There is no neutral.
I was on a llama packing trip with some friends earlier in the summer. Augie’s godfather Willy and I were talking about our shared hope that camping influences our children. I told Willy I felt conflicted, because I am so averse pushing my interests on my children. How can you love unconditionally and want them to like something? I want my children to know that I love them exactly for who they are and that nothing they could ever do or say would change that. But I love being in the mountains, and I hope that he loves being in the mountains. Aren’t those two ideas in conflict? And with one simple sentence, he made me hold my breath for a moment. “There is no neutral.”
We booked the camping trip before two of the expedition mates were born. I thought that taking a one year old camping would be good training for me and Jake as the parents. Proof that we could do it. Motivation to get out of the house and out of our comfortable routine. Some kind of validation that we could still do the things we loved with a child. Certainly for our baby, someone so young who wouldn’t remember it, it wouldn’t make a difference.
But once the baby was born, I was humbled by how mistaken I had been. Over the course of the past year I have learned and re-learned the truth about our impact. Sleeping under the stars for a week influences the baby. My presence— peaceful, stressed, somewhere in between— impacts the baby. Our nervous systems are so much more intertwined than we admit to ourselves. Last week I read about a study in which pregnant mice were zapped every time they smelled peppermint. They released the stress hormone cortisol every time they smelled peppermint, anticipating pain. When their babies were born THEY TOO released cortisol when they smelled peppermint, even though they themselves had never been zapped.
Going camping with a baby is important to me because there is no neutral. Everything we expose or don’t expose our small, impressionable child to has impact. We are going to spend our time some way, so we might as well choose it consciously and provide opportunities for positive influence. I hope to be a parent who consciously culls, lives with intention in hopes that he does too. I’m so lucky to have a partner who role models this for us daily— reminding me that the small, conscious acts are what make up our life. That we should choose our words and actions with precision and awareness. That how we spend our moments is how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
I hope our son loves camping because I hope that he loves wild places, values simplicity, finds magic, seeks meaningful connections, takes care of his body, knows the names of his neighbors, the animals, and the plants around him, and appreciates how incredibly comfortable and luxurious our life at home is. I hope he learns to try hard things and succeeds and fails and keeps getting up.
It’s all new— parenting for us and life for him. We are constantly learning, being humbled, and adapting. But it’s the coolest thing in the world that the three of us make the rules and the three of us get to make the traditions. Some that we’ve come up with in our short year together: We collect the flowers for his birthday book. We go camping every August 10. We write down the birds we see. We grow and harvest and forage as much of our food as we can. We get to influence these early years so much. It’s the greatest blessing, privilege, and responsibility we’ve ever known.
