Tag / parenting

Sailor Tamara Miller at the helm on blustery day in Puget Sound.
by Tamara

Welcome to Fouled Up Life, 2.0

Sailor Tami at the helm during a blustery day in Puget Sound.
Learning to sail in mid-life has changed me for the better.

I’ve tinkered with the idea of writing an article titled “All I’ve ever wanted to know, I learned from sailing.” 

Tongue-in-cheek, partly, but also for reals. Learning to sail has changed my life, and not just in the obvious ways. The lessons I have learned since I started to sail have taught me how to live better in all aspects of my life. 

When I started this blog, I simply wanted a place to capture all I was learning about sailing. I’ve learned how to sail, yes, but I’ve also learned a lot about:

What I didn’t expect, though, was that my experiences on S/V Polaris would inform all parts of my life.

The first time I step foot on a sailboat was when I was 38 years old, newly divorced with two kids, and fairly certain about what I was good at and what I wasn’t. Learning to sail in mid-life definitely took me out of my comfort zone and I am so glad for it.

Sailing continues to teach me how to screw up and get back up again. How to be patient. How to be a better teacher and parent to my kids. How to cope when my plans go to shit. How important nature is to me and all living beings (and how, I firmly believe, we would all be better if we spent more time outside). How to dig deep and get a really tears-inducing frustrating job done. How to keep going when I’m tired. How to really, truly rest. 

In short, sailing has taught me how to learn and to be OK with always learning, with not knowing the answer and being totally OK with that, too.

All those other things belong on this blog, too. 

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here. That’s OK. Life has been crazy for us for the last two years. We bought a house, put our kids back in school, resumed splitting time between boat and land and have had to endure a lot of ups and downs along the way. But I’m ready to share what I’m learning again, and I hope that maybe, you’ll learn something, too. 

If you aren’t interested in that other stuff, you can still find my sailing- and sailboat-only content here. But if you are a curious type, and I bet that you are if you still are reading this post, you can start finding that “other” content over here.

by Tamara

Making kids part of the sail crew

We’ve been sailing as a family for three years, but until this last year, my son showed very little interest in being anything more than a passenger.

During passages (in our case, a day or two of sailing in Puget Sound to get from one gunkhole to the next), we had to demand he leave the cabin and come topside. We gave him “jobs,” like searching the water for sea life, or rules, like any eating had to happen in the cockpit while we were underway. He complied, but usually would cry boredom at some point and beg to go back into the cabin with a book.

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by Tamara

What learning looks like on our sailboat

Like many families in the U.S., our school year looks a lot different than it has in years past.

Gone are the days of getting up at 6:30 a.m. and rushing to eat, get dressed and in the car in time for school.

Instead, the kids get up when they get up. After breakfast, they usually head outside for some vitamin D and fresh air.

Once back inside, they don’t head to desks or any sort of designated learning space. Instead, we compare their schedules with my husband’s calls for work and figure out who needs to use the one table we have first. Some days, the kids don’t even crack the computer and we spend most of our time outside.

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by Tamara

Divorced and sailboat cruising with kids

Cruise the web for cruising families. You’ll see some differences: large families of four kids or more, sailing on a large catamaran; small families with a single kid, voyaging the world on a boat not much bigger than a daysailer.

They cruise in Fiji, Australia, Mexico, the Med, northern Europe and along both coasts of the United States.

In most cases, cruising families are made up of two married or committed parents and the children they have had together. And it makes sense. Balancing a weather-dependent cruising schedule with parenting plans, custody arrangements and divorce decrees requiring travel notifications is a formidable challenge indeed.

Our family has to manage all of those factors. My kids are from my first marriage. My husband is their step-father. Our boat is in Puget Sound and my kids’ dad, J, is in Portland. We have a 50-50 parenting plan.

And we are making it work so far. Here’s how:

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