
This is a photo of Diego and his pig Loquat he raised at the high school for the fair. We are not ranchers or farmers; no one in our family has participated in Future Farmers of America. But Diego had an opportunity to do FFA, and he took it. He raised Loquat from a piglet: he walked Loquat, bathed him, fed him, tended him. But Loquat got sick and died before the fair. I imagined Loquat anticipating his fate and deciding: You know what? I'm out. I say that as a reluctant, yet grateful bacon eater. RIP Loquat.
Diego and Charlie, now 18 and 17 respectively, have been exposed to a lot of different activities over the years. Some people will think, God, this is what is meant by parents over-scheduling their kids! But as a working parent (or just a parent), I needed them to have some structured, scheduled time, and I wanted them to figure out how they liked to spend their time. Eventually, my children became high schoolers and started deciding their own extra-curricular schedules. I was no longer signing them up for basketball or summer camp or organizing their playdates. But with the fleeting time I could influence them, there did so many cool things, some of which stuck, some of which contributed to what they love to do now.
Here I will just say that I grew up with a working-class mom who for some years worked the graveyard shift at UPS and who could not afford anything extra for my brother and me. She did not have the time, money, or energy to enroll us in and take us to activities. She did take us on the weekends, weather permitting, which it almost always was, to Zuma Beach, which is where I learned to swim in the ocean and body surf with my brother while my mom caught up on sleep on her beach blanket. I did gymnastics on my own in my backyard, perhaps imitating what I observed from watching Nadia Comăneci in the 1976 Olympics (I would have been 5). Between the ages of 6 and 9, I walked back and forth on the tall brick wall that separated our rental's backyard from the neighbor's, pretending it was a balance beam (I did that for hours; I think it was a moving meditation). I never knew camp, but I did swam almost every day at the public pool during the summer.
Diego and Charlie know my history, and know they've been given some incredible opportunities. And I'm so incredibly grateful to have been able to expose them to a plethora of things. I cast a wide net. Off the top of my head, here's some of the activities that we exposed them to, whether through us or clubs or classes:
Friday Night Lights (flag football), soccer, swim, junior lifeguards out in Morro Bay, art classes at SLOMA, the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, ceramics, Spanish, hockey, basketball, baseball, karate, skiing, snowboarding, water skiing, surfing, hiking, fishing, NATOMA sleep-away camp, chess club, skate camp through the YMCA (kind of a bust), piano lessons, Outside Now camp (nature camp), band in middle school, water polo, sailing. We taught them to play poker and to cook and later to drive, including stick shifts, and to ride bikes. I read to the boys and took them to the Cal Poly library and to the public library until Charlie got shooshed. Derek played guitar for them.

We made them go on dozens of hikes and rain walks. Charlie was often wearing swim trunks and nothing else.


Diego, now in his first quarter of college at Western Washington in Bellingham, is mountain biking, playing guitar, camping, and sailing. Charlie is captain of his water polo team, graduating high school and studying Spanish in Barcelona for a semester before college.
You never know what will land, what will delight, what will endure. For instance, Charlie, below, ended up not liking karate and would refuse to get out of the van after a while when I'd drive him to his class. This is one of the most frustrating moments for a parent: Do I force my kid to do the thing that he agreed he wanted to sign up for and which I paid for but that no longer interests him???? Grrrrrr. So there was some of that. Â But even the things they ended up resenting just gave them information about themselves and how they want to be in the world.

At one point, Charlie took up knitting for an art class in high school. Here's this tough, strong, water polo playing kid ... knitting.
Here's my Top 10 things we did with the boys.
Swim lessons. This is the best gift you can give a child, in my mind. And I always say: You don't want to teach your own child to swim! At least I didn't. I put them lakes and pools and a very young age. But I had someone else teach them to swim. This paid dividends, led to a ton of other activities, and kept them safe.
Learning a language. We enrolled our kids in a public bilingual elementary school, Pacheco, where they learned Spanish. Huge gift, great opportunity.
Chess club. I love chess and taught both boys to play. Charlie, who plays online with people all over the world and now beats me every time.
Piano lessons. This led to band in middle school, with Charlie playing sax and diego clarinet. Now Diego plays boogie woogie piano and loves guitar. Charlie is a great singer.
Taught them to ride bikes and then rode bikes with them to school. They both learned how to be confident and happy bicycle commuters!
I asked Derek his number one thing he thought we did for the kids. He said: "We stayed together as a nuclear family." I include that reluctantly. It was possible for us. But it's not always possible or beneficial for a family that the parents stay together. I felt lucky we could raise them in the same house. But again, definitely not always possible. I lived in more than 12 places by the time I was 18 and survived.
Here's what else Derek added: We maintained a marriage, a happy household, loose and fun, not uptight. We didn't sweat the small stuff. We let the boys ride their little bikes and skoots and ripsticks in the house, creating levity with the kids and also with the adults... Fuck formal living rooms. We let them jump from their bunkbeds onto the futon. We made forts out of big cardboard boxes. We played music and danced. We allowed the boys to wrestle. But we also went to work, did our jobs, towed the line, paid our bills. We got our stuff done and then goofed off.
The stuff we were able to do, well, it paid dividends.
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