OLLIE ON THE SERENGETI

reports from the Unparenting movement, which is less a movement and more a convalescent home for old hammocks

“You’ve ruined my day, Mom,” says my daughter. (We brought her to the lesser playground this afternoon.)

“I’m just too weary,” says my son. (I have asked him to unbuckle his seatbelt.)

“I’ve got the banana,” I say to my husband (the translation of which is a Gladiator-style “strength-and-honor” palm-to-shoulder).

We get out of the car and brace for the back doors to fling open into the brewery parking lot, where a man with Jersey plates is already busy running us down in slow motion.

It’s ok, though, because he lifts a finger from the steering wheel of his Audi to indicate the brainstem impulse to wave, all while he continues to drive at us. It is unclear why he needs the spot right next to ours, since there are twenty empty spots next to it.

My husband growls at Jersey while vectoring my son towards the grass. My son growls at my husband while changing course for a huge pile of dirt. “No growling,” I say. To my son, not my husband. He is allowed to growl, as am I. There are rules here, people.

The children climb up the huge pile of construction dirt.

My son, who is wearing his jeans backwards and his shirt backwards and inside out, gets to the pinnacle of the pile, plants his bare feet (when did he take his shoes off??), makes a series of coked-out hamster noises, and begins using his spinning hand-shovels to fling dirt between his wide-planted legs like a cartoon character.

At least this time there is no gaggle of three-to-four-year-olds with Gentle Parents convening behind him in order to be harmed and outraged. I have become weary of a world in which so many completely hapless people line up to get run over or bashed by my kids.

Look, I want to say, we are the Serengeti. We are the harsh conditions of our cruel and beautiful world. Sandblasting and rock-toppling and leopard hunts and punishing weather abound. TEACH YOUR GENTLES NOT TO TRUNDLE THEIR FACES INTO ACTIVE FIRE. Perhaps by letting them engage and sort it out?

But I do not say this. I save it for my Substack like any self-respecting repressed mess. So anyway, while Gentle Parents everywhere are wondering why in the name of all that is holy I do not have control of my children or myself (this is a fair question, one I often ululate to myself while pounding my chest), I am wondering why everyone looks like one of those cardboard cutouts they used to have at video rental places.

It’s a bit of an impasse, all of us Parents engaging in Silent or Not-silent Judgment. But what seems most salient here is actually not our contrasting choices or behaviors, but our rather different circumstances. I think this culture isn’t very good at acknowledging circumstances.

For instance, whatever child shows up on the day of its birth is the child you get. You get about thirty percent sway in their life, with all your best moves; the rest is ANYBODY’S GUESS / some mosaic of extended family member quirks. There are actual studies that show this—like, real ones—but I’m too tired to dig them up. What I’m saying is we all have different kids, and mine have won.

Enter the Unparenting Movement, which is something I just made up. I’m less a parent and more of an oxidized guard-rail, saturated dish-towel, or fraying hammock for my family. Also it isn’t so much a movement as a pull-off from the Highway of Betterment.

We at the pull-off are eating warm string-cheese because we (have been forced to) acknowledge that our cars are not particularly road-worthy, so we may as well dig around in the go-bag for that old banana and check out the Turkey Vultures circling above while we wait for people’s executive functioning to kick in. (We’ve had time to name all the Turkey Vultures Ed, since we weren’t practicing math skills or going to gymnastics.)

Am I happy for the parents whose kids can handle standing in line and sitting down and holding still and following instructions and learning predetermined things in a procedural way? No, that would be too hard. But do I refrain from homicidal jealousy most days? Yes, because I, too, am committed to my movement, in my own way, and one of our codes is “snark is permitted because we’re human but no actual wish to harm will be tolerated because that doesn’t actually make anyone feel better and all we really actually want when it comes down to it is to feel better.” (We don’t have an admin or editor in the Code department yet.)

Tonight at the brewery many subtle and un-subtle dynamics relevant to the movement are unfolding. I can see already that out on the grass there’s one four-year-old who appears to be almost as fast as my son, and seems unfazed by the coked-out hamster noises; there is also a set of three-year-old twins who appear have just enough naughtiness under their bowl-cuts to make me not worry about the health of their souls.

Child B achieves bucket list item “make hole deep enough to stand in” at park sandbox with help of bored father of significantly more demure child, April 2025

Sure, it could be schadenfreude that makes me feel pleasure in these cases, where other kids are in the same Parental Wrangling Skills tournament bracket— to see the wailing, the wiggling, the flailing, the active darting and outraged monster-yodels happening to someone else— but also, I’ve noticed that the degree of hellfire a kid can dish out often correlates with their apparent creativity and resilience, and since these are both things we need lots of in the world right now, Problem-watching at the brewery seems almost like a way of dabbling in a form of Hope.

So: when I hear things like what I’m hearing now, which is one of the three-year-old twins getting asked do you want to go home?, in an extremely stern hiss, for the crime of intensely eyeballing (ok, maybe walking briskly towards) the giant mud puddle at the back of the brewery lawn, I tend to cast my vote for chaos and wish very much to see Ollie get in up to his wobbly knees. Maybe even soak up some mud-water in his extremely low-slung diaper.

“Go, Ollie,” I hear myself whisper, when I see him wrench free of the disciplined hand and very nearly make a concerted and deeply naughty dart for the mud. I reckon Ollie could outrun his mum over this particular distance. I lean forward and hold my breath, willing him to get past the defense. My husband looks up. “He got intercepted,” I say, and my husband gives a micro-nod. He’s now tracking the drama too, and has also come down on Ollie’s side.

At some point the fast four-year-old’s mother makes it clear, aloud, and with witnesses, that he is NOT to go in that mud puddle, and then she exits the scene to a table far, far away. Bravo, Mom, brilliant. She has dispatched her duty of Performative Boundary-setting and honorably discharged herself for the night because her (clearly very fast and spirited) son is now obviously under the watch of my (clearly very fast and inventive and at-least-not-actively-malicious) twins.

My husband shrugs. “If you sign your kid up to get babysat by terrorists, kid’s going in the mud puddle,” he says. I agree. We clink glasses. The four-year-old enters the mud puddle. We “don’t see it happen.”

My son’s jeans are halfway down his thighs. My daughter has elected to hop from rock to rock in her sparkle plastic sandals, falling each time into the muck and calling out the plays to us as if we can’t see them. MOOOOOMMMMM HE IS PICKING UP ALLERGY / MOOOOOOMMMMM HE THREW THE ALLERGY AND IT HIT ME. (Algae.)

My daughter’s play-by-plays are making it a lot harder for my husband and me to become invisible inside the glass rims of our drinks, but we are skilled. The four-year-old is now shadowing my son, standing about eighteen inches behind him and doing whatever he does (throwing algae, issuing zombie-screeches in two-second blasts at deeply irritatingly regular intervals).

When the throwing upgrades to rocks, we do engage in a little Performative Intervention, which is required even of Unparents when it comes to head injuries. I yell vaguely prohibitive-sounding syllables before letting them trail off into my absorption in the charcuterie board. The rocks aren’t going super high and they’re not aimed at anyone, so, I mean, no foul, technically. My husband even stands up and walks some of the way towards the puddle in a slow pantomime of willingness to physically intervene, which we both know he will not do, but which we are banking on our kids having some doubts about. The rocks agree to get lobbed lower, slower, and more surreptitiously.

Next up it’s the Calorie Game, which everyone hates, in which we have to find ways to trick my son into eating. If we don’t do it, he becomes starving and psychotic and will not feed himself. The hungrier he gets, the less likely he is to allow anything into his mouth. “Oh, they learn to regulate if you let them get hungry,” the Gentle Crowd have informed us many times, as if they’re studying the same species.

It’s like we created a magnetic opposite creature to the things it most needs for life. Fortunately, his sister is game for psy-ops work and has significant skill at it, so a brief round of King of the Rats on a large rock with charcuterie board nearby has some marginal success, on account of a repeated announcement with trumpets that the King of the Rats is Arriving, which seems to stimulate my son’s sense that Intake would be Appropriate. (Who wouldn’t take a bite of cheese after having been announced by trumpets?)

That goes on for a while, during which time we have to somehow discourage our children from actually putting their muddy bodies, including feet, all over the picnic table next to the giant rock where we’ve camped in order to avoid Real Parents and Other Actual Humans, so really this is just about where I hit my quota of parenting.

I feel the wash of numbness go over me. We are At Limit. I have No More Moves. It’s been a long afternoon of Monitoring and Ineffectual Attempts at Intervention in my son’s game of Bowling for People on his BigWheels at the park, and it’s been a long six years in general.

So yeah, we’re at the pull-off, folks, watching those vultures.

Lots goes on, lots continues, more things happen at the brewery. I continue to fail to shape much of the happening. But no one is severely injured, I would point out, and no one is being obviously, actively, sustainedly unkind, so I’m obliged to hang onto my shreds of hope that the guard-rail/dishcloth/hammock approach to parenting is sufficient. (Basically, you don’t choose Unparenting; it chooses you.)

I watch with sadness as Ollie, now thrice intercepted, lies down on the cornhole board to sleep off his disappointment in life. The sag on his diaper really looks kind of bereft. I begin to wonder if I can make a racket in the other direction so Ollie can make one last break for it. I see myself intercepting his mum— “excuse me, do you have time to talk about Mary Kay?”

Am I just fantasizing about bringing other families down into the chaos so I can feel better about my own shortcomings? Or am I genuinely rooting for Ollie on the Serengeti?

As a mostly-recovered English Professor, I feel compelled to say “the answer is, of course, both.” And maybe that’s true enough. That’s probably why we do it— because it’s mostly going to be right, merely on account of how most things are more complex than anyone has time or energy for.

But the part of me that knows how to twist and run, run like blazes, straight into the mud to make the maximum possible splash, the part that can lift a rock as heavy as herself and chuck it as far as you like, as far as the sky says is possible and then a few inches more for good measure and do it all with a holler from the lowest part of the guts— that part is grinning ear to ear, when she whispers, without any hint of order or apology:

Go, Ollie, go.

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If you’re interested in some other kinds of yammering I do, here’s a great podcast I was kindly invited to infiltrate, in which I get my #feralprofessor poet-paws all over a gorgeous short story by Elizabeth McCracken in a crafty discussion with some super smart and kind writers.

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