Distracted: What is with all that isolation? Is that fixable?
Anything else, like putting your phone in a different room, which I urge you to do — beg — would just be tweaking things at the margins. You sound dangerously, depressingly isolated. And you’re trying to do an exhausting job, alone, that humans throughout time have done collectively.
If you can’t move (closer) to a village, then I hope you have at least some materials around for building one.
Carolyn: The isolation is temporary-ish. We are stuck here for another season at least. I use my phone a lot to talk to friends and family, which gets me on it.
Distracted again: Okay. So: If there’s any kid-friendly institution, then push yourself out there for whatever program there is — as much for you as for him. If not, then scour the land for fellow parents of littles.
And schedule your calls with longer stretches in between.
And humor me as I hand this over to Nick Galifianakis, the cartoonist for my column and also my ex, who shared this about being a toddler dad in a remote area with a child-care shortage:
This was me for months. The nearest playground was 50 minutes away. You know you’re in an isolated part of the world when you drive an hour just so your kid can go up and down, over and over, on an escalator.
In our rural area, many kids are home-schooled, so the nearest library can sport a packed house at story time during school hours.
At the church thrift store, for a buck, I could fill a grocery bag with children’s books, spreading out the times I was asked to read “Ulysses.” (I kid.)
A walk to “nowhere” can yield a fun time: name this bird, name that squirrel, name this house, name that deer (and that and that and that one). I often wondered why anyone bothered going into the woods at dawn to hunt deer when they could just sit in my living room, open a window and bonk one on the head.
We would play I Spy or vote on the prettiest bricks (Baltimore bricks, in case you’re wondering). I’d set up couch cushions like slices of bread and cheer on the kid to run into them and bounce off. You can do this over and over until a 2-year-old says, “I’m tired.”
Or I’d lie down on the couch, exhausted, and dare her to push or pull me off the couch. She tried and tried. I was getting a sort-of massage, and she was wearing out.
I included her in loading the dishwasher, folding sheets (yes, I had to refold them, so what) and even sweeping the floor with her scaled-down cleaning tools. Kids want to be included.
