Wild Impulses
Right now I am on vacation with my two children, husband, parents and in-laws. The eight of us rented a house for seven days near Mt. Rainier National Park, which is roughly two hours from my house, door-to-door. Mt. Rainier is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States, rising 14,409 feet. On clear days, it stands like a sentinel ghost in the distant Seattle skyline. It is massive and magnificent.
When we got here we quickly found that our sleeping quarters weren’t as advertised. The room my children, husband and I are staying in looked more substantial in the pictures. As an added benefit to our ‘cozy’ bedroom, the baby isn’t sleeping well. He is crying in the night waking up our toddler, who then also cries. Last night we had a rousing, hour-long (party of two!) cry-fest in our small bedroom. So far, we are all tired, but still trying to enjoy ourselves.
I’m not going to lie: this feels more like work than vacation. I’d much rather sit on the deck and take in the view while enjoying a quiet, reflective glass of wine, but instead I am feeding, bathing, playing with, or soothing someone to sleep just like every other day, except I’m even more tired. I am the mommy; this is my choice, my life. I love it, but there is never a shortage of sacrifices being made.
My consolation prize is waking up to see something breathtaking out my window. The natural beauty here is stunning, ethereal, ENERGIZING! Every detail from the worn, rock-laden trails to the violet lupine in bloom are reminding me of the book I just finished, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.
Wild is about a 26 year-old Ms. Strayed and her three-month, 1100 mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, starting in the Mohave Desert in California, to the top of Oregon State. Strayed’s decision to embark on this journey came because her life was heading in a dark direction. Three years prior, her mother died suddenly from cancer. This shattered her small family, sending the people of her life spinning in different directions; away from – and without – her. She ended her marriage to a man she still loved, partly because she became a prolific, impulsive philanderer and partly because she no longer knew what she wanted. Strayed also became a heroin user and got pregnant by a heroin addict. With no money, no plan, and no prospects, walking for miles alone in the wilderness seemed like a good idea.
The book follows her journey switching back and forth between the struggles of the trail and the struggles in her life. It is filled with deep insights and a profound recognition of the correlation between wilderness and life; their harsh realities, relentlessness, and inherent beauties. While there are a myriad of lessons to glean from these pages, there is one that resonates with me deeply. It is a truth we all must face in the name of maturity: the value of learning impulse control.
My days (my life, really) is a teeter-totter of choices. At its fulcrum lies the question at the heart of every choice: is this what I want or is this what I need? Each side of the seesaw holds the consequences of that choice. According to many philosophers and schools of psychology, it is the ultimate division of the brain’s functionality – left vs. right, feeling vs. reason, want vs. need.
When I was younger, my wanting won the teeter-totter battle most of the time. I wanted that boyfriend. I wanted to eat that bad thing. I wanted to smoke, get drunk, stay up all night and do whatever the hell I pleased. Over the years, I became a master at masquerading my wants around as needs. Even now I say, “I need to write! I need time to myself! I need a new outfit for this occasion!”
However, there comes a point in everyone’s life when you are given no choices. The only ‘option’ is the one that needs to be done. The decision is made for you, and it stands like a boulder on the need side of the teeter-totter; unmoved and unmovable. Everything is tipped, sometimes irreparably, in a direction you would never choose if indeed you had a choice. I believe that these moments offer our greatest lessons. They teach us how to hold on, persevere, have courage and strength of character. They make you grow up.
This is what Strayed discovered while out in the wilderness alone, hungry, in pain; her only option was to move forward – literally.
“…the thing that was so profound to me that summer–yet also, like most things, so very simple–was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay.”
The most profound, harsh and enduring moments of being forced to do things I have no desire to do have come into my life as a result of being a wife and a mother. When both of these things happened, my teeter-totter tipped wildly, unexpectedly, radically into a position that I chose, yet simultaneously didn’t want.
I was 27 when I married, and 30 when I became a mother. Admittedly, I held on to many of my selfish, impulsive, childish ways before entering both arrangements. I want sleep. I want to dedicate a good portion of my time to physical maintenance. I want it my way, always, and I want my children and husband to just leave me alone for a little while. I want to travel unencumbered. Like right now.
And yet none of these things are part of my reality. They sit like the mountain out my window – in patient defiance, indifferent to my wants. As much as I may want, there is no escape, no denial, no numbing down my children and spouse and their needs with food or wine or any number of unhealthy options that call for me from the other side of the teeter-totter. And yet…
In the reality that has become my life – in both fear and love of this mountain – I have developed a determination, a perseverance, an internal knowing. This solid bedrock of confidence was born of realizing that I am capable of doing what I need to do, when it needs to get done. They call me mommy with love and devotion because I have done this, everyday – the things I least want to do.
When you keep putting one foot in front of the other – like Cheryl did–in spite of your impulse to numb yourself or bend to your emotions, and no matter how sad/miserable/tired/self-pitying you may feel, when you summit that mountain, you will find a greater, deeper, more grounded part of yourself that you didn’t even know existed. A part that you truly need. A part born of needs in spite of wants. And it is that part that will carry you the rest of way, over every mountain, through your entire life.
Instead of enjoying my reflective glass of wine, I will be playing Lincoln Logs with my toddler and trying to get my son to sleep until the wee hours of the night when I, too, will fall into bed. Because there are more mountains to climb tomorrow and I need my strength.
Shannon Lell is a fallen corporate ladder climber turned writer and stay-at-home mother living near Seattle. She writes introspective pieces on personal and social issues at Shannon Lell.