Take my kids, for example...

She is a conscientious student and always strives to do her best.  She is a pleasure to have in class.

 “Do I haaaaaaave to?”

You’re sure you didn’t mix up the report cards, Mrs. Impossibly Patient First Grade Teacher?  Because… I don’t think you know the child that I know. 

Do you have to?  Um, yeah, kid.  You. Have. To.  Despite all indications that the vast magnitude of my cruelty is overwhelming your neural circuits, I’m not, in fact, asking you to read Plato in the original Greek or walk across a wasteland of smoldering lava in your Dora the Explorer socks.   I’m asking you to amble over to the cutlery drawer and take out some spoons.  You know, those things that make it possible to eat pudding without getting it on your ears?  Yeah.  I’d like a few of those.  On the table.  And really, I’d like this to happen without any whining.

“But Mamaaaaa…”

There are times when parenting feels rewarding: truly, deeply, I-am-part-of-the-future awesome.  For example, a few days ago, one of my kids wanted to know the length of the human genome.  We Googled it together, and discovered that there are TWO METERS of DNA in every human cell, and that all the tiny encoded chains of nucleic acids in your body would reach to Pluto and back.  Yeah, how cool is that? 

There are times when parenting feels peanut-buttery: that is, run-of-the-mill, with occasionally chunky niblets of humor value to keep me going – like reading aloud all six novels in a series about Humphrey the classroom hamster, whom, despite myself, I’m kind of starting to bond with. 

And there are times when I wish that the notion of child-theft-by-gypsies were not a myth (and a racial slur to boot).  Or maybe not theft, per se, but child trading.  Because I’m pretty sure those gypsy (sorry, Romani) kids would be way more tractable than my own – and not have the same three knock-knock jokes imprinted on a mental Mobius strip.

At those times, of course, I am consumed by guilt.  Because Nice Parents do not have such thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my children.  I adore them; I dote on them; I would take on an angry bear on their behalf, armed only with my bitten-down fingernails and a pocketful of hair-snaggled rubber bands and used Kleenex.  I love my children… and yet I’ve often wondered why it is that despite the fact that I am viewing them through the lens of my positively-biased genetically-related bonded-since-infancy gaze, they nonetheless sometimes appear to be nightmarish little demons.  Conversely, I’ve wondered why other adults – who are under no particular imperative to love, like, or even tolerate my kids – often seem to see them as relatively functional small human beings.

I was proud of her courage to speak in front of her peers… Great job!

Ah.  So… the other twin doesn’t talk much at school, huh?  Uh-huh.  Yup.  THAT MUST BE BECAUSE SHE’S SAVING IT ALL UP.

“But I don’t want to go to bed!  I’m not tired!  Wait, I need to tell you about my book… so in the first part….

“… and then after they go into the cave, then their flashlights run out of batteries…

“…and they have these walkie-talkies… wait, Mom, I need to tell you about the walkie-talkies…

“…and then the one girl with the pony…

“…so then after they switched the batteries…

“… and then there’s another girl, and she’s in the cave too… Mom, wait, I’m not done yet!  Wait, listen!”

I meant to listen.  Really, I did. I mean, who could resist a twenty-minute oral book report on a novel entitled “Pony Pals”?  But my brain had melted fifteen minutes previously, and leaked out my ears.  Maybe it puddled somewhere in my stained hoodie, I’m not sure.  It was really too bad, because I’d been hoping to use it to help me parse the intricacies of the crisis in Syria, or to write a couple of scientific journal articles, or at the very least to make a marginally erudite pun on Facebook.

Facebook.  Facebook is where my parental guilt goes to metastasize.  On Facebook, given my place in the over-educated-middle-aged-people demographic, many of my friends went through the Kindergarten Rite of Passage with the baby of the family this fall.  The last one! On Facebook, there were many bittersweet parental sighs.  But… when my first one and my last one set off for their first day at University Park Elementary School two years ago, I did not weep; I exhaled.  And then I zoomed off to work, my spirits and my bike both free-wheeling.  Because someone else was taking care of my kids. 

Yeah, I know.  Not nice.  Wasn’t I supposed to be mourning the end of their babyhood?  Regretting the loss of some portion of my time with them, and some portion of my influence over their little lives?  Wasn’t I supposed to be concerned about the not-me influences they would be prey to in a big, bad world full of Other People? 

 “Mama, it’s not faaaaair!” 

At times like these, the Other People can have my kids.  On any given day, there are at least seventeen things that are “not fair”.  I’ve leveled with the kids: yup, life isn’t fair.  I’ve pointed out to them that most of the time, the not-fairness of the world has been working heavily in their favor.  This is commonly known as the “You should be grateful, because some kid is starving in a country you’ve never heard of” strategy.  It doesn’t work.  Or, maybe it only works on other people’s children, who invariably seem to remember, when in my care, to say “please” and “thank you” and “I had a very nice time” and even “Wow, you’re so cool”.  You think I’m making this up?  No, really, someone else’s offspring thinks I’m, like, awesome.  My own?  Not so much.

“You gave her the bigger piece!”

The thing is, I LIKE kids.  I always have.  I revel in their imaginative energy (“I will give you a ticket to our kingdom.  But you have to paint yourself with cranberries.”)  I am amused by their disarming honesty (“You have a really big nose, Nancy!”) I appreciate their peculiarly abstract view of the word, as evidenced by the poetry-magnet ode that appeared on the fridge (“He is warm butter.  He is a chocolate sandwich.  He is gorgeous.”)  Why, given that I genuinely like hanging out with kids, am I sometimes driven ape-feces loony by my own? 

Nice Parents definitely do not offer to sell, barter, or trade their children. 

Or… do they?  Maybe I’ve just been focusing on the positive.  I have a problem with that – always seeing the stupid glass as half-full, even when someone has clearing been filching my lemonade. 

Ok, I told myself.  Let’s go back and dig deeper.

Jackpot. 

In the past few weeks alone, two different friends of mine publically confessed (with photographic evidence) that their toddlers had decided to “decorate” the family car by creatively engraving its exterior with a rock.   One mom shared deadpan and marvelously unsympathetic reports on just how often her three sons were vomiting.  Another parent offered dark humor regarding little-kid nightmares and being woken from well-deserved slumber for the eleventeenth time.  And one, a peculiarly honest fellow, suggested that he would like to divorce his ten-year-old. 

I commiserated with a coworker whose two-year-old will not put on his snow boots for her, although the same task goes over just fine at daycare.  Why, she sighed, were all his meltdowns directed at her?  Another office-mate chimed in from behind the next segment of carpeted wall: “It doesn’t get any better as they get older!”  She just sent a kid off to college.  “It just shows they’re normal.”

Normal?  Someone out there has kids who are “normal”?  Then again… if every kid is abnormal in a different way, perhaps it makes sense that dealing with someone else’s normally-abnormal child feels like a gulp of fresh oxygen after being locked in a gym locker room for a week.

A couple of weeks ago, our family headed out on a three-day 20-mile hiking excursion that included nine adults and six (six!) kids between the ages of 6 and 10.  Although I wouldn’t bet my life on it, I’m pretty sure all fifteen of us managed to have a (mostly) good time, despite mud, hills, the ultimate inevitability of bedtime, and the innate unfairness of being between the ages of 6 and 10.  And for me, one of the greatest things about the trip (besides the hot tubs, because I can’t let this go by without mentioning the hot tubs) was the constant and sometimes hilarious shell-game of siblings and parents. 

For example, at one point, a kid from family A and a kid from family B were grooving together in the somewhat distant charge of the parents from family C, who had left their teenager at home in the nominal care of family D.  An extra adult with no kids of her own was happily hiking with the other kids from families A and B, who were getting along marvelously with one another, despite wanting to have nothing to do with their awful, terrible, respective siblings.  Meanwhile I hiked with Child E, who even ten miles into a long day was unfailingly charming.  Child F was the only one hiking with a parent.  By mile nine, she was moaning piteously.  However, she was sweet as a snickerdoodle a very short while later, splashing in a hot tub with me -- because she is normal.

Yes, it seems that this is precisely correct.  So says the Official Psychology Literature, and so says the common wisdom, and so says my cubicle-neighbor.  Kids do their very best whining, sniveling, and sociopath-impersonations for their parents – and only for their parents.  The teacher who thinks they are angels is not lying.  Neither is the neighbor, the friend, the anybody-but-you person who gets all the pleases and thank-yous and holding-together-of-emotions.  The tedious complaints?  The screaming, door-slamming awfulness?  Those are just for you.  Why?  Well, because your little Beelzebub knows you love him unconditionally.  Even when he’s lying on the floor shrieking.

Part of me wants to greet this harsh reality with a wail of my own:  “That’s not faaaaaair!”  But… in my heart I know it is fair.  For one thing, it’s payback for what I probably did to Dear Old Mom and Dad three decades or more ago.  But I also realize now that it’s more than fair – it’s actually good.  There’s a silver lining somewhere in the cumulonimbus of parental despair.  Because, ok, you can’t actually sell your kids, but occasional trading isn’t just a-ok, it’s necessary.  Kids have something to learn from Other Grownups.  And grownups have something to learn from Other Kids.  Somewhere out there is an adult with new ideas, a novel perspective, and some thoroughly exciting snacks to share.  Somewhere out there is a grownup who hasn’t been worn down by this particular child’s set of idiosyncrasies.  Somewhere out there is a grownup who has not yet heard those three knock-knock jokes.

A couple of days after the trip, Jay and I received a kind-hearted and eloquent thank-you message from the parents of family F:  Thanks… for giving a parenting break: most times, [Child F] did not even want us around, and we indulged in that freedom for a bit.

Oh, you are very welcome, my good friends.  I’m always happy to hang out with your imaginative, energetic, sharp-witted kid – on a hike, on a bike, in a show, on the go… (but keep the green eggs and ham out of the hot tub, okay?)  Besides, you are among the ranks of those who have spent their oh-so-valuable time with our own children.  To you – and to all who have talked to them, babysat them, taught them, or even biked around Iceland with them – thank you.

Today, by some peculiar serendipity related to half-written blog-posts, another friend made this comment on Facebook, directed at family A:  You should follow Nancy's advice precisely… Just keep her away from your girls or they, like ours, will suddenly find themselves happily involved in Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater productions for the next decade or two!

You hear that?  Lend me your kids, and I will corrupt them with four-hundred-year-old plays full of bloodshed and sexual innuendos!  Meanwhile, I’ll send you the twins.  I hear that one of them “speaks up” and that the other “always strives to do her best” so I’ll bet they’ll make a really good showing when they tell you those knock-knock jokes.

Our Town

A few days prior to a public presentation I gave this summer (“Frost and Fire: Alaska’s Changing Climate”), the Fairbanks Daily NewsMiner published an article touting the event: “Professor's talk looks at climate change in Alaska.”  Yes, this was a whole newspaper article about me.  This could have been super-flattering --  except that the NewsMiner had already written other articles about me.  And about Jay.  And about our small children.  And about lost dogs.  And about zucchini. Or if you prefer, from July 16th, “Fairbanks man arrested after punching himself in the face.”

It’s hard to maintain an illusion of Not Being a Total Hick when one ranks right up there with news of this caliber. Moreover, the online comments on the climate change article -- which reflected the grasp that selected local folks have on science, the role of university professors, and generally accepted rules of spelling and grammar – well, let’s just say they didn’t exactly make the city of Fairbanks seem more cosmopolitan. Once again, I had to face the truth:  the city of Fairbanks is not a city.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this.  On one hand, I’m relieved, because I’m not a city person.  Yeah, ok, I’m stating the obvious here; my lifestyle doesn’t even include a hairdryer, a purse, or, you know, plumbing.  Whatever word is the opposite of metrosexual, the OED probably mentions me in its definition. I know that I’ve never had a banana’s chances in a blender of being either urban or urbane.  And yet… some obdurate part of me wants to feel as if I’m at least in spitting distance of Where Things Happen. A hub.  An epicenter.  Ergo, a city.

Not wanting to be a hick isn’t just a semantic bias.  The long tide of human history indicates that it was when human societies aggregated, coagulated, and clustered that they most often began making great discoveries, writing compelling prose, illuminating the truths and perils of the human condition, and moving the metaphorical chess pieces of the world.  Indubitably, a single human brain is a fascinating and impressive bundle of neural connections (despite tending to find its own self repulsive to contemplate).  But thousands of brains working in concert – piling idea upon idea, hypothesizing, arguing, challenging, goading -- can be stunning, powerful, beautiful, creative, explosive.  Throughout history, cities have created seas of thought.   Such is my hubris that I’d rather think of myself as a guppy in Lake Superior than as a liberal, intellectual halibut flapping in a redneck puddle.

Just how small is the pond up here?  Well, if being touted as news is one sign of small-town-ness, being known by everyone (and their mother, and their dog) is surely another.

“Oh, you’re the one with the two-kid bike attachment thing!” 

The elderly woman was smiling at me with genuine goodwill, but even so, I felt my dignity ebb.  I was still wearing the Respectable Professor Outfit that I’d donned to give that public talk – black slacks, an equally black top that is not (technically) a t-shirt, and shoes that are not held together with duct tape – but she was obviously picturing me in my ordinary state:  covered in bike grease.  “I see you all the time!” she enthused. So much for dignity.  And it wasn’t as if being recognized at my climate change presentation was anything new. This woman extolling my bicycling prowess reminded me of my kids’ summer camp director, an equally elderly and voluble personage in her seventies who had stopped by my office a few days previously.  She, too, felt the need to tell me that she saw me bicycling “everywhere.”   It also turned out she knew Alison, in the next cubicle.  And Tina, in the opposite one. 

“Wow, Fairbanks really is a small place,” I said. 

“Oh, yes!”  Her voice was surprisingly loud for such a tiny individual.  “NEVER have an affair in this town!” she boomed cheerfully. 

Uh, thanks, Sweet Old Lady….

Sage advice from elderly locals notwithstanding, Wikipedia – boon of all lazy researchers -- insists we are, indeed, a city: “Fairbanks is the largest city in the Interior region of Alaska, and second largest in the state.”  In contrast, Huntington Long Island, where I grew up, “is one of ten towns in Suffolk County, New York.”  But if you read a little further, you find that the “city” of Fairbanks has 32,036 residents, and that even the entire “metropolitan area” has a population of only 97,581.  The “town” of Huntington, meanwhile, has a population of 203,264.

Well, gosh, that really clears things up. 

When I was a kid, “The City” meant only one thing: New York.  Much as Manhattan fascinated me, with its labyrinthine museums and its richly-scented and teeming Babel of culture, drama, and vertical humanity – it also intimidated me, for much the same reasons.  Huntington is a dot in the morass that makes up the greater New York Metropolitan Area, which has a population somewhere in the order of twenty million people.  You could lose Fairbanks in that Charybdis two hundred times over, and then some.  If cities are hive-brains, New York is a genius.  But… it’s not a genius I can live with.

Even in tamer havens such as Boston and Seattle, I eventually become claustrophobic and overwhelmed.  What greenness they boast is managed and proscribed.  Escaping their clutches requires braving the transportation maze.  The metaphorical weight of those members of my own species becomes oppressive.  Still, I have an inescapable feeling that such places are the Real Deal: in order to be newsworthy in an honest-to-goodness city, you have to either be hoarding chemical weapons or really, really good at playing football.

Perhaps it’s when I’ve been listening to a little too much KIAK FM that I start questioning whether Fairbanks is precisely the sort of community I belong in.   I’m not a city girl, but I’m not a country girl, either.  Much as I enjoy an occasional country ballad, I don’t aim to spend every Friday night getting fired up on Jack Daniels before riding the mechanical bull, and I don’t really want Brad Paisley to check me for ticks.  On the face of things, the non-city of Fairbanks is that sort of town.

Or… is it?  As I chatted politely with the woman who “saw me everywhere,” other Climate Change Talk attendees were still filing past, some of them enjoying a not-terribly-dignified but deliciously free Good Humor bar on the way out the door.  I said hello to a charming couple I’d met years ago, when I dabbled in the local Shakespeare company.  I thanked the friends who had helped haul in more chairs, when the crowd over-filled the room.  I quickly answered a question posed by a grad student whose research – and academic contacts – overlap with my own.  Meanwhile, two other people agreed with the first of the friendly older women – that yes, I’m that person with the kids on the crazy bike, and where on earth did I get that thing?

Somewhere in the midst of all this – it may have been when I unwrapped my second ice cream bar – I realized that I was having a good time.

I realized a few other things, too.  First of all, for an on-campus academic talk on a Tuesday night in a remote Alaskan outpost of humanity, this really wasn’t a bad turnout – and not a single one of the online hecklers had turned up.  Yes, many of the faces were familiar, but then again, many of them were not.  Only one person had blatantly shown up only for the ice cream, and I found myself kind of admiring his audacity and creativity as he busily bundled extra bars into his ragged bag.  It seemed that I didn’t really already know every single socially engaged and intellectually curious person in Fairbanks – or even anywhere close.

Second, the fact that some of these people were folks I’ve seen on stage with the Fairbanks Drama Association or running through the streets dressed like mosquitoes during the Midnight Sun Run made them more interesting to me, not less.  Recognizing each other, knowing each other, and caring about each other doesn’t make us hicks; it makes us a community.  I may not be a small-town girl in the small-minded sense, but I’m a small-town girl nonetheless.  When it comes down to it, I’d rather be known and understood for who I am than taken seriously for who I am not.

Third, while Fairbanks isn’t a city so much as a speck of humanity lost in hundreds of miles of forests, rivers, and wetlands, it is nonetheless an epicenter and a hub.  We’re a hub in the sense that we’re the largest community for over three hundred miles in any direction, along the five roads that leave town, heading north to the Arctic ocean, northeast to the Yukon River, east to Chena Hot Springs, south to Anchorage, and southeast to the Lower 48 (via a couple of thousand kilometers’-worth of Canada.)  But even more importantly, we’re an epicenter -- because in the age of the Internet, small towns are big, and big towns are small, and epicenters can be everywhere or nowhere. 

The internet has Changed Everything, but I’d argue that it’s changed the small places more than it has changed the big ones.  Google “Nancy Fresco” and you can find our far more than you ever wanted to know about me.  (You can use it to heckle and deride me, if you want to.)  Among the public detritus of my life you’ll find that back in December, the NewsMiner singled me our as the “winner” of the solstice Dawn to Dusk race, a ludicrous 3-hour-and-41-minute trot at temperatures that never topped -30.  There were only 2 women who completed the entire time period – and I was, in fact, the slower of the two.  But – so what?  Fairbanks residents do not have to rely on this sort of stellar reporting for their worldview – and people in New York need not be deprived of it.  In this century, anyone can read the NewsMiner… or the New York Times.  And we can all share in the messy, pyrotechnic, beautiful massive-mind-meld that used to be the sole prerogative of city-dwellers.

As for my actual, physical locale – well, I’d much rather live in a quirky outpost that feels like a community than in a city full of strangers.  There are limits to how genuinely hick I could be; I want to live somewhere with a university and excellent public schools.  I want a good academic library, and a good public one as well.  I want a variety of local events, shows, resources, and experiences -- and I certainly wouldn’t object to a town that offered the opportunity to run a marathon over a scenic mountaintop and then catch a show and some Thai food all on the same day.  I want a large enough local population to allow me to find intellectual, open-minded, adventuresome, challenging, supportive, iconoclastic, hilarious, goofy-as-heck friends.  But really, eighty thousand choices will do. I’ve found you guys.  I mean, I’m picky, all right, but I’m not THAT picky.   In short, I don't want or need to be in physical proximity to a million people, but I want to be in metal proximity a billion. 

And… I can.

Sure, there are things I hate about Fairbanks.  Many of my fellow residents do not vote in precisely the manner in which I would like them to.  Our urban planning is deranged, and we seem sadly unable to sanely manage our air quality problem. And I should never, ever, read any NewsMiner online comments.  But those are all subjects for another day (meaning, of course, another blog post; your patience with me is impressive, if you’ve gotten this far).  For now, I’m happy to live in the great big bustling urban metropolis of Fairbanks.  And if you’re pretty sure you’ve seen me before, because aren’t I that woman with the two-kid bike attachment thing – well, yeah, that’s me.  In fact, I’ll be giving a public talk a couple of weeks from now at Beaver Sports, about our family’s vacation, spent biking with kids.  I was asked to do this because… well, you know, because this sure is a small town. 

See you there.