The house of the opposite of mirth

I’m just back from spring break vacation with my kids. As usual, it took nearly the entire trip (five days) to relax. But we had fun and much needed bonding time, free from the usual soundtrack to our familial relationships — do your homework; brush your teeth; brush your teeth NOW; hang up your swim things; I don’t care why, just do it. On the trip, I continued my sad little midlife attempt to learn how to ski. I didn’t ski as a child — other than once, on what was essentially a small hill in suburban Minneapolis, from which I remember nothing but terror. So taking my children skiing, like having them learn piano and a foreign language, is one of the many ways I stereotypically try to make their childhoods cushier than mine was.

In three days, I will leave my family for nearly three weeks at Ragdale to start a new draft of the ball-and-chain of a manuscript I have been writing. Once I get going, I’m sure it will be okay. But right now I’m full of dread. It strikes me that I’ve done a lot of things in life in the wrong order, like try to write a difficult, personal book at a moment in life when I often feel like little more than a vessel for other people’s needs.

On the trip with my family, and now as I return to an empty house, I understand that part of the malaise is about the nature of the domestic caregiving. My dog is 14 years old. He’s is stable health, but he sleeps most of the day, with very little time or energy for interaction with the rest of us. My relationship with him is mostly about giving him meds and cajoling him to pee outside. Recently we had a hamster and a bird. The hamster died last month of old age, but my children were still devastated. And within the same week, our bird (a green-cheeked conure) was captured and eaten by a hawk in our back yard, right in front of my seven-year-old son. It was horrible for all of us, but both of my kids were inconsolable. I had to kick my shaky parenting resources into high gear to deal with all of the emotions, the guilt I felt (irrationally), the big questions about death and why we won’t just rush blindly to the pet store to replace them both, that it would be like a widower showing up at his wife’s funeral with a new bride. And the elephant in the room in all this is the kids’ grandmother, my mother. For years she has lived with us part-time and helped us care for them when the kids were young. But the strain of three generations under one roof takes a toll. And what was sometimes, after a cocktail or two, easily explained away in some kind of charming, arthouse movie aesthetic of living our own way and taking care of our own, has become more difficult. As she grows older, not infirm yet but inflexible, unapologetic, and uninterested in change, it becomes more of a challenge to accept her as she is, terrible health habits, OCD hoarding and depressive tendencies, and all. It’s a long story with no easy solution.

Middle age is sometimes referred to as the sandwich generation, as increasingly mirthless 40- and 50-somethings take care of the old people and the young people at the same time. I know it could be much worse — we could have genuine health crises to deal with. And I know that my fantasy of this age being a halcyon moment in life are based on nothing more than a youthful, incomplete understanding of the movie “The Big Chill.” Beyond that, I don’t know what lies ahead, other than, I hope, 18 productive days at Ragdale.