Less Rocky
Photo Courtesy: Megan Vos
BY MEGAN VOS
Note: This is a companion piece to “Rocky,” which was published in the Motherscope Journal in June. You can read that piece here.
It was before dawn, maybe 6 a.m. The elk were bugling, which I had heard before, but never quite so close, and never all night. It reminded me of when we’ve stayed at our family’s cabins in northern Maine, where the loons call to each other all night long — a reminder that you’re someplace special, someplace different. We were in Rocky Mountain National Park for our final camping trip of the season.
My partner breathed heavily beside me. I poked my head up to see if my daughters had their blankets still, and spotted two lumps, deep in their sleeping bags, heavy blankets on top. Everyone warm and cozy. I alternated between reading and thinking through this piece in my head, one of my favorite parts of the writing process, when I let the ideas solidify a bit before translating them onto the page.
An hour later, my seven-year-old awoke. “I barely slept because of those elk!” she told me, “but I held hands with Dad when I was scared.” Her eyes were bloodshot, but a smile spread across her face. As she and I walked to the bathroom, our breath visible in the crisp air, we scanned the meadow across from our site, but didn't spot any elk. The night before, we’d watched a huge bull walk up the hillside, searching for a mate.
Back at our campsite, my partner and eleven-year-old were awake too. I built a fire and started boiling a pot of water on our camp stove. The girls picked up the same pretend game they’d played the night before, and my partner and I wondered, as we had many times over the summer, how many more times our eleven-year-old would play like that. Then we ate, packed, hopped in the car, and were home exactly 23 hours after we’d left our house.
Throughout those 23 hours, the thought, This feels easier than last time ran through my mind. On the surface, camping should have been a massive effort that weekend. I am working part-time this year, and no longer have Mondays available to unpack and regroup after weekend adventures. My eleven-year-old left for a two-night Outdoor Ed trip three days after our trip — her first time away from home — and we were not sure how she would do. I had been sick with a bad cold for over three weeks, and would finally test positive for COVID the day after we returned from camping. Plus, it had taken us two hours to pack that morning, proving once again that it takes the same amount of time to pack for a one-day camping trip as for a two or three-day trip. But despite these factors, the weekend felt, dare I say, relaxing. Restful. Fun.
Partly, I know the relative ease of this trip was circumstantial. The campground was quieter in September than in June, and we were in a part of the campground that doesn’t allow RVs, so we didn't hear the constant hum of generators. The bathroom was nearby, boasted flush toilets, and was surprisingly clean. It was warm when we arrived Saturday afternoon, but the weekend we were there in June fell during a heat wave, and each task felt oppressive in the high altitude and the blaring sun. Plus, this trip was a full day shorter than the last; there was less time for things to take a turn for the worse.
I suspect, however, that the reason this trip felt so different is because I was different. As we drove into Estes Park, the town at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, with sweeping views and countless tourist shops, I said to my partner that it felt both like we had just been there, and also like it had been ages since our June trip. Shortly after our camping trip in June, I had back-to-back, very serious infections. At urgent care for my first infection, the doctor casually mentioned a possibility of inflammatory breast cancer — thankfully not the case, but I will never forget her caustic, almost accusatory tone. A few weeks later, I was in the ER for an abdominal infection. I had assumed I was experiencing side effects from my first round of antibiotics, but it turned out that this was a separate and even more serious infection. I was on heavy antibiotics that made me feel terrible, and I spent the first half of July swallowing pill after pill, three times per day. My illnesses were book-ended by the overturning of Roe v. Wade while I sat in the Women’s Imaging Department waiting to see if I had breast cancer, and the death of our fourteen-year-old dog while my abdominal infection resolved. While I was beyond fortunate that the worst-case scenarios I imagined as I lay in the ER bed didn’t come to pass, these medical events were scary and exhausting. When my abdominal pain returned after our dog died, I thought, “I can’t do this.” The thought of taking one more antibiotic made me feel powerless and crazy, and despite my best efforts to calm myself, I couldn’t shake the panic.
I have written at length about the stresses of parenting, compounded so many times by the pandemic and the other traumas our community has experienced over the past few years. I have always attributed my anxiety to circumstance, and have worked incredibly hard to both understand and improve my mental health over the past couple of years. I have gone to therapy, learned about the way trauma works in the brain, and ended a toxic relationship with a family member. My medical issues felt like a tipping point, however, and I knew that I needed some more help with the anxiety. I went to my doctor in early August and decided to start an SSRI. My doctor explained that it would not solve any problems, but that it would allow my brain to utilize what I’ve been working on with my therapist, to take the edge off. Now that the edge seems less jagged and sharp, I can recognize just how much time I have spent there, regardless of what caused me to be on that edge in the first place.
When my partner said that he noticed a difference in my interactions with our daughters, my first response was to feel defensive, even though I knew he was right. I am better able to match my words to my feelings now. Instead of seething internally in the mornings while saying through clenched teeth, “If you’re late, you’re late,” I mean it now. My daughters’ lateness is not a crisis. Our mornings are still rushed and we still forget things and I still tell the girls that if they’re not ready, they can walk to school on their own. But there is less at stake now. Less emotion. When my older daughter forgot her social studies folder the night before her first-ever test (aside from the standardized tests she has been taking for years), I truly meant it when I told her, “You know what? You’ll do the best you can. I bet you’ll remember to bring it next time.”
I am not saying that all of the work I have done has transformed our life into one devoid of conflict. When we pulled into the shopping plaza on our way out of town to go camping, I asked, “Who’s coming to the grocery store with me, and who’s going to the pharmacy with Dad?” We had just a few things to buy, and we were trying to get on the road. My eleven-year-old tried to go with whatever parent wasn’t taking her younger sister, and my youngest wanted to go with my oldest. A well-worn pattern in our family. I snapped at my oldest, “We are not starting our weekend off like this, do you understand?” The stresses of the last time we had gone camping, when she got mad at her sister and the interaction clouded the rest of my weekend, played like a movie in my head. I had zero interest in living the sequel.
But then my younger daughter and I went into the grocery store, and my partner and my older daughter went to the pharmacy, and when they found us fifteen minutes later as I said “no” to yet another item my seven-year-old was asking for, I pulled my eleven-year-old in for a quick squeeze. “I didn’t mean to snap,” I told her. “I just don’t like it when you try to avoid your sister like that.” “It’s fine, Mom,” she said. And it was.
That night, my partner and I sat by the fire and the girls played in the tent. When it got dark, the girls joined us to look at the stars. My seven-year-old sat on my lap, and we laughed as she missed seeing one shooting star after another. Finally, she spotted one. Behind us, the Big Dipper sat low in the September sky, and since it is one of about two constellations I can recognize, I pointed it out. The girls looked for other constellations, their minds full of half-remembered tidbits from a planetarium visit the summer before last. The next night, my overtired seven-year-old would melt down because I made her wash off the makeup she had put on at a friend’s house. The day after that, I would test positive for COVID. But for the moment, I felt my partner’s hand in mine, the weight of my daughter in my lap, and the warmth of the fire at my feet. I could hear the elk bugling and my older daughter’s laughter. I could be right where I was.
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.