I started using my dad’s Nikon SLR in college and I’ve been putting my “real” photos on a Flickr account for almost half my life now; I started blogging on a Geocities account in high school and I’m 40 now so I guess that means I’ve been writing online about myself for more than half my life. Hilarious! Longtime readers and/or knowers of me will remember that I briefly tried to make writing and photography into jobs in my 20s, but mostly I’ve just been plodding along, bringing my big camera out with me sometimes, writing this blog increasingly not at all, doing both because it feels impossible not to, but always with an air of humiliation like the failed creative professional I am. It’s only recently that I’ve managed to see the obvious: That I take pictures and make videos and write in my little internet journal not as some kind of sad idiot who was not brave or smart enough to push her way into a career in the arts, but just as a regular person, with hobbies.
This becomes more obvious to me when I think about the hobbies I’ve taken up in the last few years. I don’t feel embarrassed telling people that I garden or lift weights, probably because it’s clear to everyone involved that these things do not constitute, and will never transform themselves into, a side hustle or a freelance job or some principle I can organize my life around. Nobody looks at my insufferable Instagram Stories of my creeping phlox and my deadlifts and thinks: This lady should consider becoming a landscape designer/professional powerlifter. Nobody, including me! These activities are just for fun, and for stunting on people. Contrast that with the way I fall over apologizing and insulting myself whenever somebody politely asks whether I take pictures as a job (“oh my GOD NO this is just my dumb expensive HOBBY ha ha ugh so stupid” — me a couple times a year to well-meaning school parents when I send them photos I’ve taken of our kids together).
Refusing to take myself too seriously is basically my religion; strangely, in putting myself and my more creative pursuits down (or completely hiding them — at this point, the idea of telling anyone else in my actual life about this Substack and its years of archives is unthinkably humiliating; if anybody has an idea of what the fuck to do with this stuff when the kids get old enough to be on the internet please let me know) I have, in fact, been taking myself too seriously, by imagining that anyone cares or has an opinion about the things I choose to create in my downtime, and that I need to pre-empt these presumably negative or pitying opinions with my clownish attitude. And, not that I’m gonna get into it here, but in recent years I have noticed that sometimes people take advantage of this (cool, accommodating, fun and funny) personality trait of mine by feeling free to say shitty and aggro things to me about how I organize my life (ie, with paid work that is not particularly time consuming or central to my identity, which is related to the fact that I have the time and brain space to faff around with other stuff). I can make fun of my stupid job and my stupid extracurricular activities, not you, because I don’t really mean it, assholes!
Anyway where was I. Hobbies are a flex. They are a flex for anyone at any point in life but I consider having hobbies, creative and otherwise, to be a huge flex for anyone in midlife with full time paid work plus caregiving duties, aka me. I’m not going to insult you with the paragraph that we can all sense goes right here, where I talk about how I am speaking from a place of privilege, how most of these hobbies cost money and all of them take time and I should not pat myself on the back too much when there are many things about my cushy self-centered upper middle class white lady life that enable me to et cetera. I’m not saying I disagree with that paragraph, just that I’m tired of reading a compulsory warmed-over version of it everywhere I look and I assume you are too.
What’s been bothering me for a while is that fuckin AHP essay from last year about the gendered nature of leisure. I’m not going to link to it because there’s a chance she could follow it back here and she seems like a person who doesn’t deserve to see the snide remarks I’m about to make. If you google “Culture Study who gets quality leisure” you’ll find it. If you haven’t read it, you can get the gist of it based on this screenshot:
I do not appreciate the amount of time I’ve spent chewing on this idea (that men tend to do timebound hobbies with other men outside the home, while women tend to do hobbies that can fit into the margins of life inside the home, by themselves, and the hobbies usually confer benefits on other people as well as the hobbyist). AHP annoys me. I am generally glad that she’s on the beat she’s on, but she has a Captain Obvious vibe about her, and her writing is like one long version of that paragraph I refused to write above, and I would simply prefer that if someone is going to style themselves as one of my generation’s spokespeople for the untenability of modern American motherhood, that they be a mother themselves. A nice child free lady writes some solemn and respectful thoughts about the societal forces conspiring against me and I can’t help it, my hand automatically does the jackoff motion and my mouth makes fart sounds. Get your own problems, babe.
But anyway she’s right, obviously, about the hobbies thing. She’s right about me. I write this blog in the margins of life, by myself. I take photos in the margins or while documenting other activities, in a way that adds value to lives of my family members and the people around me. I dig and plant and weed and mulch and prune and fertilize and I do refer to myself as Yard Dad during these activities because it can be protected time (I love breezing through the living room on a springtime Saturday morning, where the three other members of my family are locked in a battle of wills about video games or tablets or whatever other bullshit, then stepping out on the front porch and putting on my little gardening clogs and shutting the door behind me, sorry Ryan), but it’s also interruptible, can be and is performed simultaneously with childcare, confers benefits to other people in that it increases our curb appeal and the value of our home (barf), and two years in, it’s basically more of a seasonal chore than a hobby at this point. And while I’m proud of myself that I protect my workday enough to do my noon Cr*ssfit class, having any kind of exercise count as a “hobby” is dubious, as a woman. Exercise classes can be pleasurable and social and timebound and protected, but they’re also a way for me to attend to my physical and mental health (necessary) and to make sure my ass looks better than it otherwise would (un-). Kind of a wash.
I signed the kids up for piano lessons last month. I’ve been threatening them with these lessons for so long, cajoling them, sweet-talking them. I believe so strongly in holding the line as long as we can against Endless Kid Activity lifestyle. I experience each spring and fall kid soccer season as a deep puncture wound in my quality of life; layering a second activity on top of it, with all the attendant mental labor and opportunity costs, seemed unthinkable. But I started piano lessons when I was Gus’ age, and basically every other seven year old we know is in some kind of music lesson right now, and unfortunately for everyone these facts nag at me in a way I can’t ignore. I’ve been moving toward this moment for a long time: Three years ago, I had movers yoink my childhood upright piano from my parents’ house in Fairfax and set her down in our dining room; earlier this year I hired a tuner. He seemed like the exact same curmudgeonly old dude I remember coming out to our house in the 90s, except with a tuning app on his phone, now. Once he was finished and the piano no longer sounded like it belonged in a Wild West saloon, he asked if he could have one of the tangerines sitting in the bowl on the table. I took one too and we stood there with our oranges and chatted for a while. I confessed that I was feeling eager (or anxious?) about getting the kids into lessons. “Well, you don't want to force it,” he said. “Only do it if they seem interested.”
That remark put me off for another month or so. They didn’t seem that interested! “I wanna learn the drums,” Gordon would say, when pressed. “And I wanna do guitar,” Gus would say. “If you do piano lessons for six months and if you take it seriously then we might consider other instruments,” I would find myself saying, somehow. Lady, what the fuck? I knew exactly how this was going to go: I would sign them up, they would be resentful about the impositions on their screen time, and we’d quickly find ourselves paying hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege of ruining our Sunday afternoons dragging them to these lessons, as well as every other night of the week when I would have to decide whether to hector them into practicing. I searched inside myself for the strength to resist, to wait until they asked for this, to not be so fucking lame and weird and Tiger Mom Lite. No dice. I filled out the online forms, two for them and one for me (Two years ago I asked Ryan, the actual guitar player, to get me a good electric guitar for my birthday, something that wouldn’t immediately fall out of tune like my old one that I found too frustrating to play, but also something that would be good for small hands; he found me a nice Fender and the thing has been sitting untouched on our wall ever since. “I’m going to learn the guitar this year! I’m going to throw myself a big birthday party and go on a big birthday trip and then I’m going to take guitar lessons!” is what I said to basically everyone who came into contact with me last year. My apologies to those people, and my thanks; the fact that they heard me say my little plans is the only reason why I followed through with them).
Two Sundays ago we went to our first lessons, all together: Gus and Gordon with their piano teachers in their rooms, and me with my guitar teacher in mine. There was no complaining on the drive there, just a strange, anticipatory silence. Their teachers introduced themselves brightly and ushered them into their classrooms; both of the kids had familiar, closed-off expressions on their faces as I chirped “Bye!! Have fun!!!!!!!” For the next 30 minutes, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being a clownish middle aged woman, impervious to embarrassment, taking an introductory guitar lesson knee to knee with a cooler younger dude. Afterwards, I waited in the hall for the boys to be done and I thought about whether it would be worth it to me to keep taking my lessons if the kids wanted to quit theirs. How much do I really want to finally learn the guitar once and for all, and how much of this is a performance for their benefit? Wow look at Mom, learning an instrument too! She’s like a real person or whatever.
The kids came out with the same blank, nervous expressions on their faces. Their teachers showed me which songbooks to buy for them for next time, and praised their attention and focus. On the drive home, the sky was blue and the cherry blossoms were bursting all around. “Well,” I said, gearing up for a bit of Jolly Along Monologuing, “I’m proud of us! We’re trying something new!”
“And it was fun,” Gus said, looking out the window. My heart stopped. What?
“Yeah,” Gordon agreed, studying the piece of paper his teacher had sent home with him: Whole notes, half notes, quarter notes; a traced outline of his hands, each finger numbered.
This Sunday, they went quietly but willingly again. Last night I told them they should practice and they briefly beefed about who was going to get to go first. This morning I woke up to the sound of Gus downstairs at the piano, working on his finger exercises.
It's funny because I kind of want my silly little hobby to be learning to edit video (i uh, work at a production company but all these people have been doing this since college and premiere is just innately wired into their brains now and they are of no help to me). did you learn to edit just by futzing around? or do any more formal online class-type thing?
I teared up reading the last paragraph. I hope they stay interested in it.