'Our Beautiful Life in the Wilderness is Over. How Can I Do This to My Kids?'

This is an opportunity, not a tragedy.

Heartless (1980), Dorothea Tanning

Dear Polly,

These seven years since I met my husband have been an absolute turbulent disaster, and now in the past few months everything seems to finally be crashing down around us. I loved him the moment I met him. He was (and still is) a beautiful artistic dreamer, stubborn and brave and impulsive and creative and wildly emotional. When I fell in love it was reality bending, it was all encompassing, I abandoned my whole self to be with him. I quit my job, stopped seeing my friends, moved in with him and began this journey that is now seemingly ending.

We became obsessed with creating a life where we could be together, work together, have lots of children and dogs, make art and grow our own food. We began pouring everything into it, all our time, all our money. It was an idealist dream, but we’ve almost made it a reality.

Except it hasn’t gone how we thought it would. Pandemic, huge losses of people we both loved, money stress to the extreme. When our first child was born he nearly died in childbirth which sent me deep into a state of panic I haven’t broken out of in the years since. Then a miscarriage. Then another pregnancy where I felt sick with fear the whole time, certain she wouldn’t make it here with us.

The house we live in is very rural, nearly an hour away from any moderate sized town. We have gone through floods and fires, break ins, extended power outages through the middle of winter where we have to bundle our children up and sleep all together in front of a fire. There are bears here and mountain lions, ticks and snakes, I feel constantly on edge taking my children outside. I feel constantly scared a new disaster will strike, another loved one will die.

Our life is not this peaceful, beautiful life I thought we were working towards, and our business does not make us enough money to live above the poverty line. Since our second was born it seemed clear that my husband should look for a job, but we delayed it as I was so scared to have two small children on my own in the middle of nowhere with no friends or family nearby. And now, much later, it is also becoming clear we should move somewhere more practical, some place we can afford, that is near schools and jobs and other people.

I don’t make art anymore, I make popsicle stick crafts with my littles, we paint with our fingers, we bake oatmeal cookies. We do not grow all our own food. We are not drinking wine in the sunshine, we are not keeping bees, we are not barefoot in the grass.

And yet, saying goodbye to this delusional dream feels like destroying myself. We will lose money, we will be walking away scarred from this experience. We cannot dip easily into a new, normal life. I am forever changed, I am part wild animal now. I cannot imagine myself navigating suburbia well, I cannot picture interacting with people daily, working a normal job, putting my children in daycare. I’ve been living in such an unusual, animal way, denned up in the forest, that I’ve forgotten how to be human.

My son cries when we mention possibly moving. He says this is his home, he does not want to leave. He is young, but I know what he feels is serious. He loves the berry bushes we have, the orchard, he can name every wild flower that grows here, he loves to watch the tadpoles turn to frogs in the pond. He is part wild animal too. I feel we are making this decision for our children’s well being, but what if this life is nourishing in a different way?

I keep forgetting the reality of the situation and keep slipping into the dream of it, the beautiful story of it, of bird song and sunsets and my husband’s hand in mine as we walk through the trees. I block out the fighting, the rabbits torn apart by birds that I have to shovel off the path to keep my dogs from rolling in them, the enmeshment, the loneliness, the blood and guts of a rural life, the money.

My husband was finally offered a job, a well-paying one, and it starts in two weeks. It is in a large city three hours away, he would have to move there first on his own, before we could join him. We are quite likely in the last season of living like this and despite the stress, despite the pain, I am terrified of leaving. We only have enough money left for three more months, it feels like he must take the job, he must leave if we are to avoid being financially ruined.

When we talk practically about life and money it seems likely we will not be able to afford more children. I have these two wonderful children, but I had thought we would have more. I feel grief for the beautiful children I will never meet. My question for you is, how am I supposed to accept this failure? How am I supposed to settle for a normal life? What happens when you chase your dreams and they end up like this? What if success is just around the corner and we’re giving up too quickly? Is some of this panic because my husband and I were both raised in a mild suburbia and we subconsciously feel that childhood should look a certain way? Our children are well fed, happy, incredibly smart, and surrounded by love and nature. Do people struggle financially even when they live a so called normal life? Are we going to make this huge change and then simply continue to struggle in new ways? Is life simply struggling in different ways? Does struggle even matter at the end? We only get to live so many years, how are we supposed to spend them if not chasing joy and an authentic life? Does becoming parents mean that suddenly all our dreams become unimportant, secondary? Would my children grow up to be strong joyful, deeply rooted people if they experienced this unusual life? Can I shield them from the financial pressures, can I protect them from my own fears and only share with them the beauty?

It feels insane for my husband to reject the job offer. It feels selfish to choose poverty for our children when we have the potential to provide a safe and normal life for them. I am writing this with the knowledge we likely do not have a real choice here. I just don’t know how to live life after the dream dies.

Love,

Delusional Dreamer

Dear Delusional Dreamer,

I know you’re in mourning, but your situation isn’t tragic. You and your husband and your kids have learned a lot about one beautiful, intense way of living. Now you have the rare opportunity to learn about a completely different path. Everyone in your family will benefit from this violent change of scenery: You will. Your husband will. Each of your kids will. Everyone will learn a lot.

Your husband will benefit from the strain and stress of having a regular job in an ordinary place, even as he sweats under the burden, doubts this choice, and misses the wilderness. Your kids will gain a lot from being forced to interact with, cooperate with, and tolerate other children, other parents, and teachers, and to endure loud cars, random dogs, sudden noises, trash, traffic, and odd strangers on the street. You will be blessed by the intrusion of tame city children, irritatingly mainstream parents, not always very enlightened teachers, ugly strip malls, terrible grocery stores, interminable traffic lights.

Your current anxieties will be replaced by different anxieties, and through it all, you’ll convince yourself that you made a horrific mistake, that you should’ve stuck it out in the country, that you’re letting yourself and your husband and your children down by going along with this compromised, difficult, deeply UNROMANTIC, annoyingly practical choice. You’ll say to yourself, “Here we are, and we’re still broke, and my kids are mad at me for moving, and my husband is miserable at his job, so why the fuck did we do this, how could we have brought this nightmare on ourselves?”

You’ll forget the dead rabbits and you’ll only remember the wild flowers. So will your kids. So will your husband.

That’s why you have to understand that your job as a human and as a parent and as a wife is to celebrate a wide and terrifying range of experiences, in tandem with your family, so that everyone can grow up to be more flexible, more open, more engaged, more invested in community and the future. In other words, you were NOT put on this Earth to create a gorgeous, idealized, isolated mirage of perfection and control for your kids and then get them dependent on and addicted to that rarefied habitat, which, despite the deeply soulful and moving connection to nature, is its own form of boutique existence, carefully excised as it is from the endless inconveniences of other human beings.

Instead, you were put on this Earth to experience a wide range of mad and horrifying and romantic events. You are here to witness wild love and disappointment and unexpected sickness and hideous death. You are here to prepare your kids to bear witness to these forces without shying away, without expecting to be in control, without feeling that it’s all too much for them, without believing that the ideal for every human is to be safe and secure and whisked away from ugliness, inconveniences, from threats, from awkwardness, from irritations. Your job is to prep your children from untold calamities and difficulties and also the intense frustrations, fears, and disappointments of random human beings. Your job is to make your kids more curious in the face of their fears.

More curious. More engaged. More joyful. More accepting. More compassionate. More helpful. More loving. More expressive.

In order to do this, you don’t tell a child, “BE MORE CURIOUS!” No. You model curiosity. You don’t tell a child, “BE MORE BRAVE.” You ask a child to share their fears with you, and you share a few of your less terrifying or maudlin fears, and then you talk about how you locate your brave self.

You don’t cushion your kids from hardship or heartache or hard work. You don’t step in and do everything for them. You don’t hang over their shoulders, making sure they turn in every assignment on time and to your specifications. You don’t call their teachers to protest a bad grade. You don’t set up playdates with kids you think are appropriate when your kid likes other kids. You don’t micromanage and smooth and perfect your child’s path. You ask them what they want, what they enjoy, what they might change. You encourage them to experiment with different approaches to see what works.

You let your kid feel overwhelmed and you say “That’s normal, everyone feels that way, I have felt that way often.” You allow your kid to react to the jolt of civilization however they like. You celebrate their reactions, which are signs of free will and zest for life, and you explain that you understand. But you return to first principles. You voice them.

Which first principles? That there is only one righteous way to live, out in the lovely wilderness, and every other way of life is ugly and unsafe and compromised?

No. The first principles that we are all here, on this Earth, to enjoy a vast, alarming, gorgeous range of possibilities. We’re here to meet a stunning variety of different people and to see a breathtaking sweep of different places and to soak in and appreciate and tolerate and savor all of it. We can’t become people who live in one narrow way and therefore have no flexibility, no range. We can’t grow into humans who react to the world like it’s just a maze of offensive and insulting forces that are out to destroy us.

This includes you and your husband. You will return to nature one day, or you’ll find some lovely patch of land near the city and near the country that balances the joys of both. But right now, you are meant to grow up. You are not growing into something lamentable with this move. You’re expanding in every direction.

But you have to be brave. You have to model curiosity, engagement, compassion, joy. You have to express your sadness, you have to mourn, but you can’t treat this move like it’s an unfair tragedy, because that’s not accurate. Nature isn’t going anywhere. You didn’t fuck anything up. You’re trying something new, for the benefit of everyone in your family, yourself included.

You sound very, very anxious. When a person sees the past, the present, AND the future as dark, scary, tragic? That’s anxiety and it needs to be treated before you do anything else.

I recognize that sound because you sound like me a few years ago. I moved a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old across the country after the pandemic, and I was very anxious before, during, and after the move.

It did not go smoothly. My older daughter hated us for it. She hated her first year at her new high school. She missed her friends and didn’t want new friends. She hated leaving LA, her hometown where she was born and wanted to stay forever.

I told her that we all needed to be closer to my mom, who was turning 80 soon, before she died. I told her that her dad and I had wanted her and her sister to experience a place that was very different from Los Angeles. Soon enough she’d have control over her life, but for now, I wanted her to have a new kind of adventure, to know what it feels like to walk through the snow in the winter and to see the trees blossom in the spring. I wanted her to understand how nice it can be to live in a smaller, more relaxed place.

None of this stuff was convincing to her, but I kept saying it. And in spite of feeling like an anxious tangle of nerves, I forced myself to exercise, to take classes, to make new friends. I was bold when I didn’t feel like being bold. I socialized and threw parties and hurled myself into my new life, and endured the nerves and the mixed feelings that went along with these risks.

I felt very shitty a lot of the time. I was recovering from several surgeries and taking a hormone-blocking cancer drug that made me anxious and sad. We bought a big chunk of land that we could not manage, with a terrible, dark, ugly, small house on it that our kids hated. To them, LA was a glorious dreamland of greenery and sparkling sunlight, and we were in a rainy, humid smallish place inhabited by weird, annoying strangers. My husband wanted to move the most, but he didn’t really want a new job. My kids didn’t want to meet new people. I didn’t want to start over and make new friends at age 50. Everything was HARRRRRD.

But I kept repeating our reasons for moving. I kept telling my daughters what they stood to gain by living in this new place, as much as they hated it now, which was absolutely understandable. I asked them how their days went (“BAD.”) without micromanaging or coaching or becoming visibly jittery over their anger and sadness. I did not hover. I was supportive. I let them stay mad and frustrated and upset, and let them talk it out. I didn’t tell them how to feel about things. I just repeated what I wanted for them, as they rolled their eyes over and over and over.

Last summer, about three years after we moved, my older daughter said to me, “I understand now why you wanted us to move. I love it here and I’m glad I got to live here.”

Now let’s be clear: I wouldn’t have just plucked up my family for the sake of variety and new adventures. We had a bunch of reasons for coming here. But moving was my reality, so I explained how we would all learn and grow from moving.

Likewise, you wouldn’t have left the wilderness without this financial crisis breathing down your neck. But tragic plot twist or not, your job is to make sense of where you are, and to model bravery, curiosity, enthusiasm, and even sadness and fear for your kids. Your job is to be a human being out in the open, where they can see you. Your job is to comfort your kids through this tough transition WITHOUT putting your anxieties and fears into them. Your job is to respect how resilient they are.

Don’t paint this move as a tragedy for them. Don’t insist that they prefer the country. Don’t insist that they remain isolated and suspicious of city dwellers, and don’t force friendships on them, either. Don’t lament the countless insults of having to get along with regular people in a regular place, far from nature, and don’t repeat the idea that life is much better in one place or another.

Show your kids how to be where you are, soaking up new sights, appreciating new oddities, navigating new troubles. Model boldness and courage. When you can’t, explain why. And then?

Return to first principles: We are here to experience everything this world has to offer, the good stuff and the bad stuff. We are not here to dodge and avoid and keep ourselves safe. We are here to be brave, to relish the day, to embrace our own flaws and the flaws of others, and to share our enthusiasm, share our curiosity, share what we know, where we’ve been, what we’ve experienced, and to share our love.

Life is chaotic. Uncertainty is inevitable. We’re here to enjoy it as much as we can.

I often felt like a giant baby in that first year here. I cried to my husband over and over. You will both be giant babies often. Be giant babies when you’re alone together.

But with your babies, be adults. You’re giving them an enormous gift. This curse is a blessing. Thank the gods you landed here, and relish this adventure as much as you can, every minute of it. Because trust me, you’ll look back and you’ll say: “Oof, that was nuts. I’m so glad we had to do that. I’m so glad we tried something new. We all learned a lot, we all grew so much. We wouldn’t be who we are today without that very important, very difficult time.”

Model bravery until you are brave.

You will feel brave.

You will feel proud of yourself.

No dream is dying, today or tomorrow. This could be the most romantic year of your life so far. Try to enjoy it.

Polly

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