Silly Little Men

Duck Creek Campground, UT

 

“Lee, can you freaking help me!”

Analise was screaming for a bottle after only spending a couple minutes on each nipple.

“Yes, okay, sorry, was just trying to flip these steaks.”

Lee ran to the back of their car and started measuring out powder into a plastic bottle.

How this creature needed to be fed every two hours was a mystery to Becca. That’s all Becca did, fuckin feed Analise. A simultaneous bottle holder, personal chef, and milk factory. Motherhood was some unrelenting, intensive bullshit.

Lee came back with a bottle, shaking it. Becca took it. “Thanks. I’m sorry for yelling.”

“That’s okay, it’s our first time camping with her. I’m sure it won’t be easy.”

“I’m already regretting it.”

Becca and Lee had rolled up to their campsite late Thursday night, the site surrounded by piñon pines, small aspens, scrub oak, and a few small boulders. A picnic table stood next to a circular metal fire pit. It was nice but fairly close in proximity to other campsites and very much unlike the dispersed camping they were used to—where you could set up anywhere in BLM or National Forest. However, there were bathrooms here—albeit, filled with mouse droppings, flies, and spiders. Becca would have rather pooped outside among the friendly trees.

Headlamps on, Lee set had up their tarp and tent first, then placed their sleeping bags and sleeping pads inside the tent while Becca tended to Analise. Next, they unloaded camping chairs, the water, cooler, the cooking stove, and the plastic tote filled with kitchen utensils. She was fussy as fuck and did not like the $80 camping bouncer chair they’d bought her; she only wanted to be held.

Lee turned the steaks on the stove and then began chopping some leftover logs left at the campsite for a fire while Becca fed Analise.

“Luckily, there’s some leftover firewood,” Lee said. “I forgot to pack some.”

He began really going at it with the hatchet. Becca started to worry. Analise’s lips were covered with milk as she writhed her lips around the nipple of the bottle like a demon.

“Fuck!” Lee yelled.

“What? Lee, are you okay?”

Becca’s headlamp framed Lee holding his hand and she looked down to see a wooden axe handle split in half, blood dripping down.

“It’s fine, this handle split and it nicked my middle finger.”

Becca placed Analise back in her car seat and rushed over to grab the first aid kit in the hatch of their Subaru.

“Sit down,” she said. Becca promptly began to wash away the small amount of blood tricking down his hand and apply Neosporin and a bandage to Lee’s middle finger.

“Thanks,” he said. “I think I broke the axe. But at least I still have my tomahawk,” said Lee.

Analise began crying again and a hiss from the stove meant the steaks were burning.

“Fuck.”

You can do all the same things with a kid, they said. It’ll just be harder, they said. But you can do all the same things. You can still have a life. You can still go out and go camping and climbing and road trip around the country. Yes, you can have it all. Be a working mom and a wife and an artist and, oh why not, an astronaut if you want, why the fuck not? Kids don’t have to change anything. Except they fucking do. Even if you can do all the same things, you will be a hundred times more frustrated.