One of those days (the bad kind).I kneel on the ground, surrounded by blue fence to keep parents and other unwelcome visitors away from the little ones. The magic carpet buzzes behind me, full of kids learning how to stop on skis. I look from mom, to kid, back to mom. Payson* is half screaming, half crying. I can imagine why. I'm a big scary stranger wearing a mask. Mom has entrusted me to teach her son skiing, insisting over and over to Payson, who is only two years old, that I'm a "professional." I think she repeats it so she will believe it herself. Or maybe so that I will. I sit, helpless, paralyzed. I've tried everything. I've tried reasoning, "skiing is so fun!" and "it's only an hour and then you can have pancakes with mom!" I've tried small bribes, which usually go far with the youngest kids. Gummy bears, stickers, games, magic carpet rides. Nothing seems to work. The instructor that worked with the family previously tried to give me pointers by explaining how they handled this mess the day before, but I wasn't prepared to be another person to push him down the hill, perhaps leading to lifelong trauma surrounding skiing. The screams were so loud, so desperate, they made me feel ill. Snot and drool dribbled down the front of Payson's brightly colored yellow vest. I plead with him. The only word in his vocabulary is "no." "I think we should call it. I don't want him to hate skiing. Maybe we can try again next year when he's older, or when there's not masks involved. New experiences like this can be pretty scary for the kids, especially this year." I try to hold my ground, share my wisdom, embody the professional. Even the older kids are dealing with pandemic-heightened separation anxiety. Meanwhile, parents are trying, and failing, to downplay their insatiable need to getthehellawayfromthekids, at the expense of instructors. Usually, when kids that young are so afraid, I would try to hold them, to comfort them, sing maybe, all of the universal languages of care and safety. But here we are in the middle of a pandemic, and I don't feel safe doing so. Payson is swimming in his own bodily fluids, everything short of blood, and even that is only one tantrum-tumble away. If I scoop him up, cradle him in my arms, would it be a huge risk? Every day, I make small talk with small humans. "Where are you from?" "Florida!" "Texas!" "At home we don't wear masks to the grocery store!" a seven year old tells me. Yikes. For locals, leaving the county warrants a period of quarantine. I haven't spent time with anybody but my roommates for the entire season. It's not because I don't want to be around people. It's downright exhausting not to be. I go to ski clinics constantly, often just to have people to ride the chairlift with. I know plenty of instructors that don't care very much about their contact with guests. But if I start to take risks at work, where do I draw the line? As we walk away from the blue fence and the tiny slope, mom tells me all about how Payson took four swimming lessons at 9 months old, all of which had the same effect: the blood curdling scream that simultaneously woke something instinctual in me, and shut down my entire body. "And now he loves swimming. We can't get him to come out of the water." I find myself questioning my own boundaries. Should I have just manhandled the protesting child? Push him down the mountain and hold by the back of the jacket, pushing his skis into a wedge with my feet? Pick him up, his drool covering my uniform, and plop him down on the magic carpet? I trudge back through the one-way entrance to ski school, exhausted. I want to hide, somewhere nobody can see me. The sounds of Payson's screams still ring in my ears. At least this was my only lesson scheduled, only an hour. Then I check the board, see my name again. Another lesson, another two year old. My supervisor approaches and asks if I'm okay. I manage to choke out something about feeling unsafe and it's a COVID thing, because at least you can't argue with that. I don't want to elaborate, obviously. I quickly slink off the bathroom to let the valve wide open. Through my mask, a muffled sob comes from the bathroom and I'm deflated. I try to figure myself out. Is it really this lesson that bothered me so much? Is something deeper going on? I love skiing, and I love teaching. I want to be the best that I can at both, so I constantly go to trainings, professional development, seek mentors and talk through best practices. Never had I considered what would happen when doing what I love leads to such burnout. You're so lucky.Working in the outdoor industry is endlessly rewarding. I do the things I love every single day and get paid for it. Then I feel this burnout, cry in a bathroom, and suddenly I doubt everything I thought I knew about myself. Do I suddenly not like skiing or something? I try to hold on to the highs, trust that feeling I get when I'm zipping fast through the trees or throwing new tricks in the park. If I loved teaching and skiing so much, then wouldn't this be the dream? Shouldn't it feel like it used to? The comparison can hardly be made from last year to this year. There was no pandemic last year. I worked at a different mountain entirely. We could be with friends and blow off steam. But the way the kids react to instructors was so different too. I used to teach groups of three year olds last year. Now I teach 1 on 1 and it feels harder than anything I've ever done. This year, I have to be a ski instructor, teacher, caregiver, friend. Standing in for everyone the kids haven't had for a year, and then some. Being a ski instructor is about so much more than those two words alone. It's about the magic of the mountain town, the locals discounts, the mad dash to the chairlift after work to get just two more laps in. It's about grinding until you finally have your day off, midweek when nobody is on the mountain, and getting endless laps on the magical couch in the ski with zero lift lines. It's about community. Look, I'm not here just to complain. If you feel lucky to still be working a job in your field, you are. I am too. If you feel exhausted by all of the challenges COVID brings to what you originally signed up for, that's okay. I am too. We all are. The point is, it's not easy to continue as "normal" when the world is still very much not normal. Calling all nice people.Ski instructing is in the hospitality industry, and vacations have been wrought with drama since the dawn of the American dream. On my own childhood ski trip to Colorado, everybody got either altitude sickness or a stomach bug, we still don't really know which. We all vomited, but the grand prize for most creative and unfortunate location went to my kid brother, who puked in the rental car. There's always something. After so much yearning in 2020, miserable people are crawling out of their home offices, man caves, and Peleton paradises to be rude to service workers again. You can hear the sighs of relief out of spouses as they shift out of the hot seat for once. The tough part about being the service worker is that this year, there aren't as many of those truly great people that balance all that bad energy out day to day. Last year, I waited on one of the worst tables ever. I didn't realize that's pretty much as bad as it gets, because it was my first table ever. The family came in swinging, and they left with a gift card and their meal on the house. No tip. I think that's what they were going for all along, I just happened to be collateral. The next table I had was a lovely young couple, who instead of getting angry when I got their drinks wrong twice, slowed me down, asked me where I went to school and made meaningful conversation while their food was taking forever. They tipped $2 on their card, and with an arrow and shhhhhh scribbled on the back of the customer copy, they left a $40 cash tip on their $80 meal. Unfortunately, there's way less of those kinds of people taking vacations this year. I'll let you guess why. There still are some good people out and about though. My first private lesson with a wonderful 3 year old was a huge success, and her parents reached out a few weeks ago to send me a photo of us together and a heartwarming story about how their daughter loved the lesson so much she bought a little stuffed moose and named her after me. Another kid, who I had in group lessons for all of Christmas vacation, is so psyched on learning how to ski that her mom texts me often about how much of an impact I made. I got a $100 tip for running down the hill after a giggling two year old for an hour and teaching her nothing. Good things are still happening, just not as much it seems. What's important to me right now is remembering that there will be moments that make it all worth if it if we're patient and hang on to them. Pandemics happen once a lifetime (hopefully). *names changed for privacy
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AuthorHi, I'm Anna! I'm just a girl that loves to play outside, especially in the mountains. Archives
January 2021
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