I Hate It Here
By Rachel Nevergall
@rachelnevergall
This story begins on a train, as many great stories do. The moment I step aboard and notice the windows curving to the roof I know I am in for a postcard worthy journey. The engine leaves the station and my body flows with the jostle of wheels bumping against tracks. I gaze upon jagged peaks of the Swiss Alps carving a path through clear skies, tiny villages dotting the landscape along teal lakes. If I squint I swear I spot Heidi in her lederhosen bouncing down the road.
I step off the train in the quaint as village of Wengen, Switzerland and my senses bombard me. The first is the aroma of pine—crisp and fresh—like I’m inhaling a cough drop. The second is a sound—cowbells—ringing gently in the distant hills. Then the views. Oh the views! The village is perched on a hillside cradled by the Jungfrau mountains and as I spin in wonder, I can hardly breathe. Making my way down cobbled streets, my eyes dart back and forth, gawking at buildings from a centuries-old fairy tale as I …
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
A startling trill awakens me from the moment. My eyes squint, painfully adjusting to the reality before me. There are no mountain peaks out my windows, no chalets, no pine trees. It’s just me and my ordinary living room on a dreary Tuesday morning in January, and the approximately 113 open tabs of travel blogs and YouTube videos on my laptop screen.
My phone continues to vibrate next to me. Incoming Facetime with Leo, the screen flashes rudely.
I press “join” and the top part of my six year old’s face pops up on the screen.
“Hi Mom!” His chipper voice greets me on the other side of the phone.
“Hi Leo.” I dig deep to mask my disappointment and match his cheer.
This is not what I wanted for my day. He’s supposed to be in school. I’m supposed to be at work. But winter germs are germing, as the youths say. Leo is the latest victim of the dreaded January stomach bug, and because it’s not 1989, I can’t just give him a kiss and leave him on the couch with Bob Barker, a two-liter bottle of ginger ale, and the promise to check in on my lunch break. So here I am, waiting out the necessary incubation period. And “traveling” to Switzerland, apparently.
“What do you want, Bud?” I ask him through the screen, wondering how quickly I can get away from this conversation and back to the Alps.
I only have myself to blame for this interruption.
You see, when you’re trying to get your kid to eat something, anything, after he’s been sick, inevitably the only thing he will possibly be hungry for are some Teddy Grahams but not like the healthy kind from Trader Joe’s. No, the real kind like Royce’s mom puts in his lunchbox. Of course you don’t have said Teddy Grahams (make it the sprinkled kind, please, mom, tilts head, pouts lips, bats eyelashes, the whole bit.) And now that Royce’s mom has set the impossible standard for parenting, you must make a trip to the store. But then in addition to Royce’s mom, now you have Dateline’s Keith Morrison in your head giving you the raised eyebrows of judgment at leaving your child home alone, so you decide at the very least you can take advantage of technology and leave the child with an iPad and quick instructions on FaceTime if he needed anything in the next seven minutes. Relax Keith. I’m doing my best here.
Which is all to say how I find myself at the moment, safely returned to a house not burned down by a neglected child, desperate to escape to my dream Swiss vacation, now cut short by Leo’s latest fascination with that magical button on his iPad.
“Hey Mom, listen to this.” Through the screen I see him take a slug of water and then gurgle it in his throat as water splashes out of his mouth.
“That’s pretty cool, Dude.”
“Do I sound like a dragon? I think I sound like a drowning dragon.”
“Yeah. You do.” I pause, assuming there is more. He continues to gargle.
“Hey, do you need anything?” I offer up my very best I-love-you smile.
“No that’s it.”
Without so much as a goodbye, the screen goes black and he’s gone.
I smile and chuckle to myself. Good thing he’s cute.
Now where was I? Oh that’s right, Heidi-ing up the Alps. I return to the laptop to reenter my world of imagination–cozy wooden chalets, bright red geraniums spilling from windowboxes, peaceful sounds of…
“Who let the dogs out?! Woof Woof Woof Woof.” Leo’s voice echoes through floorboards above my head singing along with Baha Men to a song thought we left in the early 2000s.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Incoming Facetime with Leo.
I put my smile back on and press “join” once again.
“Yes?”
“Mom, listen to this song.” He turns up the volume and continues the dog sounds.
“I’m making a playlist.” Apparently we’ve reached the Make a Playlist Stage of I’m home sick but feeling better so now I’m just bored.
“Ok, have fun!” I try hard not to wish we were still in the Sleeping All Day Stage of sickness.
“K, bye!” He leaves FaceTime and from upstairs I hear the Beatles join in the sick karaoke session with “Here Comes the Sun.” At least he has range.
But before George Harrison finishes his first chorus, the beeping and vibrating begins again.
This time I don’t bother answering with a smile.
“What.”
“Hey mom … I’m bored. What can I do?”
Might I suggest a trip to Switzerland?
“Why don’t you read a book?”
“Good idea. What book?”
“I don’t know, Bud, pick anything. Maybe read your Ramona Quimby book. Just leave me alone for a bit, okay? I’m trying to get some work done.”
“Okay, fine. Bye.”
Now guilt joins me as I return to the computer screen. It wasn’t exactly a lie. I do have work to do. The neglected “Untitled document” Google Doc eyes me from behind the Switzerland tabs. I’m supposed to be writing today. I WANT to be writing today. Writing has always been my creative respite. For a writer, a day stuck at home is an invitation to get lost in good storytelling. But storytelling requires a life of adventure and fascination. I can’t remember the last time I was fascinated by my own story.
Let me be clear, do not confuse my boredom with ease. I’m a mother of three in the age when parenting comes with its own warning label from the surgeon general. Anything hazardous to your health is never easy. I also wouldn’t say I have achieved mastery level as a parent, not like Royce’s mom anyway. But after a while there becomes a certain predictability as a parent. The hard just doesn’t surprise me anymore. Dinner refusal, bedtime shenanigans, even sick days—I’ve been living the same misadventures of parenting for a decade and then some. And all along the way, I’ve written about them. Parenting is a tale as old as time, and I’m bored with that tale.
And so I escape. If you don’t like your story, you go find a better one. I overflow pinterest boards with hills to climb, streets to wander, lives to live far more colorful than the one before me. Certainly if Anne Shirley was here she would agree with me. One must face the doldrums of life through the “scope of imagination.” That was all I was doing, right? Using my imagination? Then why do I feel so guilty?
I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer like Anne. When I didn’t want to clean my room, I imagined the queen was on her way for a visit. When I was lonely without friends, I climbed trees and made the animals my friends. I crawled into every story like a portal into a life more interesting than the one I lived in a small town in Kansas.
But there was another side to that imagination. “You live in a fairy tale,” my dad responded when I told him after two years as an engineering major I was leaving to study psychology because I was “bored.” “Life is not a fairy tale, Rachel. Life is hard. Life is boring. One of these days you’re going to have to step out of your imagination and challenge yourself.”
Was he right? I wondered today. Was I escaping into my imagination? Or was I escaping from my life?
I no longer heard Anne Shirley’s voice in my head. Now it was Taylor Swift.
“I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind.”
I have my own secret gardens. In the labor and delivery room, I remember taking the advice from the lamaze instructor to go to my happy place. “The mind is a powerful tool. Let it take you somewhere far, far away from the pain.” Through every contraction, I closed my eyes, took myself out of that hospital room, and into the Champ de Mars at the foot of the Eiffel tower with a baguette and a bottle of wine. Anywhere but here.
But was that so bad? After all, I got through it. The proof is in the little boy upstairs singing along as the fifth Beatle: “It’s alright, doo doo doo…”
Maybe Anne Shirley isn’t as brutally honest as Taylor Swift, but don’t we all need to go somewhere in our mind when the world is dull, or even worse, scary? Maybe going to the secret gardens of Avonlea or Paris or Switzerland wasn’t always so bad if it helps us get through the day and find a better story. As Taylor sings, in her fantasies, when she rises above and looks down on her life she learns: “I actually love it.”
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
I join the Facetime once more, this time relieved for the break from my swirling thoughts.
“Mom, you have to hear what Ramona just did.” He is so close to the screen, I can only see the top of his face. But his eyes sparkle with delight. Maybe he needed the escape into a different story, too.
“What did she do?”
“She ate a bite of every apple in the box. Just one bite. EVERY one. Isn’t that so funny?” He chuckles. I chuckle, too.
“That is so funny.”
“Hey, mom, can you bring me an apple?”
“Sure, buddy. I’ll be right up.”
I climb the flight of stairs to deliver one apple to the rosy cheeked boy grinning as soon as he sees me.
“Thanks, mom.”
I smile, wipe his hair from his eyes, and hold my hand just for a moment on his cheeks.
“Hey, mom. Want to read the rest of the story with me? It’s really good.”
“Sure, babe. But, only if I can have some of your Teddy Grahams?” I curl around him and start reading, the two of us now looking for our next story.
Guest essay written by Rachel Nevergall. Rachel is a therapist, writer, maker, and dreamer living in Chicago with her college sweetheart and their three kids. Rachel wants to be defined by the things she loves, like an impossible to carry stack of library books, the many layers to a well mixed cocktail, growing vegetables from tiny seeds, and obsessing over the complexity of a Taylor Swift lyric. You can follow along with Rachel and her ever growing catalog of muses in her Substack newsletter, Speaking Of, on her podcast, Swift and Swigs with Sibs, or the Instagram grid, of course.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.
Lyric and author references:
Baha Men, “Who Let the Dogs Out,” by Anslem Douglas, on Men in Black II Soundtrack, S-Curve, released 2000, streaming audio, Spotify.
Montgomery, L. M. 1874-1942 and Jody. Lee. Anne of Green Gables New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1983.
Swift, Taylor, “I Hate It Here,” by Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner, on The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, Republic Records, released 2024, streaming audio, Spotify.