Rocky
Photo Courtesy | Megan Vos
BY MEGAN VOS
I snap a picture of my partner and our younger daughter, age seven, at a picnic table in Endovalley Picnic Area in Rocky Mountain National Park. My daughter is holding a book of Mad Libs, and when you look at the photo, you can almost hear her laugh. Our old Highlander sits in the background, nestled beneath the pines and a cloudless sky. What you cannot see in the photo is my older daughter, who is almost eleven, sulking in the back seat. She refuses to get out for lunch. She hates the food I brought and she’s mad at me about the Mad Libs.
I’m mad at myself, truth be told. Our camping trip was going great; we arrived the night before after grabbing food for our kids on the way out of town, so that we didn’t arrive at our campsite at dinner time and have to cook for them while setting up. The girls built a fairy house while we set up the tent and heated up some dinner for ourselves, and then we walked down to the river while the moon rose. The next morning my partner went fishing while I sipped coffee and the girls played some more.
And then, they found the Mad Libs. I had brought a few emergency surprises, a practice I started when my older daughter was young and we traveled frequently. I always had a stash of stickers or little toys. For this camping trip, I’d grabbed two pads of Mad Libs, but I had forgotten to hide them, and just before we’d left our campsite that morning for a little bit of adventuring, the girls found them, accidentally placed in a seatback pocket.
“Mommmmmm, I wanted the Diary of a Wimpy Kid ones,” my older daughter whines. “Remember, I had those once, and she did them without even asking!” My younger daughter shoots back, “I did not, those were mine!” And so it begins, the timeless tale of “who does this [insert any object that is precious for 49 seconds and then will be forgotten] belong to.” In that moment, I am transported to a thousand other moments during the past ten-plus years, when I have tried to do, or buy, or plan something nice, only to have it backfire. If I buy them the same thing, they complain, but if I buy them different things, they inevitably want what the other has.
My anger flares. “How about saying, ‘Thanks, Mom, for buying these for us’?” I snap. She turns away from me, facing the window, scowling. I look to my husband for support, but he is navigating the windy road, and I can’t really read his expression. As I seethe, my seven-year-old daughter calls from the back seat, “Mom, what’s a noun?”
We continue with our morning, stopping at a lake to look for bighorn sheep while my oldest sits in the car, apparently on strike from any sort of fun. We do not see sheep, but we spot a herd of elk by the lake. After our ill-fated lunch picnic, we were planning to drive to the summit of Trail Ridge Road, the highest road in the park, offering sweeping views of the Continental Divide. But I don’t think either my partner or I have the energy for that.
I go for a solo hike that afternoon, where I spot two moose, and I wait for the sweat and endorphins to work their usual magic. But I can’t shake my frustration, my disappointment that all it took was a book of Mad Libs for our morning to derail. Even after my seven-year-old offered the coveted Mad Libs book to her older sister unprompted, and they made up, my irritation lingers. And then I’m judging myself for allowing a typical sibling argument to dictate my mood. I have been working hard on letting the girls have their feelings, but I haven’t mastered separating those feelings from my own.
Back at the campsite, my older daughter reads book after book, totally checked out, and my younger daughter wants to be entertained. We play cards. We blow bubbles. I watch her jump from rock to rock as she plays “Floor is Lava.” I tell her I am going to read for awhile, and she stomps away. I turn to my partner. “Let’s go for a swim,” I say.
We wind our way towards Bear Lake, and the road follows the rushing river, curving one way and then the next. We pull over at one point and walk along the river. My older daughter has given up her “fun strike” and is quoting Judy Blume’s Super Fudge, perfectly imitating Blume’s voice on the audiobook, while my younger daughter belly laughs. The water is too loud to hear their words, but we’ve listened to those audiobooks so many times that I recognize the cadence of my daughter’s perfect imitation of Fudge. I spy a place where the water is eddying, not so much a pool as a small enclave, but it will work. I strip off my sweaty t-shirt and wade in. The water is coming directly from a glacial lake; it’s beyond frigid, and my feet are numb before I’m even up to my knees. I dunk under, come up and gasp, freezing. My partner follows. Our kids sit on a rock, shaking their heads at us. I dunk in, over and over, washing off sunblock and sweat and the cloud that hung over most of the day.
In my pre-parenting life, camping made me feel powerful and competent. I led wilderness orientation trips in the Adirondacks during college, sea kayaked through the Everglades for a week during one spring break, and hiked the hundred-mile wilderness in Maine with my stepdad just before I moved to Colorado. When I met my partner, we backpacked in Utah, spent a summer camping in Alaska, and took countless weekend trips, getting to know each other through the lens of camping in foul weather, hiking off our topographical maps, and reveling in the occasional blue skies. But with kids, the effort of camping has often outweighed the rewards. When my daily life involves so many domestic tasks, doing these tasks in more challenging circumstances is unappealing. We sleep badly enough at home in our own beds. Plus, at home, we have flush toilets that our children willingly use, as opposed to the pit toilets we often encounter at campgrounds. I enjoy camping with our daughters more now that they’re getting older, but a few weekends per year is enough for me.
As I look around the campground that night, at all of the parents muddling through campfires and sticky marshmallow hands, noisy neighbors and rock-hard sleeping pads, I think, It’s crazy that we are all doing this. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s supposed to be messy. Just out of the frame of each adorable picture, real life is happening. It’s all there; the rushing river and the sticky sleeping bag; the melting-down child and the fireside snuggles; the chaos and the calm.
MEGAN VOS lives in Boulder, CO with her partner and two daughters. She is currently editing her first middle grade novel and disproving her story that she doesn’t write fiction. She produces Listen to Your Mother, a live show featuring local writers’ stories about motherhood. Megan is also the Community Coordinator for Motherscope’s online community. Megan’s writing has been published in the Birth Stories, Radical Mama, and Generations issues of Motherscope, Kindred, Motherwell, and Journal of Expressive Writing. Follow Megan on Instagram at @meganvoswrites.