Guilt & De-Guilt

No! It’s not about parenting! Well, not mostly.

When we moved to The Mizzle last year, buying our first home and expecting our first child, people said, where’s your minivan? and we said, oh no, we won’t be buying a minivan. And we won’t. But we will be buying a car.

We didn’t want to buy a car. We sold our last car, whose name was Gordo and who had tweed interior, in 2004 and had been living quite happily since as slightly-car’d people who belong to a fabulous car-sharing program called the Cooperative Auto Network. Do you have one of these in your city? Look into it, really.

Vancouver’s CAN is fantastic: it’s very affordable, after an initial outlay of $500 (refundable when you leave the co-op,) it’s very convenient and, like they say, It’s All The Car You Need. Unless you are outside Vancouver proper. If you are outside Vancouver proper, you might need more car.

OK let’s define need. A vehicle, at the moment, would be nice to have so that I could go places with the baby and have those places be actual physical places, not “the shadowy places in my head where I am slightly insane.” At the moment, no, I don’t need a vehicle. My time during the day is not so constrained that a car is so much better than public transit. As we proved last week, we can take transit to Point Grey, visit a friend and take transit home again without a major meltdown on either of our parts. But the trip took over an hour either way and when you’re with a baby who needs to sleep every 2 or 3 hours and practically has a rider explaining his terms of daytime sleep (definitely no brown m&ms) that’s really pushing the limits of tolerance.

Once every couple of weeks we go to my parents’ place, which is an hour by bus or half an hour by car. They are kind enough to pick us up and drive us home (first grandchild and all) and this works well. On weekends, when Saint Aardvark is home, we either walk, take transit or get a co-op car, which is a 2 person/one baby job that involves one of us taking transit to the co-op car, bringing it back to our house, putting the car seat & baby & baby junk in and then reversing this at the end of the outing. This is not eXtremely convenient but neither is it the end of the world and it makes us feel all nice and martyr-y and like responsible global citizens who, yes, brought another human being into the world but also, yes, are trying to reduce our footprint by using the same car as 99 other people.

But. In July I am going back to work. On Mondays and Fridays, Trombone will go to his grandparents’ house. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he will go to daycare, the location of which has not yet been determined and on Wednesdays he will stay home with his papa (yay! for flexible work schedules). I will not have the luxury of an entire week to buy a week’s worth of groceries, carrying one backpack-full home every day after a leisurely walk uptown. I do not want to double the time of my commute every morning and evening, nor do I really want to travel on public transit during rush hour with a 13 month old. (Yes, I hear the privilege in that want to. I know I could do it, but I would be such an unhappy person and so would he.)

We created this problem for ourselves, that’s the part that causes the guilt. We were small-footprint people in our old, downtown apartment. We could walk or bus anywhere.

So, says my mean brain, you bring a kid into the world only to spend a year with him, spend half that time angsting about how Not Fun it is sometimes and the other half feeling guilty about the angsting and then spend the next 17 years trying to find 10 minutes to rub together while you work and work and work to pay for all the things that never had to exist before the kid did?

Yeah, I know. Relaaaaaaax.

But, says the mean brain, who has at least been distracted from criticizing my writing, you live where? Doing what? And now you’re actually fantasizing about a car, a hunk of metal that burns toxic gas and destroys the environment? (I am. I am fantasizing about a car. I want to go to my parking garage and get in my car and put the baby in the car seat that is already in the car and drive, drive, drive out of this neighbourhood. I want to go to Cambie and 7th ave. and buy bagels at Solly’s. I want to go to Granville Island and have coffee and watch the boats. I want to go visit friends. I want to go to Value Village. Oh, Value Village.)

Well, says I to mean brain, remember that no choice is permanent. We could sell the townhouse and go back to renting. We could move into a co-op in Vancouver. We could move to Saskatoon. I could quit my job (don’t worry, co-worker A, not for at least another year) and stay home, SA could quit his job and stay home (no, he won’t, but he COULD) – there are all sorts of places we could re-jig our quality of life. The bonus of having once been poor-ish, self-supporting young adults is that we really appreciate everything we have now and we know we could survive with much less.

Though it seems counter-intuitive to add more responsibility to the mix as a way of simplifying our lives, it is, in fact, the best way. Two years ago, when it was just us in our downtown apartment with no parking spot, when we could walk to work and anywhere else, when we lived 2 blocks away from most of our friends and were surrounded (like, 7 within a 3-block radius) by co-op cars, it made complete sense to sell our car. Now that there are three of us, when we have to travel by transit an hour or more each to get to work, when we have 2 parking spots (I know! 2!) and limited time together, it makes complete sense to buy our own car. Especially because: my dad is finally going to buy a hybrid vehicle, something he has been wanting to do for a couple of years. He agreed to sell us their car in the spring; it’s a sensible, 4-door, silver Honda Civic (WITH A STICK SHIFT YAY!) We’ll go to the beach, we’ll go to the airport, we’ll go to the valley, we’ll go to the mountains. Oh! The places we’ll go.

What we need is time together as a family. What will facilitate that is a vehicle. If I get 4 dozen bagels as a side-effect of this, so be it.

I find that a gratuitous kid picture always caps things off nicely.