raisin grippers

raising kids outside isn't all chocolate; sometimes it's raisins. it's worth it though.

In two weeks, my older daughter will graduate from high school.

This is absurd because about five minutes ago, Steve and I were double-swaddling her to get her to sleep. She was so feral and full of energy as a baby that she needed to be wrapped tightly twice in order to settle down. That or walk. I hiked throughout my pregnancy, and she was so used to being in motion that I carried her up mountains at nap time. I couldn’t stop to tie my shoe or else she’d wake up. I hiked up a lot of mountains in those first few years.

In 2011, I started writing about our adventures for my weekly Outside Online column called “Raising Rippers.” Our two daughters were babies and toddlers then, and there was no gap between the stories we were living and the ones I was writing.

handies peak, co

I wrote Raising Rippers for more than a decade (you can still some/all? of them online). During that time, we changed diapers on the tent floor; I pumped breast milk in the back of a SnoCat. We shelled out a small fortune on snacks. We skied into huts and rafted down rivers, taught the girls to ride their bikes and to navigate the neighborhood streets safely to school alone.

Eventually I stopped writing the column, but we didn’t stop living our stories. They got more complicated, arguably a tiny bit less cheerful: adolescence meets global pandemic. School closed; one dog died and another got depressed. The world reopened, and high school began. It was harder to go on family adventures, but also more necessary.

A few years earlier, a friend told me that he always misread the name of my column as Raisin Grippers, not Raising Rippers. When I told this to Steve, he said, “That should be the title of your next column.”

I laughed. It was a perfect name—way better than Raising Rippers, which implied a kind of machismo and dominance that suited the media outlet more than our family.

I’d never wanted to teach my daughters to “rip” or “shred” or “crush” or “bag” anything in the natural world. I wanted to help them develop a healthy intimacy with their environment, their bodies and minds, and their family, friends, and community. I knew that if they felt at home and at ease in the world, and in themselves, they would make a positive difference wherever they went.

But Raisin Grippers? Yeah, that tracked. I pictured our daughters with filthy, food-smeared faces clutching fistfuls of raisins as they climbed a mountain. In my mind’s eye, they were not especially thrilled about the raisins nor the mountain, but nonetheless they were doing it. They were climbing the mountain.

oh be joyful, crested butte, co

I never did write that column. Our raisin grippers were growing (too fast, IMO) into strong, confident young women, with curious minds and compassionate hearts. They were becoming kind friends and sisters and, I hoped, future stewards of the natural world.

They had their own stories to tell.

And the truth is, I don’t even like raisins. They remind me of desiccated little bugs, withered and sad. They’re cloyingly sweet but a total let-down. You think you’re getting chocolate, but really it’s raisins. I would never willingly snack on raisins. Even if I was 50 miles into a 100-mile ultra marathon, I probably would not eat raisins.

So of course this makes raisins a perfect metaphor. They’re the things we grip onto that we don’t want or need, that trouble us or hold us back, that we think we ought to like because we were told to, or because we are pleasers or afraid of change, or of what people think, or being our truest selves. They’re the trick bits in the oatmeal cookie batter when what you want is the chocolate.

We all have our version of raisins.

In life, we have to learn to let go of the f-ing raisins. Just paw through the bag of trail mix with your grubby hands if you have to and weed out the raisins. I fully support this.

Sometimes, though, we have to suck it up and carry the raisins. We’re running up a mountain and that mountain might be work or a deadline or aging parents or family squabbles or heartbreaking injustice, and we have to stay the course. No matter what, we have to keep going, and in order to do that, we might have to eat the raisins. Just a few.

There’s a time and a place for raisins. Just please don’t put them in the cookies. And don’t grip them too hard because they’ll leave sticky, little dead-ant stains on your palms, and that’s gross.

Today my daughter won the Steward Award for her graduating class. Raising her wasn’t all chocolate, though. We made mistakes, fell on our faces, got up, laughed a little (or cried), and staggered on. There are scars. We ate the raisins. We did our best, and she did even better.

I love her way more than raisins, and we still have to let her go.

sending love,

katie

raising rippers + gripping raisins is tiring work