Enter my home on a weekday around 4 p.m., and you’ll find a scene that feels ripped from a medical drama: Rushing, shouting, various equipment flying through the air. A ticking clock. Only when you squint do the differences come into view: Absolutely no one has sanitized their hands and while the stakes feel life or death, they are just… gymnastics. Albeit gymnastics that starts at 4:45 p.m, when we’re not home from school until 4:15, and is located 35 minutes from my home. You can do the math. And when you do, I think you’ll understand when I say:
In this house, we heart quitting. So far, this is our quitting year.
Quitting is a relatively new passion for my family, as we’ve only actually been doing things you can quit for a couple of years. There were baby times, then the pandemic and its slow return, but eventually we managed to frazzle ourselves into a classic tableau: Three kids with at least three extracurriculars to their name. For context, my kids are nine, seven and nearly five. They are young. I once envisioned myself being the kind of parent who eschewed activities altogether—Childhood is for unstructured exploration! I would say, all blissed-out, while they quietly painted rocks at my feet—I hit my limit on unstructured exploration around April 2020. When I could finally enroll my kids in teams and clubs, I did so not with the mindset of a gum-chewing, tracksuit-wearing, “my kid versus all” ambition monster, but with the mindset of someone who wanted, very much, to … drop … them … off.
So we did t-ball and baseball and basketball and flag football. Hip-hop and musical theater and ballet and tap. Animal club and book club and after-school workout club and, hatefully, formalized street parkour, which I’ll come back to. Each activity had its commensurate uniform, equipment, fundraisers, and dates to remember, and the ones that were not through school came with tuitions of varying heft. For a while, it was fun. It felt like the life Covid robbed us of. But soon the novelty wore off, dinner became things flung to the backseat of the car, and I found myself wondering: How had something I came to with such a non-intense mindset become so… intense?
What I realized was: I’d been confusing intensity and competition. I had checked myself for competitive tendencies before enrolling my kids in things, but I hadn’t thought to examine any other types of intensity. As it turns out, I’m not a snowplow parent or a tiger mom or any of the other vehicles or animals—I’m a… well, I’m kind of like a fairy who just chugged a Red Bull. When my children display a momentary interest in something, presto! I wave my wand and enroll you in it, instantly. One lingering look at the cover of Angelina Ballerina? I’m Priming leotards. Made a painting? Page the art school! Watched a few minutes of basketball with me, likely just to shut me up? I’ll be upstairs googling 10-foot hoop what if you have no driveway?
