Rediscovering “Vienna” in the Minivan June 30, 2008

My inner control freak lost her battle by the last full week of June, and that serenity and spirit of possibility were taken down a few notches by the looming projects of the fleeting summer.

The other day, while I sat in my minivan on the way to soccer camp—my first time as a “soccer mom” is this summer—so very cliché!–I was nearly stopped for 20 minutes trying to go 5 blocks.  Two streets were flooded, and the police were diverting people off the main drag but then leaving them to drive through ponds and sit close to one another’s bumpers in a sort of back-street slow motion swamp parade.  By that Friday afternoon of thunderstorms and driving hang-ups, I had to have logged at least 30 hours in the minivan that week, almost all for kid activities.  After the soccer drop-off, I would head to the lumber store and load more 2×4’s for the family contruction project that has been the other part of taking over our daily lives:  a two-story bunkhouse/“treehouse” on stilts that rivals in size a nice addition.  I had my son and two other boys in the back, behaving very nicely as they generally do when they’re together, and Billy Joel was keeping me company, singing a song it seemed I hadn’t heard until I fell in love with it in college, Vienna.  I used to croon along with Billy Joel, feeling he had written that song for someone just like me:

“Slow down, you crazy child.

You’re so ambitious for a juvenile

But then if you’re so smart, tell me why are you still so afraid?

Where’s the fire? What’s the hurry about?

You’d better cool if off before you burn it out.

You’ve got so much to do but only so many hours in a day.”

 

 

Ah, still true, so true.  Slowing down is still so hard for me to do, though only some of my motion-oriented body parts are showing severe signs of burn out twenty years later (in the past year and a half, knees, shoulders, and foot.)  Oh, and then there’s my scatter-brained mind.  Words escape me.  Perhaps one out of three times I say dishwasher (giving instructions about where to put dirty dishes) instead of refrigerator, when I actually mean dishwasher.  Am I burning out?

 

 

I got teary listening to “Vienna.” I was struck by a wave of compassion for my younger self, and her persistence in me, this middle-aged self.  I was that crazy child, so ambitious for a juvenile, on my way, it seemed to burning out, but knowing, with some kind of driving insecurity, the truth of that other part of the song, “You can get what you want or you can just get old.”  I figured I’d have to run fast and hard and keep my wits about me, always if I was going to get what I wanted instead of just getting old.

 

 

A couple years ago, I read a magazine piece in which people were asked to write letters to their younger selves.  The idea was to give advice to that younger self, tell her what her she needed to know, that only you, the older you, could know.  I talked to my oldest daughter about this, said that if I were to write myself that letter, it would say something like, “Relax.  It will all work out.  You don’t need to do everything perfectly.  You’ll make it.”  But, my daughter argued, if you hadn’t worked so hard, if you had relaxed, maybe you wouldn’t have gotten what you wanted.  She’s a smart one, that girl.  She gets the catch 22 of it all.

 

 

As I heard the song unfold in all its old mystery, and change direction, “But you know that when the truth is told, you can get what you want, or you can just get old,” I wasn’t sure what it all meant now.  By the standards of my youthful 1980s worldview, I did get kind of old, and I got a lot of what I wanted too.

 

 

Later, sitting with my husband over a glass of wine in our half-constructed treehouse, I told him about re-discovering that song.  “But there was always something frustrating about that song!” he said.  “Oh, you mean the mixed messages?” I asked.  Yes, he knew exactly what I meant.  We argued, in a pleasant sort of way, about whether Billy Joel just narrowly avoided becoming bogged down in contradiction and instead somehow achieved sweet paradox.  I argued the latter, but John wasn’t so sure.

 

 

Still, there was more, because the song wasn’t just about doing, but also about dreaming. “Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true. Oooooohhh.  When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?”

 

 

Well, despite my little petty frustrations, my tendency towards road rage when stuck in the minivan too long, my lack of time and focus to stop and smell the roses, whether it’s my kids’ sunscreen-scented skin, tomato plants in my garden, or the fleeting ideas I want to write down as I’m sautéing spinach and garlic at my stove, I know this is the result of my dreams, both big, and mundane, which did come true.  I have a loving family, friends, health, and meaningful work in the world.  I have abundance every day, or, put another way, my cup runneth over, and there is never a dull moment.

 

 

Maybe what they don’t tell you is that it’s a whole different spiritual discipline you need to enjoy the fruits of your dreams, to stop spinning, every day, and pause to watch, listen, and touch, the people, pets, plants, colleagues, friends, strangers, and even to appreciate the ageing body in which you live.  To appreciate, too, in their glorious detail, the to do lists, the undone tasks, the creeping weeds and sagging foundations, the piles of kids’ wet clothes, the pile of cookies that disappeared in one attack of the kids, the writing that doesn’t get done, the packing of coolers and clothes and library books for the day of being different places on time, a day powered by the “hurry about” discipline of minivan mama herself. 

 

 

In mockery of my dreams of common hours and lazy days, this, the craziest week of kid activities of the summer, wore us all to a frazzle.  When I signed the younger kids up for one-week “enrichment” activities, which I’ve historically been so good at avoiding due to my laziness about driving and my preference for summer down-time at home, I knew Allie would be finishing up drivers’ education, so all three kids would need to be in different places at different times all day long.  I didn’t know that in this same week, we’d be racing against the inevitable summer rain showers to put up a monstrosity of bunk house/treehouse, and working until 9:30 at night on it most nights, with the girls required to pitch in because we needed that many hands to put up heavy 4×8’ siding six feet off the ground. I didn’t know that before driving kids all day, I’d be obliged to get up early in the morning and work on book proposals for the academic book I’ll be writing for my (never seems imminent but will someday come) sabbatical, because, after recently meeting with editors who were interested, the iron was hot.  Lazy days of summer these are certainly not.

 

 

By Thursday night, with John having worked on his feet all day at his nursing assistant job and on his feet all evening as extra-large treehouse general contractor with a pretty incompetent and weak (in every way) family labor force, with all the kids pretending it was summer with bedtime, but being dragged out of bed in the morning for “enrichment” looking like wrung-out wet rags, we were all on our last legs. Wednesday evening had ended with kid meltdowns, snapping parents threatening to take away ridiculous “privileges,” like the opportunity to finish the week’s activities, for which we’d paid dearly anyway, tears and recriminations, and only a few pieces of plywood put up on the treehouse, which was a gift from Dad (and Mom, and our funding benefactress, Grandma) for the very same kids.

 

 

But Thursday night Sylvia had a choir concert as the culmination of her week’s music camp, and we were all there.  Allie was sitting up valiantly, looking washed out and slump-shouldered, and Brad was curling his arms into the sleeves of his dirt-covered just-came-from-soccer t-shirt to stay warm in the air conditioning, and leaning on and  squirming up against me throughout the concert, but still sitting up to clap for every soloist.  John came in late, having tried to squeeze in a little mowing after work, and Grandma was there, with her boundless enthusiasm for the kids’ talents.

Our girl sang so sweetly, and showed incredible poise. She made me cry with the way she shared her gifts with the world with the irrepressible energy that is her trademark.  Often taking on their first solo performance, many of the girls quavered in front of the audience, forgot their lines, or sang too softly, though the enthusiastic audience nodded their heads in encouragement, eager to see them keep trying.  Sylvia, however, announced her name proudly and proceeded to sing boldly and clearly a beautiful spiritual.  She wasn’t the only eloquent and poised girl up there, and even the ones who struggled were beautiful in their efforts, taking on something that was kind of unimaginable to me, singing solo for all those people! But there she was, really shining, and there we all were in body and spirit, supporting her.  Burn-out and dreams come true, all in one family package.  Our moment of Vienna waiting for us in the spaces of hurry and do.  Though one of the hardest parts about summer is losing “me” in everyone else’s needs, this was a moment of gratitude to be sharing it all with the people I love most in the world.

 

Believing in Summer June 11, 2008

A few weeks ago, I told a friend from work, “I just want to believe that summer will really come, that it won’t be just a different way of being too busy.”  Though still punctuated with bouts of crazy busyness (make hay while the sun shines, mow that lawn, hang those treehouse beams, plant those squash seeds), now and then, I can honestly say that summer downtime has arrived.   

 

There really isn’t much e-mail in my work inbox, I really can manage my child labor force (who are homework free) and get them to clean out and vacuum the car, do household chores, and help me pack boxes in my office at work, in exchange for $5 for garage sales, to which we really will go tomorrow, searching for treasure, bumming around, savoring free time!

 

At home, while it rains so much this crazy June, there is time to watch the world turn, and, inbetween the tasks of cooking, cleaning, calling, and paperwork, find time to participate in its turning, marvel in its moments.   In the hands of kids and adults with free time, Sculpey clay turns into multi-colored bugs, fancy pens, miniature beds, carefully wrapped babies.  Lego creations are built, a pile of wood and brush turns into our first campfire, complete with S’mores and a game of tag for the kids, Skipbo card games and Scrabble turn my head to simple puzzles and quiet sociability. 

 

The vegetable garden, meanwhile, in true summer abundance fashion, turns mostly to weeds, though I struggle valiantly and mostly alone, planting beans in the mud, beating back the wilderness for each little primadonna spinach bouquet, willing the strawberries to survive the wetness and turn red without simultaneously rotting.

 

Then there’s the rhubarb.  I offer it to everyone, complete with recipes.  Please help me eat this stuff, I say.  It’s such an abundant offering from the earth, easy and free.  It comes every year, shades out all the weeds.  I love its toughness. I hear it can grow up through sidewalk cracks.  I turn it into rhubarb pie, rhubarb bread, rhubarb crisp, anything edible, and once in awhile, the kids still eat it raw, right out of the garden.

 

More amazing still is the perennial garden which is a daily gift, right by the patio.  Like the rhubarb, it requires little, though unlike the rhubarb, it has been a labor of love, dug painstaking shovelful by shovelful by my husband, who quietly entertains visions of bountiful flower gardens, reforested acreage, and abundant vegetable harvests. (The other day he actually dreamed of bushelfuls of strawberries and eggplants and woke up hungry for both.)  He has saved dozens of seedling trees around here, one of which is now a towering 40 feet after seven summers.

 

He started digging the flower garden in 2005, and each year we have added, and subtracted.  And we’ve found that nature provides a different array of color and combinations.  We don’t really plan it.  One year we find thousands of daisies, this year, I am in worshipful awe of the corabel flowers, ethereal and graceful, catch-me-if you-can-beauty, just sturdy enough to sit still for the beak of the hummingbird I saw feeding there last night.

 

A little over two years ago, I came home from a little trip to the Twin Cities in March, the Midwest’s ugliest time of year.  I saw unkempt flower beds, scraggly trees, a homemade patio that had heaved into a brick obstacle course in response to its first encounter with frost, and a yard that I anticipated we’d spend more time mowing than the kids would spend playing on it. (We were getting ready for summer with a 13-year-old, and I was starting to understand the desire of older kids for cavelike isolation in front of the computer.)  I pictured my husband’s spring freak out when he’d start worrying about the overgrown perennials and tuning up the lawn mower.

 

Right then and there, I thought, we should sell this place and simplify our life.  My husband was game.  We tried.  Quite simply, no one wanted it.  Could have been the lousy kitchen (which we’ve since remodeled.) Could have been our day wasn’t done here, living our country dream.

 

All spring and summer of 2006 we marketed the house, fixed up little annoying broken things, and noticed, with each passing week, what our little piece of land might look like to passers by.  This week, I would think, if those future buyers come, they’ll see the apple blossoms AND the lilacs.  By July, it was the day lilies and tiger lilies and queen Anne’s lace, I thought someone else might love.  By and by August the goldenrod and decorative grass with sand-colored seed pods, and yes, we had survived another summer here and fallen in love with the place again.  By early September, having moved around some bedrooms, made plans for a kitchen remodel, resigned ourselves to our driving into town life, and started back to school, I pulled into the driveway and felt the rush of good feeling that comes with knowing I’m home. 

 

So now, in 2008, we continue to dig into our soil (deep enough for bunkhouse posts and wide enough to replant perennials), making do with the weeds and unkempt beds, starting new projects, maintaining old ones, mostly turning a blind eye to the disrepair that more fussy homeowners would notice, because we simply don’t have the labor, the time, or the willpower to turn nature to our most ambitious visions while also nurturing those even more compelling little creatures we call our kids.

 

There are days I feel like George Bailey coming home to that impossible banister topper at the bottom of his staircase, the one he sometimes wanted to hurl at the wall on bad days at the office.  There are other days when I just refocus my vision, look at the colors, look at the gifts, take a break, and eventually get back to work, feeling the sun on my back, or at least its promise when the rain gets done watering this patchwork of earth where we are planted.

Summer, Partially Unplugged? June 8, 2008

 

Project Mom had this idea, those last few days of school, that she should just embrace her inner control freak, at least on a limited basis.  The big idea was to propose, first to the eldest, whose buy-in generally guarantees that the youngers will come along, a “common hour,” a few times a week this summer. This would be a time when at least the kids and I (since John works a lot), and possibly all five of us, would just agree to be together, doing whatever, just not wandering off to our separate corners of the house, “plugging in” to the computer, the phone, the TV, our books, magazines, my cookbooks, Brad’s legos, John’s bunkhouse ruminations. 

 

Last summer we spent a month in Ireland while I taught there.  The five of us lived in a tiny dorm with an unfathomably small kitchen, no TV or computer.  Many days we were out touring, or in the afternoons we took the bus (we also never drove) into the town of Galway and shopped, looked around, visited museums or sites.  Almost always we went together, the five us.  I won’t say it was always a picnic, or that we should strive to replicate such constant togetherness at home, but it was special.  It was, in fact, my favorite part of the trip, just the being together, being each other’s company. 

 

Without a radio, we sang together, loudly.  With few entertainments, we played individual (but side-by-side) games of solitaire and one-on-one scrabble.  We read the travel books and made plans. Sometimes we just talked.  Except for Brad, who wasn’t reading then, we also read a lot, old favorites the girls had brought along, or new-used books from Galway’s used book stores.  Ironically, only one of us (perpetually restless me) sometimes got bored.

 

The year that followed that trip took busy to a new level, especially with alternating work schedules for me and John.  But the weekend before school let out, the schedule vise grips about to release us, we gathered around a spot we had found to plant a tree and sprinkle some ashes in honor of our dear beloved dog, whom we lost to a hit and run accident just in front of our house a few months ago.  Our little ceremony of planting, sprinkling, and sharing memories seemed to bring us back from the pulls of the outside world that had tugged so hard all school year.  The little cherry tree heard all about the way April’s ears stood up in a lopsided way, how excited she got when she saw her food coming, and how she enjoyed licking lotion off any of our legs.  Smiles, tears, a little closure…

 

We ended the ceremony by piling into the van to go out for Mexican food, and on the way, the kids talked to each other in this particular way, not about anything special, but in a way that suggested there was nothing important between them, like they were, again, as in Ireland, a little kid subculture unto themselves, co-existing with their parents in our own little space.

 

A few days later, it hit me:  It might not be too much to ask, this summer, to develop the habit of that common hour, just maybe three times a week, and maybe not even starting off for a full hour.  My eldest, Allie, was game.  She also understood that John and I weren’t negotiating on a rule that would perhaps facilitate this:  as with last summer, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday are no TV/no computer days.  No kidding.  Those are the days I don’t have to wheedle, negotiate, toss out guilt trips about, get on my moral high horse, or, for that matter, listen to the same banter between Luke and Laureli on the Gilmore girls for the 30^th time.  I like Gilmore Girls, but I don’t want it in my auditory space every time I’m in the kitchen and not watching it.

 

Already, I managed to get my political junkie self through the primary season without cable TV, weighing my need to be in the know, and laugh at the Daily Show and Colbert, against my memory of the way my kids sang the jingles to unfamiliar TV commercials a lot last summer. (I can indulge my addiction on my laptop instead.)

 

But so far, there has been no need to plan our common hour beyond announcing the re-instatement of that no TV/no computer rule.  Yesterday, a non-electronic Saturday, the rain continued this week’s water rant, pouring down in buckets and drizzles.  Our newly green world with its mostly planted garden, its three of six posts set for the bunkhouse, and its pile of lumber awaiting that big project is now awash, saturated almost beyond my comprehension after days and days of rain. 

 

Last night, the power went out for over an hour.  The five of us happened to be lingering around the dinner table anyway, helping me make lists of things we wanted to do this summer, indoor fun, outdoor fun, helpful things to do around the house and property, community events to attend, things to do in town, etc.  All that thinking had prompted the younger kids, Sylvia and Brad, to bring out the old box of Sculpey clay and start shaping things.  Allie and I joined in.

 

And then the lights went out, right in the middle of a Beatles tune.  Just like a good blizzard, the rain plus power outage just sent us all into slow motion.  We all instinctively stayed within a fairly small radius of each other the rest of the evening, playing Skipbo by candlelight, Sylvia and Brad, trying out some yoga moves I taught them, taking turns playing the piano, singing from Beatles piano book, even trying to work a puzzle by flashlight.

 

The evening melted slowly away, a big long common hour stretching in and out of darkness as the sky experimented with yellows, greens, greys, and finally darkness laden with persistent rain.  The girls agreed to their younger brother’s excited request to have an all-kid sleep-out in the family room.  He had cleaned up all his Legos in honor, in hopes, of their company.   After snuggling on the living room floor together for half an hour, John and I finally drifted off to bed to listen to the rain and go to sleep, and the kids did the same.

 

It was a good start to doing and being.

Project Mom Contemplates Summer with Three Big Kids June 7, 2008

 

After more than a month of publicly celebrating the many, many accomplishment’s of this town’s youth, from choir and orchestra concerts to piano recitals to picture day for second-grade soccer, school-wide kid performances for Earth Day, and other people’s graduations, my children made their way home from their respective schools yesterday (three schools, three grades) laden with their own personal papers, report cards, and art projects, unceremoniously dumped inside the front door.

 

School’s out for summer, and around here, there’s always a radio station that allows Alice Cooper’s rebellious, triumphant anthem to ring out as the school buses roll home.

 

It’s summer!  Oh my god!  Long, languid hours playing in the kiddie pool in the back yard, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, arranging neatly structured playdates, slathering sunblock onto little bodies, learning to ride bikes up and down the long driveway.

 

But wait!  That was five years ago.  Now, with my kids ages 15, 11, and 8, summer brings me very mixed feelings.  As a professor, I scramble to complete work projects before I no longer have the kids in school all day and I become mini-van mama on the way to drivers’ ed., voice lessons, and basketball “camp” at the Y.  As a mom, I scramble to devise rules about TV and computer time, squaring off for three months of skirmishes

 

Meanwhile, the grass on our 2 ½ acres has been growing to the tune of 1.5 mows per week, I’m trying to plant the garden in fits and starts (fighting the burdock and creeping charlie every step of the way), and my husband, generally not known for multi-tasking and taking on crazily ambitious projects, has decided to start biking to work (50 minutes each way) and building a “bunkhouse” (2 stories!) for the kids at night.  It’s so enormous (still on paper—not in actuality yet) that one of my friends has suggested his secret plan is for the kids to live out there.  Considering he actually bought insulation, you’ve got to wonder. 

 

Which begs the question, even though we DO have the three most wonderful kids in the world, how exactly will we live with them this summer?  And does the end of the school-year craziness mean a new kind of craziness at home?  After all, this year we transitioned one kid to high school (Stress! Homework! Worries about getting into a good college!) another to middle school (New friends! Stress! Adolescence!  Need I say more?) and a third to second grade (Two non-overlapping teachers! Two student teachers! Reading struggles! Friend struggles!) Shouldn’t my husband and I be enjoying gin and tonics on the back patio every night while the kids happily explore the 2 ½ acres, finding new kinds of bugs and sitting under shady trees reading library books?

 

I’ve been a mother for almost 16 years.  One thing I know:  the kids always change faster than I can.  Each season brings its rituals and memories from last summer/fall/winter/spring, but everything that is old is new again.

 

I am truly excited about the kids’ opportunities to do things they love this summer, now that they all have some cool interests of their own.  There’s a summer painting and drawing class in Minneapolis and an environmental leadership training for our eldest, sports and nature activities for our youngest, and choir camps, voice lessons, and canoeing for our eleven-year-old:  all this represents our highest activity level ever, and I feel like I’m trying on a suburban soccer mom personae just listing this stuff.

 

As in previous summers, I still also look forward to the days we’ll go to garage sales, hang out at the beach by the river, read books out loud to one another, pack picnics for daily outings, stack up 40 books and videos to take home from each library visit, and share visits with family and friends. I look forward to long conversations with each of them, to not being the homework police, to eating dinner on the patio.

 

And yet, the lack of structure in my own life, the gearing up for communal living, rather than babysitting, scares me.  Included in this is the weird correspondence of their “down time” with mine.  I work my hiney off throughout the academic year, and still have many projects, some of which they pay me money for, to do during the summer.  Yet I have no work routine in which I can envision doing them. 

 

More importantly, really, is the way summer appears at least to promise me time to read what I want, get up early and contemplate my flower garden with a cup of tea for as long as I want, dream some new dreams, write for joy, and cook my favorite dishes, even though most of them are not enjoyed by my children.  Will there really be time for all this, this summer?  We always hope for so much for summer, which is probably why, whenever you ask someone how her summer’s going, she says “Too fast…”

 

This summer I want to explore—while trying to live—the balance between doing and being while mothering three kids who are no longer babies.  My kids may not want to be my project.  Based on what they’ve been up to in their limited free time in the last month of school, it appears that THEIR chosen project, would be endless viewings of Gilmore Girls and Gilligan’s Island episodes on DVD.  But they’re stuck with me:  project Mom, must-enrich-their lives Mom, just-want-to-figure-out-a-way-to-be-with-them-now-Mom.  They no longer need me structuring everything, applying their sunblock, or even fixing their lunches (boxed macaroni and cheese would be just fine, thank you Mom). But when we can stop the pushing and pulling in all these different directions, we all really like one another, and it is a privilege to contemplate being and doing with these three people, and occasionally their dad, all summer long.

 

So I started this blog, an excuse to write about my maternal life beyond my private journal.  I hope it can serve as a conduit between ideas to enhance this summer’s maternal “project” (the whole thing) and little projects, and the joy of writing.  As an inveterate journal writer, I write to reflect, to live, to savor experiences. It’s all part of the same package.  Writing is doing and being at once.  Writing in conversation with anyone interested in reading this might be even more than that.  

 

This summer more than ever I have a sense of the fleeting time to live this particular maternal life with these three kids, as my eldest will begin her last summer at home, fully ours, not yet sprung the nest into college, just three years from now.  All the more reason to make the best of it, to live it, write it, dive into it deep, remember the joys each night before I go to bed, and make it last.  Maybe if the kids would ever wake up, on this, the first Saturday of summer, we could get started, thinks Project Mom.  Oh, but the joy of spending time alone with my writing—that is the being too.