Summer ends

I did start to write about the triathlon I did a week and a half ago, but it's been very very hard to find time to write anything this summer.  Writing is a thing that I feel I ought to attempt to do with some sort of discipline, something like the way I run, but it also feels self-indulgent when there are children and a messy house and places to go.  But today is rainy, so no one is in a hurry to go anywhere.  I've let the kids watch TV for far too long.  It's the last day of summer, and I am feeling OK with being all manners of self-indulgent.  I've already had a slice of zucchini/carrot/ginger bread this morning.  Just because it was there.  And today I am looking ahead toward days of renewed structure and feel the need to mark the occassion and meditate upon it.

In the past, I've been excited for Adam as he starts a new year, but mostly I've been weepy and nostalgic that my baby is grown up and going off into the world without me, to learn how to be something other than mine.  He goes off and does and learns things that I am not at all a part of, both because I cannot be and because he would not choose me to be.  As the bus drives away with my boy, I miss him.  Our house feels funny.  The day feels sort of empty.

But this year, except for just now as I wrote that and started to tear up, I have been looking forward to school starting up again, even though it means that my boy will ride off on a bus and even my little girl will walk into a school building without me twice a week.  I haven't looked forward to the starting of school this much since I was a little kid.

I used to secretly disdain mothers who said things like that or who would say things like "how many days until school starts?"  I will now publicly apologize for my secret thoughts.  I see now that there might have been something more going on than just some lazy desire for someone else to take over the job of raising a child.  I do not believe myself to be lazy.  I do not want someone else to raise my child.  But I do want him to go off to school.

I think what's happening here is similar to how we as people deal with the change in the seasons: the first snow is beautiful and exciting, but by early March, we cannot wait for it to melt.  By August we are more irritable about the mosquitos and the need for a heat index.  We are ready to tun off the air conditioning and love the occassional whiff of autumn on the breeze; we are enchanted by the red appearing on the apples and think wearing a sweater would be lovely.  So too with family life.  We had a great time spending all day every day together: going to swimming lessons, camping, travelling, having picnics in the park, playing with toys for endless hours with no concern for the clock, but now it is time for something else.  The routine we needed a break from in June now seems like a break from the every-day-is-different chaos of summer.I look at our September calendar, already stuffed to bursting with the start-up of school (we have back-to-it events [all involving food: a corn boil and two ice cream socials] on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday) and park district classes and cub scouts and soccer and PTO stuff and Doug's high school stuff and church classes, and while a part of me inhales sharply, braces myself, and thinks, "here we go again," another part of me sort of grins: it's good stuff.  It will be fun.  We will learn and grow and be with our community.  It's energizing.  This craziness coming up is why we come back from vacation at all.  It is how we survive the decreasing hours of daylight and the eventual death of the over-abundant cucumber plants.  We are not busy against our wills but because there are just so many things worth doing.  School is one of them.  I loved school, and I want my children to have that same transformative experience.  I am happy for them.

I suppose it may also be possible that I have learned from experience.  One can always hope, right?  Yes, my son has a whole life away from me at school, but then he comes home in the early afternoon, and I get to be his mom still.  Someday he will go off and not come back.  Some day he will move out.  He might get married.  He might get a job far away.  He might just realize that his mom is a wacky and intense person.  But for now, he is just going to second grade, and he'll bring his homework back for me to force him to complete.  I'll still be the one who packs his lunch and who deals with his allergies.  I'll still be the one who takes him to soccer practice and to play dates.  I'll be the one to whom he will show his lego creations and read funny poems and jokes.  I'll be the one who sets bedtime.  And those hours while he's at school?  Well let's just say that he and his sister will not be bickering and whining, the mosquito equivalent in the domestic weather of August.

So this morning I sat here and wrote, and my kids watched PBS kids for over an hour (gasp) and are now happily playing in their rooms, one huming and one whistling, one of them still in pajamas as we approach lunchtime.  It's storming, so we are blowing off the errands we maybe ought to do because today we can still do that.  Tomorrow our busy lives resume, and I may feel a little weepy as my boy drives off on the bus.  But then we have a lot of things we need to get done and not many hours before we have to be here for when he gets back off the bus.