Into the Woods

We camped! And it did not suck my will to live and leave a nasty, pus-filled wound on my psyche the way I expected the mosquitoes would on my juicy juicy body!

They say people can’t change, but I think a more accurate adage would be that people can, they just don’t. Unless they do. Which I did. Sometime about nineish years ago I went from being a “no”/”maaaaaybe” person into a “yes by default” person, and that’s made all the difference.

I was born with an optimist’s heart and a pessimist’s brain, and it used to be that if I could think of even ONE negative outcome of something I might be involved in (even just a potential negative, and believe you me, inventing disasters is one of my specialties), I’d allow myself to avoid the situation entirely and just hole up at home instead, where everything was comfortable and predictable and familiar and absolutely nothing would happen to me. Which, of course, means that absolutely nothing would happen to me.

Then I found myself suddenly single at age twenty-five (so ooooooold, I thought) and faced with the very real possibility that my life thereafter would be a sucking pit of perpetual loneliness if I didn’t start asserting myself, and thus began my transformation into someone who will come to your birthday party even though it’s six hours away, and will attend your band gig even though it starts at 11 p.m. and I don’t really like death metal, and will camp for the first time in eight years at 34.5 weeks pregnant and with a three-year-old.

I’m still plenty neurotic about stuff–I overthink and overpack and worryworryworry about all the real and imagined catastrophes I always have–but I also know it’s almost always worth it to push through that mental muck because what’s on the other side is usually well worth the anxiety. A lot of the change had to do with Simon, with wanting to be and do and see things with him rather than sit home alone, and also because I want to be the cool, go-getter who’s game for every most things. I want him to think, sometimes against a mountain of evidence to the contrary, “Hey, I got one of the fun wives!” even if that means pushing myself when I’d rather not.

And so I camped. And am glad I did.

I didn’t get eaten by bugs, I slept great except for when the two-year-old in our camp set to screaming several times a night (a glimpse into our future?), and when I woke up at the luxuriously-late-for-camping hour of 7 a.m., I actually felt better than I do most mornings in that I didn’t have to hunched-over-hobble to the bathroom twenty feet away but instead strolled down the camp path holding hands with my son, whose first words that day were the stage-whispered effusion “Mom! I camped! I camped with YOU!” He shimmied out of his sleeping bag and starting pacing with excitement, wearing just a T-shirt and shorts, insisting he “wasn’t cold,” he was just “feeling the fresh air.”

The weather was glorious, we had fajitas and s’mores for dinner and a veritable feast for breakfast, and because we let the kids stay up listening to stories until 10:30 p.m., no one had trouble falling asleep. The little ones played bakery in the sand and school in the tents (what’s with kids wanting to play school when they’re on vacation?), and the adults talked and lounged and I ate more chips and salsa than is probably recommended by the FDA, and we scrapped our plans to go on a nearby train ride because we were having too much fun just doing nothing at our little campsite. Our friends brought a stash of children’s books, and we brought glow bracelets and laser lights that strap onto fingertips, and before going to bed we hung from the ceiling of our tent a miniature lantern from our favorite dollar store that flashed rainbow-colored disco lights against the nylon walls. It was perfect.

And now we’re bummed that we won’t be going camping for a good long while (I imagine we’ll want to keep Mompth/Fox Lorax at home until, at the very least, he won’t be a nuisance to other campers), and I realize again that for all the effort I put into worrying about the things that might go wrong, the worst thing that happened is we had such a marvelous time we’re sad we can’t camp again this weekend too.

Yay team! (And especially yay me for not wimping out and cancelling the whole thing just because I have a baby in me.)

[If you're in the area and want a nice, convenient, bug-free place to camp, I highly recommend Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. We'll be back.]