At some point, living with your children becomes more like living in a messy and sometimes testy commune than like “raising a family.” The older kids set the standards of jockeying for greater autonomy, freer use of space, time, and resources, often with only token assurances that they will exercise greater responsibility. And the younger set follows, negotiating what didn’t used to be negotiable (yes, you WILL take a shower, yes you WILL put the laundry away now…)
The cabinets are constantly raided for anything remotely resembling junk food. When it’s hard to find, throwing your head back to ingest the powdered sweetness of hot chocolate mix will do. Our “open concept” house has no refuge for quiet-hungry me, as kids bombard me on their four “electronics are acceptable in moderation” (big joke) days, with the noise of movies, computer games, and the few TV shows they own, with their music in the kitchen, with phone conversations carried out—on speaker phone for greater all-around intensity—while walking from one end of the house to another.
Where is a mother to go? And when? Bedtimes slip towards 11:00, arguments over whether chores have to be done NOW, whether lights need to be turned off NOW overwhelm me. This is not easy. Embracing my inner control freak was a bad idea. I have lost control.
Everywhere is excess, abundance. The flower garden that gave me so much joy in June is a riot of weeds, relieved, thankfully, by the sunny faces of daisies that just won’t let go of their optimism. They’re trying to inspire me, I think. The vegetable garden is even worse, though there was this one peaceful evening about a week ago, when I told all the kids they needed to help me weed for just 15 minutes. It was a hiatus, a little oasis in the chaos and the tug of all of us in different directions. Nobody counted the minutes.
“What’s this plant, Mom?” “Look at these worms!” “Oh, I found some raspberries.” “Which ones are the green beans again?” They all worked pretty hard, but in kind of an unhurried, pleasant way. The task wasn’t that intimidating when done together. They wouldn’t have admitted it, but they liked being outside in the garden, with each other, with me. I’ll have to try that again. It gets pretty lonely when you’re undertaking so much without help, a problem compounded this year by John’s focus on the never-ending treehouse.
The irony of it all makes me crazy: though it’s true that we don’t encourage visits to the treehouse right now, since it’s still a semi-dangerous construction site, it would be fair to say the kids have shown little interest in it, at least as is. Yet John works on. Meanwhile, I take over the mowing of a lawn that used to have kids and dogs frolicking on it, and now just looks like a crazy waste of grass, gasoline-induced lawn mower pollution and my precious labor.
The only thing to do is to use what I have, make it work, love my family even when they make me crazy and enjoy the ride. Last night I couldn’t sleep. I went out to the back porch and took in a million stars, wandered through the still-smiling daisies, and looked around our spread-out country neighborhood from my quiet front porch swing perch.
The night pared the picture of my little place on planet earth down to something manageable, since I could only see a little bit, and there were no sounds of children, husband, pets, electronics, or the phone that ties me to the daily challenge of scheduling our summer days, which are a crazy patchwork of structure and lack of structure, held together by me.
I was comforted by my neighbor’s endearing habit of keeping lights on all the time, here in the summer evenings well-enough lit by moon and stars. He lives in the country, but seems just a little afraid of the dark. That light, perhaps, shows just enough, provides an anchor, reminds us that when the sun comes out everything will be back, in Technicolor, in abundance, and somehow, we’ll spin through the colors and create, or be created by, another crazy day.
There it all was: a light against the chaos, the daisies smiling hopefully and with a luminescent white in the dark, unconcerned about the weeds, hoping to out-compete them anyway, or just share their space, the stars reminding me they’re always there, and little me, alone at last, with a ripe summer peach and pungent cheese for a midnight snack, and a sigh.
