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.