The Other Me Hangs Out With His Kids at a Small Playground in London

It’s odd how seemingly inconsequential places and experiences can stick with you.

In the spring of 2019, less than a year before the world shut down, my wife, three kids, and I took a spring break trip from our home in Florida to the UK. Michelle and I traveled quite a bit before we had kids, including a 10-month stay in Cambridge, where I completed a one-year master’s program. Since having kids, we’ve rarely left the house, let alone the country.

Our trip to London to relive our youth was the one exception.

Traveling across an ocean with children ages 8, 5, and 3 was ambitious (i.e., insane). I know people probably do it all the time, but it’s still a completely crazy thing to do voluntarily. I have two extremely vivid memories of that trip, and the rest have pretty much faded into a smear of disconnected moments.

The two core memories: 1. The customs line at Heathrow Airport after we flew the redeye flight from Orlando via Reykjavik, Iceland. The children so tired they were practically sleeping on the floor, splayed out around our suitcases and bags while we inched forward for hours in an interminable queue. It felt like we would never escape. 2. A simple neighborhood playground in London.

The persistence of the customs queue memory is fairly easy to account for. The highly unusual setting, crowded together with other weary travelers, children wallowing on the grimy linoleum floor, eyes struggling to adjust to the unsettling artificial light after hours spent trying to sleep thousands of feet in the air in a metal tube hurtling through space. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. At least for me.

On the other hand, the small playground in London? It was ordinary. Mundane. My kids and I have visited hundreds of playgrounds in our time, and nothing about this one was particularly exceptional. On this trip, we visited renowned landmarks like Buckingham Palace, various museums, and Big Ben (I do remember it was covered in scaffolding), among others. The little playground lingers in my mind more than any of the more famous places.

The walk to the park from our friend’s flat along busy city streets. The fading evening light. The sharp March air. Such a contrast from the swampy Florida we left behind less than 24 hours ago. Somehow less than a day? Feels so much longer. The water by the park’s edge (a river?). The children’s pink cheeks. Insufficient jackets. Shivering. Hands stuffed in pockets to escape the cold. A big metal slide, gleaming. Looks like it must be freezing to the touch but the kids don’t care. A suspension bridge connecting the climbing equipment. Children crossing one by one. Silhouettes. Swaying steps. Gripping the ropes with small hands. Tall buildings in the background, standing watch. A sandy area where the kids crouch, digging in the sand with their fingers. That fuzzy, untethered feeling you get with lack of sleep. Day turning to night. Or night turning to day? Hard to know which. Feels like existing outside of time.

We visited that little park several times during our week in London. You can have big aspirations when traveling with kids but every trip tends to end up being a fight for survival. Someone gets sick. Everyone is tired. Routines are disrupted. Comfy, familiar beds are missed. We quickly realized the best strategy was to plan one real outing per day (at most) to a significant sight or activity and then spend the rest of the time doing the same things we do at home, just in a different geographic location. Watch iPads. Eat McDonald’s. Read books. Sit around. Go to the same little playground over and over again. But in London!

So, yes, we did visit the park enough times to make the memory indelible but I believe there is something a little deeper at play.

As I mentioned earlier, Michelle and I lived in the UK for a little less than a year right after we got married and right before we had our first child. That year was transformative for me. It felt like the first time I went my own way. I was 29 when we arrived in Cambridge, stepping off a bus in the town’s center on a late evening in late September with a couple of suitcases and absolutely no idea what we were doing. I was kind of old as young adults go but it felt like my first adult move. My first adult year.

Until that point, I had carefully hewed to a well-trodden path. I lived with my parents for a long time. I went to college close to home. I didn’t date. I had very few friends. I took odd jobs that were mostly comfortable and easy. I played it very safe. Moving across an ocean felt extremely daring. Very grown up. I believed it was the start of something big.

I somewhat inexplicably applied for and was accepted to a master’s program in development studies (if you’re wondering what that is, think international aid work, policy, other stuff the U.S. isn’t allowed to do anymore). I had no background or experience in the subject but I guess even the most hallowed and ancient universities are happy to take your money if you’re willing to give it.

I spent that year living a life that was completely different from the one I lived before and the one I’ve lived after. It was an outlier. There were classes and lectures, yes, and I remember a little bit about those, but the academic calendar was extremely leisurely, with three eight-week terms and seemingly endless holidays, so a lot of the time was spent just existing in this otherworldly place on a small island near the top of the world.

Old, stately buildings. Expanses of pristine green grass with cows grazing. Riding bicycles in the cold rain on cobblestoned streets. Hours spent lounging in the coffee shop on the top floor of the university center overlooking the river. Cappuccinos and dark chocolate bars. Punts floating past. Never trying that. Too scared we’d look silly trying to push the boat along with the long pole.

Frozen pizzas picked up from the college bar. Wow, the colleges have bars? Cooked in the oven in our studio apartment on the second floor. Topped with zucchini slices. They call them courgettes here. Watching all the episodes of How I Met Your Mother on the laptop. Pints of cider at the pubs. Barely knew how to drink back then. Twenty-nine years old but the palette of a teenager. Weekend trip to Amsterdam just because. Consider trying a weed brownie. Decide against it. Too awkward.

Comfy black jacket. Wore it everywhere. Gloves that were cheap and flimsy. Always wet. Fingers like icicles. Little knit hat. Self-conscious about that at first but got used to it. And scarves. Scarves! Never knew they were a thing people actually wore. Learning how to wrap it around. There are several ways. Whatever works. Just go with it. Ice skating outside before Christmas. Endless darkness. Lights twinkling. Staying upright is an accomplishment. No broken bones. Proud of ourselves.

Fly home for the holidays. Why is it so sunny here? Ugh. Are we… northern people now? Stop by Ireland on the way back. Might as well. No obligations. Tiny, winding roads. Castle ruins in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes feel like the last two people on earth.

Back in Cambridge. Winter slowly turns to spring. Still cold but when the sun comes out everyone pretends. Students playing ultimate frisbee on the college greens. Tank-tops. Shorts. Tennis on the unkempt grass courts with sagging nets. Classmate asks me to play. Wants to play a match. I destroy him. He never sees it coming. What if this is my life now? Picture myself wearing one of those professor jackets with patches on the elbows. Hair graying. Bicycling into town for lectures. Playing tennis on weekends. Fresh-faced kids surprised when they find out the old guy still has a killer forehand.

Time starts to slip away. Still sitting in coffee shops. Watching the boats float by. Kind of hoping someone will fall in. Would be exciting. Eating falafels from the street cart. Get a punch card. So retro. Buy eight, get one free. Dark crowded bar with sticky floors and watered-down tequila shots for one pound. I’m 30 now. Pulsing music. The Killers. Mr. Brightside. Of course. One-third of the school year still left but no more classes. Who knows why? Just sitting. Reading. Nothing to do, really. Think about the future. What is the point of all this? To have fun? Does anything meaningful come after? Kind of privileged, if I’m being honest. Summer arrives. Still cold, usually. Like three hot days. No air conditioning. Giant window of the little apartment thrown open. Hear the chatter of the little boy who lives downstairs playing outside in the courtyard. Families live here, too. It’s possible. Oh, right, we’re going to have a baby. In November. Thanksgiving. Now what?

Exams. Desks arranged in long, neat lines. Like in the movies. Soft light slanting in through windows near the ceiling. Write by hand in little books for an hour, two, three. What about? Hardly even know. Try to sound smart. Scholarly. Amartya Sen! Development Economics! Charles Dickens! No clue why that last one is in there. Professor with the wild gray Einstein hair loves unexpected connections. Play the game. Fake it. From day one to the end. Hop on a plane to Italy while we wait for graduation. A completely ridiculous life. Take the train through Austria, Switzerland, France. Surprised by fireworks on Bastille Day in Marseille. Forgot that was even a thing. Try to use high school German at a fast food place in Switzerland. Pretty sure they speak German here? Fail miserably. Idiot.

Graduation. Stupid black gown. Weird ritual. Forgotten within moments. Taking pictures in the bright sun. Smiling. Scared of what comes next. Back on a plane. Across an ocean. Home. Finally. Reunited with the chihuahuas. Pepper and Zoe. What did they think of all this? Are they ready for what’s next? Nope. Try to settle back in. Find somewhere to live. Rent a house with ugly carpets. The baby is here.

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As it turned out, the degree I earned across the pond was mostly meaningless. I mean, it was done in less than a year. Hard to expect much from that. After I graduated, I casually tried to get a few jobs, but I never got further than a phone interview with Médecins Sans Frontières that I conducted in a noisy airport somewhere in Europe. Once we returned to the U.S., the guy called me and said something like, “I really like your resume. It’s so unique. I could never justify hiring you, but I love how weird it is. Keep in touch!”

I quickly gave up my dream of saving the world and returned to my comfortable existence. Michelle went back to her job. Started climbing the ladder. She had a baby. I stayed home with the baby and then eventually went back to my old job at the local university, working part-time, alternating days with Michelle so one of us was always home with the kid, and later, kids. My job quietly disappeared as I knew it eventually would. I was fine with that. It always felt like a dead end. Whatever that means. I stayed home with the kids even more. It became my thing. Pretty much my entire thing with a dash of writing on the side. We moved to a reasonably nice middle-class neighborhood in an Orlando suburb. People park their cars and trucks all over the streets but nowhere is perfect. Many of the neighbors have toxic political beliefs but, you know, it is Florida. It is America. The kids are growing up. They have good friends who live close by. There’s a trampoline in the backyard. I just noticed my oldest son has fuzz on his upper lip. The passage of time is preposterous, but we’re living the dream to the extent the dream exists anymore. There is really nothing to complain about.

It is all extremely safe. Very predictable.

In a way, the little playground in London is what lies behind the sliding door. It’s my road not taken.

What if this playground in the middle of a vibrant city was the one where my kids grew up instead of the sleepy park by the elementary school around the corner from our house?

What if these were streets (or streets like these in some other far-flung, exotic-seeming, very grown-up location) where we walked?

What if I had an important job trying to save the world or something? Parenting is a very important job, no doubt, but it’s hard to escape our societal expectations about work and domestic labor and value and what constitutes a meaningful life.

The idea of all this, living anywhere other than Florida where I’ve lived for more than 40 years now, seems ridiculous but it wasn’t too far from happening. It wasn’t particularly close, either, but we at least took a step or two down this other path. Because I had no idea what to do with my life and I had already completed the requisite step of enrolling in and quitting law school several years prior, I wrote a PhD proposal as I was completing my very hasty master’s degree back in 2011.

Looking back on this is extremely funny because, of course, I had no clue what I should research so I wrote something about studying maternal health in the developing world strictly because Michelle was a labor and delivery nurse. Astoundingly, I was accepted into the PhD program at Cambridge and offered a partial stipend. The money wasn’t nearly enough to cover the cost of living, Michelle’s nursing certification didn’t cleanly transfer to the UK, and as I mentioned, she was pregnant with our first child. Because of all those complicating factors and because I was terrified of being exposed as a complete fraud, we never seriously considered taking that path. But, there is enough there for me to daydream about what might’ve been.

Of course, I typically choose to skip over the part of this fantastical other life where I show up in a country in Africa or South Asia and ask some confused person, “May I see all your finest maternal health data, please?” The thought of that is mortifying but the thought of walking my kids to school along cobblestoned streets is pretty appealing. I can almost hear their slight British accents and see their cute little school uniforms.

Would this imaginary life I sometimes think about be better than the one we’ve built?

In some ways, possibly. In other ways, likely not. In the end, it probably doesn’t even matter. I tend to believe life is more about who you spend it with rather than where you spend your time. And in my case, the people I spend most of my life with reside within these four walls. They’re all amazing and I wouldn’t trade them for anything. (However, sometimes I would consider parting with the dog or the bunnies. Hades, the dog, has been chewing stuff up lately. Like crazy. With his penchant for chaos, you would almost think he’s the god of the underworld or something.)

I used to have this running joke with the one good friend I’ve stayed in touch with from that transformative year I spent abroad. A professor we both had in the master’s program, and my would-be PhD advisor, once mentioned in an email the possibility of me doing some work for her. This was in the year after I moved home from Cambridge. When I was still pretending that returning to pursue a PhD was a possibility. She promised to circle back soon. Soon turned into months and then years. So, as the years ticked by, I would randomly text my friend something like, “Thinking about checking in with Dr. F about that job opportunity!”

It was a joke. Mostly. But as jokes sometimes tend to be, it wasn’t just a joke. It was a lifeline. Parenting small children is hard. The days are long and tedious. Everywhere, no doubt, but particularly in Florida. You really haven’t lived until you’ve managed a parcel of kids fighting over a garden hose all day in a muddy backyard when the air is molten lava. It’s a tiring and isolating experience.

During those years of long days, long nights, and a sometimes mind-numbing sameness, it was nice to dream. To escape for a moment to another life that would always be cool and educated and pleasantly overcast with a light drizzle. Somehow. It’s a dream life that will never exist. It doesn’t have to make sense.

Like a small playground in London. The place we kept going back to in real life for those ephemeral spring days in 2019. The place I go back to in my mind every so often when the chores get unusually tedious or the local politics get particularly stupid.

Real life is weird. Painful. Boring. Monotonous. It’s nice to have an imaginary world you can escape to sometimes. If only for a few minutes. Whether it’s a tropical island or a chateau in the south of France or that cool house on Zillow you found in rural Canada where you could embrace your inner lumberjack. Or somewhere a little more ordinary. It can keep you motivated. Keep you believing in possibility.

And the best part? Dream lives never let you down because you never have to live them. You don’t have to do the dishes there or fold laundry or work or fail to save the world with your important job or get sick or suffer any flavor of disappointment.

My dream life self takes his kids to a small playground in London.

How about yours?

Don’t forget to check out my books!

Love’s a Disaster - contemporary fiction about a marriage proposal gone wrong, complicated families, second-chance love, Florida, sword fighting, and punk rock music.

Fatherhood: Dispatches From the Early Years - essays and humor about the very early years of my parenting journey