Everything Grows Faster in the Summer

I have acquired yet another in the growing number of items on my list of Things I Know Better Than to Do But Do Anyhow.

I have just finished sorting through Jake and Lily’s outgrown clothes, putting them away in anticipation of the spring kids’ rummage sale at the Jewish Community Center to which I will donate them.  This newfound desire to pass my kids’ old clothes on to the JCC as a way of indirectly giving yet more money to my children’s preschool is born, no doubt, of my questionable decision to become a PTO rep for Jake’s new class.

One might logically assume my decision to become a PTO rep for Jake’s new class is what belongs on my list of Things I Know Better Than to Do But Do Anyhow.  But it’s not.  Or maybe it will be.  Whatever pangs of PTO regret and stupidity may ring through my brain shortly, they will have to wait in line.

Because not only did I sort through my kids’ old clothes, I sorted through my kids’ old clothes as soon as I arrived home after dropping Jake off for his first day in his new class, his screams of “I want my Mommy!” still reverberating in my head as they reverberated down the hall when I left him.  As I held each precious item up, trying to imagine its owner fitting into it, then remembering just what it was like when he did, I felt the distinct oof of my breath leaving me with the realization that — sniff — my children are growing up.

And not so suddenly, I found myself moistly whimpering, “I want my boy who wore these tiny tees!”

How We’ve All Grown

Jake wore those tee-shirts when we moved to Asheville exactly two years ago.  It was August 24th, as I recall, when Mike and the hounds arrived in the CRV he drove across the country to find me and eight-month-old Jake waiting at his brother’s house.  And August 25th when our financial adviser failed to make the deadline for wiring the funds for the closing on our house.  Which would be a far more tragic story if I weren’t at this moment sitting at the desk in the office that we paid for the very next business day.

I feel good about those two years, especially now that a one-week break from preschool has successfully been survived with the help of play dates and birthday parties and the feeling of really being friends with the parents of Jake’s friends and not just saying empty witty things to them about what our kids are doing in class while wishing I had something, anything, else to say.  Turns out I do have things to say.  Like, “I’ll be the PTO room parent if you will.”

It’s the feeling so good about where we are now, in fact, that makes me whimper just a little bit at the way Jake had to go and grow up while I was getting here.  It’s the feeling excited that Lily is close to being able to sit up, to crawl, to becoming an independent little person that makes me feel so sad that I want her to get to that point.

It is, in short, that old mixed up melancholy that hits when I feel like I have failed to properly appreciate my kids in the present as they gallop off toward a future slamming at me like a wrecking ball aimed at Wile E. Coyote’s midsection.

Summer break, in fact, seems to have accelerated the kids’ growing up to a breathless pace, as if a three-month break was simply squeezed into the Spanx of a one-week period.

It started with Jake going to his friend Wendell’s house to play on Thursday afternoon while Lily and I went to a doctor’s appointment.  It’s obvious that Jake had the better end of the deal, but I wasn’t so certain he’d recognize that fact once I left him alone in a house he’d never before visited, no matter how much he adores its youngest occupant.

To make matters more precarious, I was running late when I screeched off the interstate and found myself uncertain about which way to turn.  I headed north, sweating, as Jake said, “Is that Wendell’s house?” at every passing building in what I’d like to think he meant as a useful manner.  It was not.

Deciding I was heading in the wrong direction and would soon arrive at the Tennessee border, I called Mike.  “Which way?!  Merrimon exit!  Bellagio Bistro!” I blubbered to him as I sped south, cursing at the people who had the termerity to be taking their time.

As Mike fumbled with google maps, I crossed the border back into the city.  “Never mind!” I screamed, attempting a three point turn in the gravel parking lot of an auto shop and seriously endangering my two chidren in the process.

“Found it,” Mike said as I hung up on him.

We arrived at Wendell’s house in a downpour.  It was, in fact, the very first time I’ve seen Jake willingly get wet without so much as an, “I don’t like the rain!”  Instead, he scrambled in a bit of mud and headed for Wendell’s house without a backwards glance.

This was the kind of independence we experienced together for the rest of break.  He ran down ramps at the Nature Center with his friend Tasmin, ignoring me until her mother took her home in a pre-nap meltdown and then doing a seriously lovely job of listening to me as I single-handedly wrangled my two children for another hour of Nature Center-ing.  This meant nursing Lily at a picnic table as Jake ate his cereal bar and then held onto his trash until we could find an appropriate receptacle for it.  It meant him never complaining that, as I reminded him a few times, I couldn’t carry him when I had his sister strapped to me in the Ergo.  And it meant he hardly cried at all when he dropped the chocolate ice cream I bought him on the floor of Ultimate Ice Cream.  A sweet girl scooped it up for him well within the seven-second rule and I pretended they cleaned the floors every half hour or so and let him eat it without even considering removing the outer layer.

Then there with the birthday parties — two of them, one for each weekend day.  I learned something important at them.  I learned that three-year-olds’ birthday parties can be fun if the three-year-old is not your child.  If you are comfortable with a certain noise level.  If you choose not to care that your child is halfway into his second cup of chocolate ice cream before you have been alerted about his questionable (lack of) lunch choice.  And on Monday when Wendell came to our house to play — for which Mike gets most of the credit, as he took the day off from work and I took my usual time nursing Lily in a quiet, distraction-free room — I learned that it’s a whole lot easier to entertain two small children than it is to entertain one.

But I also learned something much bigger over the course of the break.  I learned that I am no longer frightened of being alone with my children.

Admit It — It’s Scary

I can’t think of many things that sound worse than saying, “I am afraid to be alone with my children.”  At least anything arguably this side of sanity.

But the truth is, until recently, I have been.  There were the endless snow days when neither Jake nor I was much inclined to go sledding or outdoors at all and even he eventually grew tired of TiVo’d episodes of Sesame Street.  The weekends when Mike is working in the yard and I struggle to prove that my attention span is greater than that of my five-month-old.  The occasional night that Mike has to work and I am faced with the prospect of feeding two children in two very different ways, putting two children to sleep at very different ages and needs, and making sure that the baby doesn’t end up forgotten and stuck under the couch.

It’s not that I’ve been scared of something happening to my children.  I have a remarkably low alarm level for a still relatively new mother.  It’s not that I’m scared I’ll do something to them.  They are unspeakably good kids and pose no real danger to each other or to my peace of mind.

The only thing I’ve been scared of is boring them.  Of Jake whining that he wants to watch Mama Mirabelle instead of reading books with me while Lily cries until I hold her and wonder how I will ever get the boiling pot of pasta off the stove when she won’t let me put her down.

Really.  What do you do with bored kids?

If you’re the kind of mom who’s good at these things, you have elaborate art projects ready.  About all I can come up with art-wise is pointing at the Melissa and Doug easel sitting in a corner of our living room and suggesting Jake draw a picture.  This occupies all of two minutes of our time. No different from the two minutes he spent fingerpainting the one time I went to the trouble of setting up a real art project.

If you’re Wendell’s mom, you plan on baking cookies with the boys, even if it never really happens because they are too busy running in circles yelling at each other in a frenzy of joy at playing together outside of school.  I would steal this idea except that our kitchen simply doesn’t lend itself to children helping out, much less remaining in the vicinity while the oven is on without warranting a visit to me from children’s protective services.

It you don’t live on the daunting hill we do and you don’t have to lug around a sixteen-pound baby, you might tempt your son outdoors and onto his Skoot in the hopes that he will grow to love it and stop saying, “I don’t like my bicycle.  It falls over.”  If you weren’t afraid to put the baby down in the grass in the backyard lest she land in dog poop or be eaten by chiggers, you might even spend some time out there playing catch.

I have tried these things and many others, and nothing seems to last long enough to make much of a dent in our day.

Except during break.  Maybe it was how completely in love I am with Jake’s age and his discovery of the world and the way he reports on it.  “Mommy!  A ladybug!”  “I wave to the man on the garbage truck!”  “The pool is closed when it rains.”

Or maybe it has something to do with how peacefully Lily comes along for the ride, staring with full-cheeked intensity at anything Jake touches.

Or, maybe, I’m finally just getting the hang of this motherhood thing.

Whatever the reason, I found myself really enjoying my time with my kids.  I marveled at their worlds and wandered through them holding hands with these two complete young beings.  I laughed at the things Jake found funny and wrapped my arms around Lily in sudden moments of overwhelming love.

I had fun.  The kind of fun it’s easy to miss when you’re a parent so intent on making sure your child has fun that you forget you can too.

Stop Planning and Start Doing

It’s striking to me that the fear of a few days off from school cast such a long shadow over the weeks leading up to break.  Especially when I easily told other parents that I knew it would be much easier than I was making it out to be.

In other words, I was perfectly well aware that the anticipation was the hardest part.  The looking ahead and trying to wrestle all the unknowns into what I hoped would be an easy-to-assemble whole but knew wouldn’t be, like a piece of Ikea furniture.

The real problem, however, was that even as I was worrying in advance about the break, I was ignoring the ease available to me in the present. I spent more time worrying about what I was going to be doing later than I did enjoying what I was doing when I wasn’t worrying about what I was going to be doing later.

I could easily have continued this plan-ahead-and-forget-to-enjoy-the-fruit-of-my-plans strategy during break.  There was always the next day’s activity to plan, the next night’s bedtime to dread.

But I didn’t.  I consciously stopped, looked down at my feet set firmly in the present, and refused to let my mind gallop ahead of me.  I enjoyed the times when Jake was laughing and dealt with the times when he was crying when they came.  I tickled Lily when she was awake and well fed and happy and I figured out how to make her feel better when she wasn’t.  And I embraced the joy of being a mom.

I’m not saying I did anything particularly stupendous or that I’m deserving of a big pat on the back for doing what countless other moms do all the time.  But I am saying that, once again, I learned something very, very big from my kids.

I learned the real value of being in the present.  Especially once school started again and I was hit with the tragedy of what happens if you fail to savor the present and instead keep straining toward the future.  You are left with nothing but some memories of a nine-month-old boy you thought looked so grown up in his light blue Scuba Dog tee and a profound sense of sadness at wondering what happened to him.

Truth be told, I would be feeling sad at the passage of my children’s lives even if every single day I’ve had with them were nothing but one big bon bon of joy.  But sadness after happiness is an undulating path of life in which you know you will rise again if you just ride out the lows.  Sadness without a true embrace of the joy is just sadness for its own sake.

Parenting is scary.  Change is scary — and kids change constantly.  Not knowing what to expect is scary — and the fun of kids lies precisely in not knowing what to expect.  But the ability to sit comfortably beside that fear is empowering.  And turning your back on it when there are happier things to experience is a kind of joy that exists in no other way.

It is, in short, the joy of a life filled with whatever you choose to fill it with.  Including, if that’s your choice, a couple of beautiful children.