Finley has been going to karate since she was 9. When she was little, we did all the things parents are supposed to do: we enrolled her in dance class, in soccer, and karate. Dance flamed out pretty early; there was an episode where her dance shoes got moved backstage, her anxiety boiled over, and she spent the entire performance crying on the stage, frozen. Thankfully, they say a child’s brain completely resets itself a couple of times before they hit puberty, so I’m glad she doesn’t remember that afternoon; it scarred me for life.
She stuck with soccer for several years, and showed flashes of inspiration while playing defense—playing offense meant she had to run more, and that was not OK. She met some new girls on those teams and did her best to make friends, but those friendships—and soccer—didn’t last. We figured OK, perhaps she’s more motivated by the pursuit of individual excellence, as I was at that age: doing something I could fail at by myself, vs. letting the whole team down by my incompetence and abysmal hand-eye coordination.
So we enrolled her in karate at a fantastic family-oriented dojo in Columbia, where the owners start out teaching kids about concepts like discipline and integrity before the Crane Kick and Sweeping The Leg. She began with a large cohort of kids which slowly winnowed down due to life, lack of interest, and COVID; all through the pandemic we paid our fees and brought her to masked summer workouts in the parking lot. After teens were cleared for vaccinations they went back to in-person training but most of the other kids from her cohort were already gone: they’d all advanced past her, up into the Advanced group. She was with kids who were a foot shorter and four years younger. And she was still avoiding any kind of practice outside of the dojo so all of her forms were terrible. The other part of the test—running a timed mile and a half—has been her cross to bear.
We’ve had multiple conversations with the Master about her situation, and he’s been absolutely understanding. He’s gone so far as to talk with her during and outside of class about her motivation and goals, but as with our family discussions, it hasn’t ever stuck. She’s huffed and puffed through her laps around the building while younger and older kids zip past her. The Master offered her a chance to be a helper during practices, which was meant to inspire her to action, but that didn’t have any effect. Jen started waking her earlier in the morning to get up and run first thing, and after I got over my stay in quarantine I took over escort duty: following her in the car and reminding her to keep running when she stops to walk.
This actually went well for a couple of weeks—there were days where she was able to run almost the entire way without stopping. But there have been setbacks as well. Last week was pretty bad, and she didn’t run over the weekend so I figured Monday would be terrible. I was right.
I’d gone out to clean snow off the car and warm it up, and when I finished I realized she had been standing in front of the house procrastinating. When I asked her why she wasn’t running, she claimed it was too cold and she didn’t want to. I told her to start running or I’d kick her ass down the street (this is not the first time I’ve told her I’d kick her ass, and I was already annoyed that she’d ignored her alarm going off for 15 minutes before getting up). She tested me by looking at me as she walked away down the street, the I’m thirteen, what are you gonna do look on her face we’re seeing more of these days. I walked up and kicked her ass, and she started running.
About an eighth of a mile down the road she’d stopped to walk again, and when I pulled up next to her, she refused to run again. I warned her a second time, and when she kept walking I got out of the car, walked up behind her and kicked her ass again—twice. She just kept walking.
For a moment, I weighed my options. I really wanted to just keep kicking her ass all the way down and back home; nothing would have given me more satisfaction than a tired leg and sore toes from that exercise. I also would have been thrown directly in jail for child abuse. If we lived out in the country with no houses around, my shoe would still be embedded up her ass. But at the risk of doing her real bodily harm, I got in the car, turned around and drove home.
I’m at my wits’ end and supremely, monumentally frustrated with my daughter, for this and many other reasons I won’t get into here. There was a time, not too long ago, when I felt like a good dad. I could, with a glance, read her face and have better than a 90% chance of knowing what she wanted, how she was feeling, or if she just needed a hug. I spent hours with her, trusting my instincts and learning about myself and my own limitations while she taught me how to be a better human—just by being herself. I saw the kind, intelligent, curious little girl she was and my heart swelled with pride just to be with her, just to be her father.
I’ve lost all of that. I’m backed into a corner where I can’t reason with, motivate, inspire, or get this teenager to see common sense. She’s a stubborn mule who gets fixated on particular things to the detriment of herself and all of her relationships. She has absolutely no executive functioning abilities whatsoever. She is pure id and no ego: all cake and no cooking. While I see so much of myself in her every day (and always have, and have always admitted this) I still can’t break through to her. I don’t know how to help her. At some point when I was around her current age I started understanding and accepting the concept of larger responsibilities, and while I grumbled about them and fucked them up, I started doing them. She’s nowhere near this yet—when faced with responsibility she chooses to argue inane logic or feign serious injury and fall asleep on the couch. She can’t learn from her mistakes because she forgets the mistakes and refuses to do things over. We can’t get through to her because she hasn’t realized she needs to be responsible for herself in any way.
This evening, after Jen made us a lovely Valentine’s Day dinner and some homemade dessert, Finn walked behind my chair and put her arms around my shoulders and hugged me tight. I love her so much it hurts, but the line between love and ass-kicking is very thin right now.
We’ve been keeping Finn up to date with world events as much as possible, which can be tricky because we don’t watch network news as a family. I mentioned the Tennessee school district recently banning Maus to her over dinner, and we explained a little bit about what the book was, then asked her to think about why they might be doing that. We had a pretty good family talk. I mentioned something Stephen King said about books being banned—when “they” start deciding what books we can’t read, it’s our job to go right out and read them and decide for ourselves what’s so bad about them. I reached behind me to the library behind our dining room table, pulled out our copy of Maus, and gave it to her to read. She’s currently on page 62.
Finn had the day off on Thursday due to snow that never really collected here. Part of being in the southern section of Baltimore County is that when the northern areas are hit with snow—thirty miles north of here, at the edge of the Pennsylvania border—it means we’re shut down too. It worked out for her, though, because she had a project for science class due Friday that she’d been avoiding for weeks. After some communication with the teacher via email and phone I got a clear idea of what was due (the paper assignment got lost somewhere along the way) and Finn took the day to finish it.
Friday was a half day, so when she got back home we decided we’d get out of the house as a family and hit the thrift stores for a fun, inexpensive afternoon. There are two in our area worth going to, one in Laurel and one in Columbia, run by the same company and generally a few steps above Goodwill in terms of organization and quality. The Men’s section can often be hit or miss in places like this, and yesterday was no exception. I was looking for a couple more pairs of cheap work pants, and though the Laurel store’s racks are 40 feet long and stuffed with merchandise, I couldn’t find anything there worth buying. Finn and Jen made out a little better, and when we’d checked out there we hit the one in Columbia. Here I was more successful and found two pair of work pants, a copy of Gravity on DVD and a copy of Red Dead Redemption all for about $18. RDR is a game I heard my old boss talking about 12 years ago when it came out, and it sounded like a lot of fun then—an open-ended western with a lot of territory to explore. We’ll see how it goes.
While she was in school, I did some long-delayed adulting. First I made an appointment to get my eyes checked for a new prescription. This yearly-exam shit is a racket that’s really beginning to piss me off; I’ve been thinking I should buy a couple pairs of glasses and skip the exam for the same number of years, as my distance prescription hasn’t changed in thirty years. But the next pair of glasses I get will be progressives for reading now that Warby Parker is covered under my insurance plan.
Then I made a dentist appointment. I haven’t had my teeth checked since before the ‘Rona, and it’s long overdue. I’d also like to price out the cost for getting them straightened: both my upper and lower jaw have done some serious remodeling in the last ten years and I’d like to get things back in line. I think we’re nearing the end of Finley’s braces payments, so maybe I could try Invisalign or one of the other services.
She’s almost as tall as me now. Thankfully, she still sleeps with Ox and sometimes Kasoogi (the purple guy by her knee). Looking at this makes me wish I could still pick up that little squirt and hug her for the rest of the week.
So, all things look pretty good on the cancer front. There are no new passengers in my abdomen via the CT scan. My bloodwork isn’t yet in the Normal range, but I also just got my flu shot on Tuesday and I’ve felt like I want to take a nap every minute of the day since then. All of the levels seem to be holding steady with no major drops, so I’ll take that as a win.
When they announced the COVID booster policy, such as it is, I made an appointment to get a dose of the Pfizer vaccine at my local pharmacy. Feeling pious about the whole thing, I went in and filled out the forms and waited in line, and then they looked at them and told me that I was a month early and that I’d have to come back in late October for the actual shot.
Tuesday night we took Finn to karate, where she is acting as a class helper by request of her sensei. It means she needs to be at the dojo an hour early, but I think the added responsibility is good for her, and we’re hoping she starts taking things more seriously. In the meantime, with two hours to kill, Jen and I hit the local thrift superstore, where I was able to find a nice Patagonia vest and a couple more of the Harry Potter movies on disc. We only need the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2 to fill out our collection; a few years ago a friend’s daughter deep in a Potter phase borrowed our complete box set and we never saw it again.
Meanwhile, the dog was at home by herself. Jen was experimenting with leaving her by herself for short periods of time while I was gone, and for spans of an hour or two she seemed to do fine. We left her for a full three hours on Tuesday, half expecting to find a hole dug through the wall or a giant mountain of dogshit on the couch, but everything was normal when we walked back in the door. Progress? Possibly, but I’m not going to hold my breath until we get a couple of months under our belt.
Happy Birthday, my intelligent, sensitive, goofy, beautiful girl. I love you so much it hurts.
Camping is a crapshoot. On a good trip, the conditions can be just right, the campsite ideal, the amenities perfect for keeping kids and parents occupied happily for the duration of the stay. On a bad trip, the people next to you are drunken bigots, the mosquitoes carry off your children, the lake is a swamp, and you’re miles from any ice cream stand. If you’ve got a shiny new trailer, you can hole up inside and pretend you’re at home on the couch watching Age of Ultron with the kids. When you’re tent camping, you’re at the mercy of pretty much everything. So you do the research, look at the pictures, ask for recommendations, and take a leap of faith a year in advance, hoping you made the right call and a hurricane with a stupid name doesn’t wipe your reservation off the map.
Early this year, I looked around for another Eastern Shore-based campground that had all of the cool stuff our last place did minus the live band and found Jane’s Island State Park, down at the bottom of Maryland before Maryland becomes Virginia. Reviews looked promising, the sites looked clean, and I was able to reserve a spot right on a canal, figuring the closer we were to moving water, the cooler we’d be.
I’ve spent the last week preparing for the trip, making piles of gear and then moving them around the house, paranoid I was going to forget something important. I upgraded our cooler. The Scout has new brakes, which are AMAZING and feel fantastic. I premade hobo stew for our first night at the campsite, figuring after I drove all the way down there, set up camp, and got the kids organized, easier dinner would taste better.
We were able to hit the road at 9:15 and got to the Bay Bridge by 10, slowing for some construction at the site of the old toll plaza. Once we made it over the span, we breezed into Easton, picked up Zachary, and continued south on 50 for the end of the earth. Stopping for food and gas, we made decent time, slowed only by the fact that the safari top needed to be up to keep Zachary’s hair from blowing all over his face.
The park is very well-run, and one of the cleanest and most well-equipped state parks I’ve been to. Our campsite was spotless and in a perfect spot to pick up breezes off the marsh. I got the site organized while I had the kids ride their bikes around to scout out the bathhouses, camp store, and marina.
Figuring we’d be hot overnight, I left the rain hood off the tent to keep us ventilated and started a fire. The hobo stew is in foil packets and was on the fire for 45 minutes before I got impatient, took it off and heated it in a pan. The kids were pretty cool about trying it (or, just extremely hungry) and we all made it disappear pretty quickly. Then, figuring we’d have nothing better to do, I drove us in to Crisfield to walk the pier and see what was there.
A century ago Crisfield was the epicenter of oyster fishing in the country, but the town has declined along with the health of the Chesapeake Bay. Most of what we saw was dark and quiet—an ice cream shop along the water actually had a sign saying they were closed due to lack of staff.
We found an ancient diner on Main Street and kept them open to enjoy their A/C and our ice cream for as long as was respectful, and then headed back to the campsite. I set the kids up with headlamps I’d bought and we lit off some sparklers by the canal before calling it a night.
On the pier at Crisfield we’d seen heat lightning flashing to the north, and my weather app showed big orange blobs on the radar heading our way. I made sure to get the rain cover ready and packed away all of our consumables in Tupperware tubs in the truck. Then we laid down for the hottest night in a tent I’ve spent since 1997. That time my ex and I had to wander the pier at Myrtle Beach until about 3AM, when exhaustion set in and we finally passed out in the tent for three hours—until planes started taking off from the airport directly over our heads.
This time we all tossed and turned until about midnight, when a blast of wind suddenly hit us and I knew I had precious minutes to get the rain cover on the tent. I scrambled outside to get the cover secured right as the first fat drops started hitting, and by the time I was able to get back inside, the wind was blowing the tent sideways and Finn was sitting up holding it in place.
It rained hard for half an hour, and then tapered off pretty quickly. The tent is a good one and kept all of the rain out both top and bottom—thank god. We all laid back down to try and sleep. It had cooled off but I couldn’t remove the rain cover to ventilate while the trees dripped on us, so things got muggy. Zachary found it impossible to sleep and was sitting up every half an hour, miserable. At about 4AM I told him if he couldn’t sleep we weren’t going to stay the second night and that I was totally OK with bailing out. That seemed to make him feel a little better, but didn’t help him sleep at all.
In the morning, he and I were up the earliest. I got coffee going and then made us some breakfast on Dad’s skillet while he talked to his Mom on my phone. We ate some food and let Finn sleep in until quarter of eight, then got ourselves ready to run over to the camp store to rent a canoe. I parked the truck in the sunlight to dry out and we filled the boat with our gear. Paddling out into the marsh, we followed a canal for a kilometer that led out into an area of open water and up to the beach separating marsh from bay. We were the first to pull our canoe up onto the sand, and we immediately got into the water to cool off.
Because it’s so shallow, the water was about 85˚ and very calm, so we stayed in for an hour and relaxed until the kids wanted to fish. We hiked back to a pier leading out into the open area of the marsh and I hung out with them for an hour while they dropped their lines in the water. While they were occupied, I took a side trip up the beach until I was away from everyone and spread some of Dad’s ashes out into the bay. Some of my strongest and best memories of him are from camping at the beach, and I was missing him a lot on Saturday.
The fish weren’t biting, so Finn got bored; we left Zachary at the pier and took the canoe back to the beach. He joined us after about 20 minutes, and we stayed in the water for about three straight hours laughing and splashing until our fingers were prunes and our stomachs were growling.
I got the kids hydrated and snacked, and then we got back in the canoe to paddle back to the marina. Thankfully the wind was at our back so it was pretty easy for me to paddle us back in—both kids ran out of steam about halfway back. Finn had applied sunblock 3 times but was still bright red and I think Zachary was suffering the lack of sleep. I got the zombies back to the campsite and sent them off to the bathhouse to wash off with their pre-selected clothes (DAD WIN) while I broke down camp and packed the truck up. After I got showered, I threw the bikes on the back of the truck, cleaned up our site, and hit the road for home.
About 5 miles out of the park we got hit with a rainstorm, so I put the hammer down until I could find a covered gas station and put the full top back up on the truck. Finn was up front slathered with aloe and Zachary was in back, so I think he only got a sprinkling. We put the rain behind us and stopped at a Hardee’s for a huge, well-deserved burger and fries, and continued on to Easton.
Dropping Zachary off at home, I noticed more storm clouds brewing north of us, so I hustled Finn out the door, put the bikini top back up, and floored it for home, hoping we could outrun the clouds moving southward. The Scout doesn’t currently have windshield wipers—it’s a long story—so I’ve coated the windshield with Rain-X. It works remarkably well on a summer day but at night in a thunderstorm I don’t want to test it out. Thankfully she’ll do 70mph with no effort, and with brand-new front brakes I’m not worried about stopping anymore.
We made it over the bridge with no problem—and as we got closer to home the clouds seemed to move off to the west. We pulled into the driveway at 8:30 dry as a bone and exhausted; I brought all of the consumables inside to the front porch and backed the truck into the garage.
Even though it wasn’t the full two-night three-day experience, I think we all had a lot of fun under the circumstances. Sometimes you roll the dice and get great weather, and sometimes the heat chases you home. I know we all slept like babies in our own air-conditioned beds last night, and with the kids going back to school tomorrow, that was the right call.
