Cedar, my 3-year-old daughter, watches my growing frustration with Lamar, my 1-year-old daughter, who fusses and whines, impervious to logic or suggestion. “Maybe she just wants to be held, mom,” Cedar comments. When I only grunt in response, she turns to her own dolly and holds her gently. “Baby Do, baby do,” she croons, a reproving eye on me and my baby. Finally I give in and followed suit. Immediately Lamar stops crying.
I’ve heard of 3-year-old girls who want to be just like their mothers. But Cedar thinks—knows—she IS the mother. ”Don’t tell me what to do—I tell YOU what to do!” she shrills at me. I holler back (do I really holler? Probably), “No, I’M the mom. I tell YOU what to do!” knowing full well that the arenas in which I actually have this level of control are shrinking rapidly. Sometimes I can laugh at this. Usually not.
Cedar and I have a somewhat unique relationship, due to the fact that we have spent many months of her life living on a small 34-foot steel sailboat on Lake Superior. Her first sail took place at six weeks old—a trip my husband Mark and I fondly look back on as one of those “mistakes,” when we had not fully acknowledged or acclimatized to the complete change that had taken over our lives. My strongest memory from that trip is sitting in the cockpit in a gusty wind, seeing dark whitecaps wash over the water, infant Cedar in my arms. We could not find appropriate baby clothes to keep her warm and eventually wrapped her in our foul weather gear. I could not go down into the cabin, out of the wind, because I would be instantly seasick and did not want to throw up all over her. On some level I knew that everything was going to be fine, but every time the boat heeled over and my love-and-protect mother lion hormones saw the icy water inches from my daughter’s face, I could not stop the tears from flowing. Despite his never-satiated longing for a good sail which he was currently experiencing, Mark could not stand to see this for long and soon turned back to the port where we had spent the night. We spent most of the trip hanging out on a lonely mooring along the windy north shore, waiting for dead calm so we could motor back to our home port some 20 miles away.
It does not take too many stories like this—even told in retrospect, with a douse of humor and a nod of acceptance toward our inherent love of adventure—to wonder why we keep choosing to immerse ourselves in a lifestyle that encompasses such a wide range of miseries. Sailing with small children is difficult and intensely stressful at times. Seasickness, fear, and misery occur daily, hourly. Both Mark and I “max out,” as we call it—go to the edge and beyond—a thousand times more frequently than we do in our calm and predictable life on land. We have netting along our lifelines and the girls wear a harness and tether at all times outside when under way—so our big fear is not, as most people assume, having the children fall overboard. That is simply not allowed to happen. No, the stress comes not from terror but from misery, real or anticipated. Listening to forecast after forecast call out the dreaded “Small Craft Warning,” as we hear the wind moan in the rigging. Sitting braced against the “settee”(nautical term for “sofa”), two wailing, throwing up daughters in my grasp, trying not to barf myself, lurching mercilessly around hour after hour, while my husband outside tries fruitlessly to lessen the motion with various sail combinations while the wind does anything but cooperate. After one such day Mark and I admitted to each other that, despite the fact that we have both logged countless weeks leading angry delinquent teenagers on wet misadventures with backpacks or canoes, neither of us could remember having taken on a challenge as emotionally draining as the one starring us currently in the face.
We’ve done our homework and read many, many accounts of sailing families. Some of them border on fantasy: families that sail blithely into the sunset, children and parents healthy, carefree, independent, bonded. Others are more practical: make a netting bed for your infant baby. Strap their carseats in the cockpit when you both need to be sailing. Stay close to home. (Most of this advice we find impractical or useless.) And the third category—those families that really do sail around the world and live to tell about it. If we could bow at the feet of these parents, we would do it. Their stories leave so much untold, but make one important fact clear—that is it possible to transition beyond the inevitable difficulties and feel the rewards that are almost impossible to obtain in this world, in this century. We have had tiny glimpses of those rewards: we notice that our girls have no desire to stare at a TV, eat a candy bar, or buy into any gimmick placed in front of them by the mass media. Their goals, even at their tender young ages, center around learning to pull in the jib, row the dinghy, or predict a storm. They learn that favorite foods run out, that it takes energy to heat up water, that a rough day usually ends with a great new playground. Most noticeable of all is the fact that they never seem to tire of the round-the-clock presence of both parents that is part and parcel of the nautical life. We never escape them; they never escape us. Hence, Cedar’s belief that our identities have actually merged.
Coming into an anchorage—a protected bay where we can drop the anchor, row to shore to play, and spend the night—is rarely a smooth event. As we enter the area and the swell drops, the girls and I usually emerge from the cabin, still a tad seasick but also starving (having yuked crackers all day). The adults scan the area and assess where to go. The greatest danger to a sailboat—land—is upon us, and coming closer every second. I hold Lamar and usually nurse her while Cedar takes her spot. In a best case scenario, both girls are harnessed in at this point. In a worst case, Cedar has refused to wear hers and refused to go below (her two options) and I am too preoccupied to confront this in a coherent manner. So she sits in the cockpit, defiant and delighted, sly and sweet, as only a 3-year-old can be. I arch my neck, trying to hear and see Mark who is perched on the bowsprit, looking for a good spot and directing me with his arms. I ask Cedar to pull out the depthsounder. This act is both a compliment and a potential can of worms, as Cedar dearly loves to help, but usually insists on doing everything herself. She bounces into the hatch, unhooks the depthsounder, carefully positions it so I can read the depths with the light from the sun angled perfectly—and then sits right in front of it so I can’t read a thing. “Cedar!” I cry, but my outrage means nothing. Ignoring me, she shouts out to Daddy, as if she could read the numbers (which she doesn’t understand yet) “10! 5! 8!” Finally I push her out of the way and yell out a few numbers before she can block my vision again. Meanwhile Lamar has popped off and is wiggling and anxious to start her toddler life again, having put it on hold while lying prostrate in the cabin all day. As I attempt to steer the boat the appropriate direction and speed, my nerves go over the edge. I command Cedar to go to the v-berth (her bed in the front of the cabin). She refuses. I accept my helplessness and somehow, somewhere, Mark drops the hook. In minutes, the motor is off and we’re in peaceful bliss. The only hitch is that Cedar and I are ready to kill each other. I banish her to the v-berth and grudgingly admit I probably belong there as well.
The solution to this particular situation was simple, in the end. First, a ready snack while we first emerge into daylight to keep our high-metabolism bodies functional in stress. Second, a promise of a “treat” at the end of a problem-free anchoring. Faced with bribes, Cedar becomes a different girl. She proactively plants herself in an out-of-the-way corner of the cockpit with her dolly and tea set, and is implacable even the time I had to do an unexpected 360 turn with the boat and swept the tiller through her tea party, upsetting everything and forcing her to move. The only problem is her inability to wait more than five seconds to ask, once again, “Are we done yet? Is it treat time?”
When people ask what it’s like to have two small children on a boat, my first, admittedly flip, answer usually runs something like, “It’s like having two children on land.” I spend a big chunk of my time changing diapers, preparing and cleaning up food, and reading stories. Sure, the fact that our house moves and tilts necessitates new skills, such as carrying a baby on my hip while grabbing a pot which is sliding off the stove in a gust, or whipping life jackets on and off with the efficiency of carseat belts. Still, every dilemma I face on the boat connects me to sympathetic parents everywhere who can relate. Whether living on the water is a net gain or not in the end depends more on my values and priorities, and less on the fact that our home is the size of a small bedroom. The fact that we are living lightly--that for now, anyway, we are not part of that horrible American statistic of consuming 50% of the world’s resources, counts for a lot. The fact that Mark gets to father his girls all the time in their early years is a value he considers beyond price. We may be short on stuff, but we are long on time. And given the frenzied way in which many families interact daily with each other, I’ll take our abundant togetherness any day. We have, indeed, followed the advice you hear nowadays—“Slow down!” We have slowed down to a 6 mph maximum speed, usually less. People mistake us “adventurous” types for thrillseekers, risktakers, anything for a fast ride or a good time. How wrong they are! We experience, not infrequently, what I believe most people would consider intolerable amounts of misery, boredom, and uncertainty. My proof of this comes in the stories passed around the sailing community, mostly of wives who consented to accompany their sailing-obsessed husbands, only to experience a bad day or a bad offshore passage (usually due to a combination of rough weather and the enthusiastic insistence of the husband to sail in it). Frequently, they say “never again”—and stick to it.
Or maybe we have a higher level of trust and endurance than most. We have an unwavering faith that meaning will be found at the other end, that you don’t give up just because you can’t remember what you are doing or why, in this moment. So far we have always reached the other end of the tunnel and appreciated the ride.
Occasionally it comes in handy to have a double. I don’t know of anyone else in the world who enjoys a bright moonlit night as much as Cedar and I. During the winter, in our landlubber life, she begs to come out with me, in the dark, and jogs along the muffled snowy road with me, gasping “I really like to run! Look at the MOON, mommy!” I think, with a touch of irony, that she may have acquired this attraction to the moon during her nighttime timeouts on the boat last summer, where the only place she could be placed where she wouldn’t disrupt the family with her racket was out in the cockpit. We resorted to the cockpit at night only a few times before two factors got in the way—people in other boats nearby, and rain. Mark is not paranoid, but he does have a desire to not appear to be abusing his child, and there was no way Cedar would consent to putting on a raincoat before being tossed outside. Those were dark moments indeed, moments when our helplessness in the face of the combined power of Cedar’s will, passion, and intellect faced us in all its glory. Those memories are inseparable from the boat for us, but I suspect that most parents have moments just as bad, with plenty of benign land around them.
In the final analysis, there is no singular answer that will tell us what is “best” for our family, when we should come ashore, when we should take off again. Clearly though, something is drawing us with unrelenting force towards the voyaging lifestyle, for our plans include selling our house, leaving our jobs, and moving aboard, all in the next year. When people ask, “How do the kids take to this?” the answer is easy—“Fine.” They have none of our heady concerns. It takes them an average of five minutes to adjust to living on a boat, or living in a house. Our boat, an ocean-going vessel, is similarly unimpressed with drama—it has come through many a heart-stopping storm without a scratch. Ultimately, it’s us—the parents—who will make or break the sailing lifestyle. Our partnership becomes immediate and constant: we are co-parents, captain and first mate, and somewhere in there we hope, soulmates. One thing we have learned is that whatever we are—as individuals, a couple, a family—is “more so” when sailing. Our biggest challenge is to like ourselves enough that the intensification process is pleasureable more often than painful. Then again, a lot of that has to come through hard experience. Who changes before they have to, after all?