist cheers such as “Pursue them, pursue them, make them relinquish the ball,” or the more low-brow “What do we do? Screw the blue,” for the end-of-season big game against rival Andover with its blue-and-white team colors.

Cheerleading wasn’t an option, and somehow this made us equal to the boys in those early Title-IX days. We could play volleyball, soccer, do crew, swim, even play ice hockey. We weren’t housewives in training. We were expected to attend college, grad school, get a job and make our way in the world. I wasn’t going to stand around and cheer for some boy. Unless he cheered for me too.

Fortunately, Samantha’s cheerleading career was over after only four weeks. Too much standing around, she said. “I want to play soccer next year,” she announced the other night. She had discovered it in gym class and liked all the running around.

I know our days of skimpy outfits and sparkly eye shadow are far from over. But at least she’s learning that it’s more fun to participate than watch, and to be cheered rather than to cheer.

First law of thermodynamics

My friend Nigel called the other day. He was in the San Francisco airport en route home to New Zealand after having climbed Mt. Rainier outside Seattle. “I crested the rim of the summit crater,” he recounted, “and I felt I couldn’t go on.”

A 15-year-old memory that had been buried deep in my cortex — beneath memories of child birth, mothering panic, and hellacious airplane trips with an active toddler — came back in pieces, as if I were an amnesiac. I suddenly remembered that view from the crater rim over to the actual summit — the highest part of the crater rim — of Rainier, a 14,410-foot dormant volcano. I remember it seemed infinitely far away across the snow-filled crater floor beneath a deep blue sky.

Nigel made it, he said, just as I had, slogging behind my then-boyfriend. As Nigel talked, I sat on our screen porch, phone in hand, and was transported back briefly to that summit with the glorious view of Seattle, Puget Sound, the Olympic Range, Mt. Baker, the stump of Mt. St. Helens. I had been there just a decade earlier.

“So do you have any adventures planned?” asked Nigel, a globe-trotting political science professor whom I met in 1994 while climbing 18,510-foot Mt. Elbrus, also a dormant volcano, in southern Russia.

I looked down at the small roll of fat bulging over the waistband of my shorts and suddenly felt like a drop-out. Where once I would have replied, “Yes! I’m entered in the Leadville 100 mountain bike race in a month,” or “We’re trying to climb all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks this summer,” I replied: “Uh, we’re going to Maine next week; I might play a little tennis.”

There was a detectable pause on the other end of the phone. Nigel once told me that I was one of the fittest people he knew. I didn’t just enter the Leadville 100. I won it. I once climbed five of Colorado’s 14-ners in a weekend. And when Nigel and I climbed Elbrus, I didn’t just summit it. I was the first one in our group of five — all men — to make it. Then, with time to spare that afternoon, I skipped up its 18,442-foot sub-peak.

Now here I sat 13 years later with a goal of playing a little tennis, maybe walking on the beach or doing a 20-mile bike ride. And I felt like two people: the Previous Peg who knew what blood tasted like in her lungs, and the current version — also known as Samantha’s mom — who would like nothing more than eight solid hours of sleep and an afternoon reading a good book without hearing the word, “MOM!” shouted every five minutes.

As Nigel talked about his climb up the snowfields and glaciers of Rainier, I started wondering if Previous Peg would ever return, even for just a brief visit. Will I ever find the motivation — or desire — to push physical limits again? Or am I destined to watch my tummy roll grow larger, like tree rings building out each year?

I’d like to think that version one will return, once Samantha is older. If for no other reason than to still fit into my clothes. For now, I have slid into the role of Samantha’s mom, and I don’t have the energy to be both people. It seems as if the first law of thermodynamics applies to parenting—that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes form. While some days it feels as if all our energy has been utterly destroyed, I realize it has simply been used to create a stubborn, strong-willed, six-year-old whose current life goal is to become a horse rider.

Although I always thought I would pine for adventure, I don’t. At least most of the time. Friends no longer call inviting us on bike rides or backpacking trips. I still enjoy riding for a couple of hours or going for a short hike with only adults.

But to go out for too long feels selfish, as if I’m disrupting the family equilibrium — sucking up all the energy for my own personal good, when it’s Samantha who needs it so she won’t wither.

In truth, Andy and I have both withered. But I like to think of it as lying dormant.

Camping

As a kid, I hated camping. Camping meant bugs. Camping meant no TV. Camping meant we weren’t cool enough to stay at Howard Johnson’s.

Other kids got to spend their vacations swimming in HoJo’s indoor pools and eating hot fudge sundaes in the restaurant chain’s turquoise green booths. We spent ours under the roof of a green canvas L.L. Bean tent, the design of which hadn’t changed since George Washington’s encampment at Valley Forge. And we ate whatever my mother could cook on the two-burner Coleman stove, set up on a picnic table at whatever campground was the site of that summer’s vacation. Mostly, we ate spaghetti.

Once it was pitched, which took the better part of an afternoon, the tent was spacious enough for four to sleep side-by-side. My parents each slept on air mattresses with matching flannel L.L. Bean sleeping bags, while my sister and I made do with cotton mattresses dug from the musty alcoves of my grandparent’s attic. These were covered with old muslin sheets and scratchy, moth-eaten, wool Navy blankets once used by my grandfather during World War I.

But our vacation home was not entirely without luxury. In an uncharacteristic moment, my father — a man who takes his Scottish heritage seriously — splurged on the tent’s matching green awning that made it look as if it had a porch. If it rained during our camping expeditions — which it invariably did—my father would put on a dark blue wool balaclava, sit in a lawn chair under the awning, and read Chekhov. Or worse, he would fish. We were expected to do the same.

My mother would shut herself in the car and read back issues of The New Yorker while my sister and I threw ourselves in despair onto our itchy wool beds.

“I hate camping,” my sister said over and over again. I moaned in agreement.

By far the worst part of the whole experience was the fly-infested outhouses from which emanated the worst smell I had ever encountered. While our parents read, my sister and I would see how close we could get to the offending structure before the odor overpowered us, then scurry away. The very thought of setting foot inside it induced constipation. Only once, when I was eight and we were driving cross-country to see friends in Minnesota, did we ever stay at a campground with flush toilets. That campground also featured a swimming pool, tether-ball, and four-square court, plus a bunch of other kids to play with. It was in Indiana, and I didn’t want to leave.

By our teenage years, we would have sooner done time in prison than gone camping. Camping was boring. Camping was for kids. Camping was barbaric. Camping was beneath us. We required daily showers and regular changes of freshly laundered clothing.

Sometime during college, though, camping became cool. On Friday afternoons in the early fall, we would load a friend’s Ford Bronco with sleeping bags (mine was a North Face bag purchased at EMS with my summer earnings), foam pads, and a two-person tent into which four of us would squeeze. We would head north, where someone always knew someone who owned land in Vermont, although it was never easy to find. I liked it out here, despite the fact that most of the time I was cold, hungry, and not well rested. But we were different than the loafer-wearing, pearl-earring set back on campus.

I liked camping so much that I changed majors — from art history to geology, which I naively assumed was like Camping for Credit.

One summer, the geology department unwisely gave eight of us the keys to a van and a week to reach the required summer field camp 2,000 miles away in Red Lodge, Montana. The goal was to see as much of the country as we could — from Niagara Falls to the Corn Palace in South Dakota to the Grand Tetons — on the $75 our parents had paid the department for gas and whatever other money we had squeezed from their wallets. On that five-day odyssey, we drove west, discovering places most of us had only read about, and pulled over when we were tired — in corn fields and state parks, in town parks and beside the road. It wasn’t exactly camping in the strict sense, more like a cheap way to sleep.

I continued camping even after I was gainfully employed. Yes, it was a cheap way to sleep, but it was the sense of promised adventure that was camping’s allure in early adulthood. A night sleeping in a tent was almost always followed by a hike up one of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, an all-day mountain bike ride around Utah’s Canyonlands, a raft trip down Class V rapids in West Virginia, or a day spring skiing in New Hampshire’s Tuckerman Ravine.

My camping excursions stopped when Samantha was born. It seemed natural to stop when she was a baby. Who wants to dig for diapers by headlamp? Find the bottle in a cooler at 2 a.m.? Or make a convincing argument that the Big Bad Wolf doesn’t like to live in forests like the one outside the tent’s walls but instead prefers darker evergreen forests in hills where no one in their right mind would never camp ...

But Samantha is almost seven now, and we haven’t incorporated camping back into our summer routine. The bugs have something to do with it. Black flies sense that I am a giant feast, and no level of DEET keeps them at bay. But it’s not like the bugs didn’t swarm me before she was born. It’s just that I’m not willing to put up with the discomfort of camping with no reward. And there’s not much promise for adventure when Samantha asks, “When can we go home?”

Last summer, we tested the waters with a modified backpacking trip to a hut on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range — modified because we tried to mitigate whining by driving to the summit, then hiking the 1.5 miles down to the hut. And hut is a misnomer. More like a lodge with remarkably odor-free pit toilets. (This should not have come as a surprise, however, given that one night for three cost over $200.) The place slept 90 in bunk rooms, and Andy, Samantha and I were assigned a triple-decker bunk in a room with five other people. Once the novelty of the bunks wore off, Samantha was too scared to sleep alone and ended up sharing the two-foot-wide mattress with Andy, who had been trying to sleep on the bunk above her. We were all grumpy the next morning, and the only adventure was hiking s-l-o-w-l-y back to the car.

Do we try a bona fide camping trip this year? My enthusiasm is low. But I do want to instill the sense that we are a family that camps, that enjoys the outdoors, and that seeks adventure. Not a family that watches TV. But I don’t want her to hate camping either — to associate it with bugs and bad odors, or think we’re doing it because we’re too cheap to book a room at the Sheraton (which would have cost less than our night in the “hut”).

If we could pitch a tent at Disney World, would she have fonder memories of camping? Or would she just remember that her parents were both very grumpy?

Maybe we should start by camping in the backyard. At least then a clean, odor-free bathroom is only a few steps away.

House guests

After my sister got married, she moved overseas with her husband. With the prospect of free lodging in an exotic land, my mother announced that she and my father would soon visit. For three weeks. 

My new brother-in-law went pale. In the end, my parents stayed for two weeks. And my mother has been the subject of significant ribbing ever since.

Now my parents generally keep their visits to a polite three days. Not that my mother wouldn’t stay longer if she could. My father knows that fish and guests stink after three days ... except when the purchase of plane tickets is involved.

My mother would live with us if we hinted at an invitation. She refers to our guest room as “her” room and seems deeply offended if we tell her that she can’t visit, as if we’ve put her out in the street without a warm coat.

This happened last fall. We were renovating our master bedroom and moved — for six months — into “her” room. She called to announce an impending visit (there is no asking, just announcing), and I told her that there was no vacancy — that we were living in the guest room.

There was a pause, as if she were waiting for me to say, “Oh never mind, you can come. Andy and I will sleep on the futon in the office.”

But horrible daughter that I am, I did not capitulate. They stayed at the local Comfort Inn. I felt guilty. Andy did not.

But there have been other times when saying “I’m afraid that’s an inconvenient time to come,” or simply “No,” hasn’t stopped her. Three years ago, she and my father made plans to fly to England from an airport near our house, not theirs. Yet they failed to advise us of their plans. A friend from Colorado had plans to visit us at the exact time.

Put off by their presumption that mi casa es su casa, I firmly said no, that I would not ask my friend to sleep on the couch (or futon) so they could roost here. I thought that was that. My friend arrived, and when we returned from a day trip, there was my mother sitting at our kitchen table.

“We were too tired to drive home,” she said in a wet-puppy voice.

Andy was outraged. I was mad. My friend felt awkward. I asked them to sleep on the futon, then felt guilty all night.

It’s not that I don’t love my parents. I do. Very much. And I know the sacrifices they made when my sister and I were young — eating fried clams at HoJo’s rather than at a nicer place with table cloths, driving us through freezing rain to reach the orthodontist, listening to us whine and complain through the drudgery of prep school, and fetching our tired selves from college, not to mention paying for it.

It’s just that their visits make me feel as if I’m being drawn and quartered. My parents like to think that they just blend into our lives when they visit. But in truth, it only works best when we — or specifically I — become part of theirs again. I feel torn between my former role as child under their care and my current role as adult with a child now under my care — a child who wants my attention as much as they want it too.

“She certainly runs the house, doesn’t she?” my mother will say in the middle of one of Samantha’s “Grandma-is-visiting” meltdowns.

“She does live here,” I say in Samantha’s defense. I want to have a meltdown too.

Then there’s the fact that we lead a different lifestyle than my parents did when they were in the trenches of raising children. I choose to work, and to exercise, as often as I can. My parents firmly believe that dinner should involve silverware and be on the table at 6 p.m. or shortly thereafter. And they don’t always agree with where I cut corners. My father once announced that he doesn’t consider pizza an adequate dinner entrée.

“What are you planning for dinner tonight?” my mother always asks between bites of cereal. When she was raising children, she always had a dinner plan, and she seems to feel that starvation is imminent if something isn't defrosting by mid-morning, or a grocery list isn't prepared. I usually regard dinner as something that can be pulled together in the 20 minutes before the appointed hour, and sometimes it involves the same cereal she was munching on for breakfast. But I have to say, she has never gone hungry in my home.

When either Andy or I dash off in the evening for a bike ride or game of tennis, my mother gets a worried look and asks, “When will you eat?

“When we get back.”

“It’s not good for you to eat so late,” she replies, still worried.

“It’s not good for me to not exercise,” I insist.

Then there are the comments about parenting style. “You act like you’re running a restaurant,” she chastises when I ask Samantha what she would like for dinner, macaroni and cheese or cous cous and chicken. “Just make her eat what you’re eating.”

Except I don’t know many 6-year-olds who eat take-out Thai food or spinach lasagna. And I refuse to subsist on mac & cheese.

In the hope that she might broaden her view, I point out to my mother that Andy, Samantha and I are reasonably happy and well-nourished. That Andy and I make a decent living and aren’t on the gov’ment dole. That we help the neighbors and the community when we can. And that Samantha doesn’t swing from the chandeliers, play loud violent video games, or yell obscenities out the window.

But perhaps if she did, my parents wouldn’t visit as often.

Large prey

The day after Christmas, Andy announced that he wanted to buy a new TV. Not just any TV but one of those giant flatscreen high-definition TVs that become the focal point of whatever room they lord over.

We didn’t need a new TV. We had two smaller flatscreen TVs in our kitchen and bedroom, and the “main” TV — the one in the so-called TV room — was a perfectly good Sony given to us by my in-laws nine years ago. It measured 27 inches on the diagonal and had a clearer picture than our other two newer TVs. 

While we were visiting my family in Atlanta over the Holidays, Andy, my father, and my brother-in-law were left unattended long enough that they set off on a trip to a local electronics store. Andy was soon captivated by the rows of gigundus televisions with such clear pictures that he could see if Peyton Manning's nose was running and whether his teammates had shaved or not.

“It would be nice to see the football,” Andy told me after announcing his desire to purchase one of these TVs. And not only the TV, but also home theater too, so he could hear the fans cheering all around, as if our couch were in a private box at Lambeau Field. And by ball, he meant any ball — football, baseball, tennis ball.

“You can even see the individual blades of grass,” he claimed, referring to the turf under whatever football game he had been watching while in the store.

“Oh?” I replied. “Why is that important?”

“It’s just such a clear picture.” He was almost giddy, and he isn’t the type to succumb to giddiness.

The conversation then turned to money. When I asked the price, he hedged: “Um, more than we should spend right now.”

With that, I figured we had put the topic to bed. But he was not ready to concede. “It would improve our Super-Bowl-watching experience,” he stated, as if I cared about that annual rite. “And I’ve been waiting for these TVs to come down in price.”

Not long enough, I thought. I just couldn’t understand his desire. Not that I’m immune to shopping impulses. But they normally involve shoes or sweaters at TJ Maxx, items that cost generally less than $50. We’re outdoorsy types, not barca-loungers. For the price of this much-sought-after piece of electronic equipment, we could ski in the Alps for a week.

Then there’s the issue of practicality, and Andy is normally the pinnacle of practicality. We haven’t replaced the toaster oven that he purchased in 1985 because it still works, and he wears shirts he’s owned since college because they still fit and aren’t threadbare. And we drive our cars until the engines are about to blow. Which is about to happen on our VW. At least in my opinion. Andy says that the car is merely temperamental. Fine, but $3,000 would be a nice down payment on a less fickle car.

What was driving my typically budget-conscious husband to drop most of month’s pay on an audio/visual toy? Is it the 21^st century way of bagging large prey?

“Look what I brought home, honey! This should last us through the winter.”

Or is it his need to master something? To put it together, adding its remote control to the flock already roosting on the coffee table, and make it work despite the inherent complexity?

Or is it that Andy, and his male brethren, have, for the most part, been able to hang on to their childhoods more easily than women? And giant HD TVs — and home theater, ATVs, and even fancy lawn tractors — are simply the best toys around. They can get together on Super Bowl Sunday to show off their new toys the way they once gathered in the neighborhood to check out Ralphie’s new Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot, Range Model Air Rifle.

We women, we’re the ones poo-pooing their grand schemes and telling them, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Our childhoods feel like a lifetime ago, and now our days are consumed by keeping the nest in order, not adorned with expensive electronics. Three grand could go toward a season’s worth of groceries, a car that starts on demand, even Ralphie’s college fund. We kill the joy and feel self-righteous doing it.

When I returned from a business trip in mid-January to find a 46-inch Samsung LCD TV commanding the north wall of the TV room, I realized that I was more jealous than angry at the money “thrown away.” Andy’s inner child is alive and well. He can conceive of buying such big-ticket toys and enjoy them with no remorse.

My inner child left around the time our real child arrived, apparently leaving behind a surly grouch.

As I stood watching Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel’s HD Theater — the neon tropical fish swimming by as if we were on the reef with them — I realized that I miss my inner child.

Should I go looking for her? Or will I find her somewhere on the screen of that big TV?