Do we all have exaggerated hopes for the summer, or is it more true of teachers who see stretched before them three months of what looks like it could be freedom? Is it writers, too, planners of special two-week vacations and organizers of family reunions? Is it all of us?
Well, like many of us, my plans for the summer proved too ambitious, and basically, too planned. One of the best laid plans that didn’t happen was writing. And writing about the kids and the mother’s plans with them? Well, there were many things, not least of which the kids, conspiring against that plan.
Maybe more confident writers would say that I am making excuses, but here’s my explanation (excuse): it proved hard, nearly impossible, to fit writing into my life this summer. I guess none of us ever knows “where the summer went,” but I do know that there were few open spaces in the day, and few openings in my mind for a thought that I could carry to its conclusion.
The rhythm of mother days in the summer is always nearly un-rhythmic by nature, with the unpredictable demands of kids who feel their freedom co-existing uneasily with the bizarre schedules that still exist. Kids want to stay up late, but Dad has to get up at 5:00 for work and Mom wakes up early to take care of work e-mail, pull some weeds in the garden, or just catch her breath for the day. And summer “enrichment” activities run on entirely different schedules than school, requiring a planning marathon each day for the active month of June and well into July this year.
Art in the middle of all this? Art lost out in its attempt to imitate life because life pulled me around by the ears a lot of this summer. I did go, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, and found a lot of joy along the way, even as I was reminded that freedom was not mine to claim very much of this particular season and era in my life.
I went where I was needed, transporting kids to drivers’ ed, nature day camp, choir, and more, helping John with the treehouse project that took over the summer while also making something beautiful, solid, and constructed with tender care.
We hosted John’s family from around the world for seven days at our house, requiring massive planning from the one of us adults who was still pretty much in tune with the refrigerator and its contents, which would need to feed 21 people. I had a great time, but my life was pretty well scripted for being there for everybody, most waking hours, cooking, visiting, offering up fresh sheets for the guests. The following weekend, at our long-planned sweet 16 party for Allie and her childhood friends, I didn’t host, but it was more of the same, visiting, chatting, tea in the morning, wine at night, and too much food. All summer long, I spent a lot of time with people. I helped. I enriched, and I pointedly told my children on the last day of the last educational event this summer (intensive drawing and painting class for one ended about the same time as choir retreat #2), “I’ve enriched you. It’s official!”
Next line (unspoken): it’s time for you to go back to school because I’m worn out from enriching, possibly drained of the vital minerals I need to make anything grow in my own overused soil. And while I’m on the subject of overused, I haven’t been getting enough work done, so when school does start again, and even before that, I’ve discovered, the piles of work will be staggering, and I’ll be trying to scale them, or climb out from under them. I’m not sure which is the better metaphor here.
I heard a story about the famous short story writer Alice Munro on the radio not too long ago. She claimed she wrote short stories because as a mother, she felt that short stories were all that she could finish. It was too hard to sustain attention for any one project for one length of time. I certainly know what she means. For me, the most tangible completion of my summer is not any writing, though writing is the art that draws me, that animates my imagination, that calls me to it even as I often have to say no, not tonight, I am too tired and I don’t trust myself to say anything beautiful, even when my life is beautiful and the world is bursting with color, abundance, and possibility.
No, the tangible creation of the summer was not words, or at least not very many, but the garden. Each elegant dark purple eggplant grows every day, 15 more tomatoes become red, and I go to the cherry tomato plant just to snack in the sun. I’ve never grown cauliflower before, and it’s a joy to watch it expand in within its silvery-green wrapping. I watch like a proud mother as my baby butternut squash grow up and turn into big-kid squash, getting ready for me to turn them into luscious curried squash soup.
Yes, I sometimes felt more in synch with the garden than with the kids, because what happened is that they quickly and in three very different ways are becoming so much their own people now. It’s as it should be, but sometimes it all leaves me so flustered and confused. I can’t shape their rhythms to mine the way I used to when they were babies, toddlers, and young school-agers. I can’t just say, let’s everyone go to the beach now (even if there were lots of days where there was time to go to the beach) because they’re in the middle of their own whims, projects, even worries sometimes (drivers’ ed. test, pre-academic year homework now that August is here.) And in the meantime, I’ve been fighting an uphill battle trying to find some time to go get my work done back at the office.
But yesterday, I skipped out of some stuff at work, part of the beginning of the year hoopla, and I came home at lunch time and said it, “Let’s go to the beach.” I couldn’t get total buy-in. Allie, my eldest, couldn’t resist the opportunity for peace and quiet at home while OTHER people went to the beach. But my two younger kids, and “my fourth child,” who sometimes practically lives here for awhile (and our kids sometimes live at her house), went to the beach with me. We swam, ate ice cream, played catch, absorbed lots of sun and grew more freckles.
And last weekend, after a summer of hosting, driving, connecting with our far-flung families and friends, just the five of us got away, just a couple hours south to a slightly cheesy campground. We rented a cabin. We played badminton and mini golf. John tossed Brad in the air in the pool over and over again. I read a bunch of Garrison Keillor’s Pretty Good Jokes and we all laughed. Allie read hours and hours of book of 4 of Harry Potter to her siblings. We went to a beautiful beach and the kids swam while I went for a treacherous run, thinking of all the running I’ve done on all my little trips, always carving out a little trail for myself, always finding some space in my head. I remember thinking, “I like where my mind is now.” It was everywhere, seeing things I couldn’t see when sitting still, solving problems, imagining things I could write about if I ever got to focus. If I often can’t find that mind in the midst of my summer living, I can at least find her when I run, and for that I’m thankful. It’s that distance from the people, obligations, joyous human connections that make up my life, it’s the distance that helps me see and celebrate all that.
Thankfully, sometimes, too, we celebrate together. A couple years ago, we started doing monthly celebrations, little toasts of whatever we were drinking (even if we’re all just sipping ice water) to each family member for something we’ve noticed that s/he should be proud of. We did that on vacation, at our favorite kitschy restaurant in that part of the state, where we go for breakfast when we’re in town, dining in the presence of many rough-hewn wooden animal sculptures. We all found plenty to celebrate. We had all grown this summer, and we all toasted one another, even Mom, whose accomplishments this summer mainly involved serving others.
Then on our last night of vacation, we relived the summer in one of my newly invented family rituals. I’d found tea light candles at a huge discount the week before, so I brought them along on our trip. We laid out all the candles on the picnic table and everyone lit a candle for a summer memory. The wind and the over-eager eight-year-old contributed to the extinguishment of many of our first round, so we came up with more. “For both our birthday parties”, “For visiting with the cousins”, “For choir camp”, “For doing a cannonball in the pool”, “For every long, beautiful summer run I took”, “for time with my friends at the sweet 16 party”, “for family visits that reconnected us with our loved ones”, “for blueberry picking,”… It went on and on. “For right here and now,” John said, “the best of the summer.”
For the adults, I believe (speaking for myself and extrapolating for John), the hard stuff had been weighing on our minds: the summer’s frustrations, the family tensions and arguments, the anxiety about fall (more demanding schedules and not enough money) when we hadn’t quite recharged our batteries this summer. But ceremony and real connections make you forget that, allow you to live in your best moments, even re-live them a little bit, and ask no more for now.
Our little lighting ceremony brought out the joys that we were almost too busy to savor these past three months, and our fond memories came together as we sat around that little picnic table and lit candles. We created something larger than ourselves.
Summer always seems to froth and bubble over during its intense and well-lit days, but at night, small illuminations of stars and candles and quiet breezes remind you of the riches as you let the day go. And as it all starts to end, those three months that held out a promise of freedom but offered something a little different, a little different each year, become more clear in the diminished light, in the fading warmth and early fall chill of a late-August night.
