What the hell was I thinking?

People, as the end of school draws near, as homework and the elusive treasures that are matching socks have become familial albatrosses that make me want to run away at least once a day, I am both thankful and terrified. What were Tom and I thinking when we decided to let the kids go to sleepaway camp for six weeks? 

I know what we were thinking. Camp would be: an incredible opportunity for growth, independence, adventure, and the acquisition of new skills that I'd rather not teach (see: emergency shelter construction and axemanship, among others); a complete electronics detox as there is no electricity at camp save for the kitchen; a new context in all ways; a summer spent mucking around outside with eighty other boys. And lord, it was their idea!

And I still maintain that for Jack and Ol, camp will be a rare truffle.

"Six weeks?!" everyone exclaims.

"No visiting day?"
"No phone calls?"
"Wow- are you beyond excited? How will you spend that time? You and Tom must be THRILLED."

We are thrilled. We look forward to reacquainting ourselves as a couple with relatively little in the way of responsibility and schedule. We're going to take our first trip abroad together sans kids since before Jack was born nearly twelve years ago. All of that is fantastic.

But what is becoming abundantly clear is that I did NOT really consider what the boys going to camp meant for me. And as the time to head to Maine draws near, I feel a ludicrous push and pull of sorts: desperate to throw the undersized catch back out to sea and immediately desperate to reel it in again because honestly? It's adorable. 

In the ways families do at the end of a holiday or the last week of summer or, as it were, the last month of school. we're all fritzing out right now. I could literally not care one bit of one iota about anyone's homework anymore. So, while it incenses me that the kids aren't much motivated for it at this point (because that means I have to nag them to do it), I can hardly blame them. 

This afternoon, they were bordering on batshit nuts over rewriting a story in Mandarin and drafting an essay about colonial-era cooks. I excused Ol to go ride his bike, and an hour later after, admittedly, very calmly and capably completing his math homework, Jack went out to join. They teamed up with the girls next door to run a lemonade stand and came in for dinner, hot and sweaty, at twilight. Meanwhile, I cooked their dinner, enjoyed a glass of wine, and voraciously read some Patrick Melrose. It was divine. Reel in the adorable small fry.

And then, as dinner wrapped, it wasn't. OMG, cast the line as far as you can. All the way to Maine if possible! I'm telling y'all, I just quit. I most definitely yelled and I refused to get off the couch and away from my book. I refused to discuss colonial cooks for even one more second and for petes sakes, people, I DO NOT KNOW Mandarin. Not my wheelhouse. NOT.

I'm left, tonight, tired and vexed. Earlier, as I finalized our plans for bringing the kids to camp next month, my heart was pounding out of my chest. What if our beloved morning snuggle tradition ceases to happen after six weeks off? How will I tolerate not hearing my boys' voices for six weeks? (Apparently if your child celebrates a birthday during camp, you can talk briefly that day. Amen for Jack being July 4.) I mean, I don't go five days without talking to MY mom, and I'm 42 years old. 

What does it mean to have spent twelve years constellating around two bright starts and then have them go dark for a short while? In theory it sounds fantastic. But in practice? I'm starting to wonder. 

This evening, pissed to the nines and tired as get-out after a random bout of insomnia last night (stress anyone?), I thought about how very much I could use some real downtime. Not a night, not a weekend, not even a week. Some real, extended time to breathe and sleep and not be interrupted ad nauseum. To read a whole book in one sitting if I want. To garden without having to set an alarm to run carpool. To not for one spot of time think about colonial cooks or butts or feeding forever-starving little mouths, even if they're the most perfect mouths ever. 

I just checked on the boys. They are asleep, their foreheads sweaty, their lips rosy. They are finally quiet and still, and my eyes pricked with hot tears for how I will miss them and their silliness and their snuggles. I believe this summer will likely be a grand learning experience for all of us, one it seems I might need. For they aren't growing younger and sooner than the amount of time I've had them with me, they'll go. Off into the world, returning less and less as children who grow into adults tend to do. 

So I guess what I'm feeling is the first big break. The first tug that really pulls the line between us taut, straining at both ends, in opposite directions. It's harder than I expected. 

Storms and memories

I'm on my couch, legs out long across it, Percy snoring at my knees. The back door is open, and I've propped the screen door ajar in case Nutmeg wants to come back in. Through a wall of windows, I see my neighbor's dogwood leaning over the corner of my deck luxuriously. It is pregnant with blooms and is most welcome.

There is a rustling in the air, a fuzzy sound that carries with it a hint of breeze. The leaves of my jalapeño plant are waving ever so slightly while the cooked-noodle arms of the next-door willow tremble on a different current. 

Though the skies are the gray blues and whites of dusk, the thinnest veil of rain started staining the deck a darker hue. Now, it's stopped, and the wood looks splotchy. Faintly, far, far in the distance, thunder rumbles inconsistently. 

I hope it comes our way. I hope the skies open and release their watery savings. I hope the thunder roars until it's hoarse. I hope the lightning strikes again and again and again, like so many exclamation points.

The ricotta on the stove hisses just a bit, reminding me that it's almost past time to remove the pot from the heat below it. I take leave from Percy and hurry to run a knife around the rim where cheese meets steel, loosing the curds, before putting things on a back burner to rest and come together. 

I wish I'd made it earlier, so that I could stir some into hot pasta with fresh sorrel and a grate of nutmeg. That's a dish that wouldn't excite Tom, and since he's in Boston, now's the time. Tomorrow. The kids and I watched Jurassic Park (well, Jack played Stack the States and Operation Math; bless his heart.), and I made them ice cream sundaes, so the ricotta had to wait. 

Earlier, I saw two toddlers in a doublewide stroller. They watched, mouths agape, eyes wide, at some construction being done on Mass Ave. Behind them, a caregiver waited patiently. How many times did I take my boys to watch dump trucks and dozers and cranes? How many times did I glance around furtively before letting them climb atop the giant bucket of a parked digger?

I smiled, and drove on, heading to school to take pictures for J's class. End-of-year headshots, for a "look how much they've grown" perspective. I arrived a bit early, during math, and waited happily on the sidelines.

Twenty-two kids sat on the rug staring up at one of their teachers as she, a million months pregnant and amazing, made math come alive. Hands shot up, guesses were proffered, the differences between a prism and pyramid made simply clear. 

One girl pulled her mane of hair into a ponytail, wrapping it with a band in a practiced way. When did she learn to do that? 'Vertices' and 'congruent' and 'pentagonal' flew confidently from the kids' mouths. When did they master this sort of language? Weren't these children just in doublewides staring at construction sites and zoo animals as doting adults pushed and paused and explained?

J turned around briefly and gave me a smile. "I love you," I knew he was thinking. "I love you, too," I thought back. "When did you get so big?" 

His neck is starting to slope into young-man shoulders, his legs are sturdy and dense even though he is so slender. It's as if the baby vanishes from the outside in, and these new solid-state limbs confirm my suspicion that J is a tot no more. In any way.

It's dark outside now, and the storm I'd hoped for remains nothing but a whisper in the wind. I need to drain the ricotta and eat some dinner and get to bed. And I will. But I'll keep listening, should the skies part, and attempting to sear into my brain memories of the boys, as they were and are.

Goodbye, Bob

Recently, the boys and I binge-watched the original three Indiana Jones movies. I was as certain as one can be about an unknown, that they'd love Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I was right. Not halfway through, I could tell Jack was feeling the burn to don clothing that would transfigure him into Indy. When he gets this itch to ape, he starts pacing casually, as if feeling out and processing a nascent drive before acting on it. Eyes still glued to the screen and whatever character he wishes to become, he'll plunge a deft hand into our volcanic costume bin, rustle around quickly and then withdraw it with a prize. He's rather like a successful version of that money-sucking game at any arcade where the grappling hook looks sure to grab the big-eyed stuffed prairie dog but then drops it, without fail, just before reaching the shoot which would gift it to the desperately waiting child. Jack plucked a handsome, brown-felt cowboy hat, a relic from his Cowboy Phase, from the costume bin and was briefly sated. But his morph wasn't complete enough, so we paused the film while he scampered quickly up to his closet. From the myriad offerings, he constructed a good likeness in less than four minutes. The hat is a dead ringer for Indy's, and khaki pants, a white button-down and a couple belts looped across his chest and around his waist served as solid substitutes for the rest of Jones' rugged explorer attire.

We resumed the show, and nestled between my sons, I felt a profound sense of gratitude that we were not watching Bob the Builder. Or Blues Clues or Dinosaur Train though those were infinitely more tolerable than BtheB.

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Bob and his crew always drove me nuts. It seemed abundantly clear that Bob and Wendy, his office manager, were suffering from extreme yet undisclosed desire for each other. I mean, does anyone without acute sexual frustration sing-song their greetings, conversations and farewells with such perky intensity? I guess Bob's cat, the oddly-named Pilchard, was the recipient of all this unrequited love. A weird claymation dynamic I tell you!

Meanwhile, Bob's machines were one transmogrified neurosis after another. Scoop, for example, was a control freak backhoe in serious need of both power and praise to feed his many insecurities. Dizzy (cement mixer), Lofty (mobile crane truck) and Roley (yup, steamroller)...the list goes in. In any given episode, one of them went nuts, challenged the others with the array of issues it presented, and ultimately won back those it had alienated. Don't even get me started on Jana von Strudel, that yodeling nitwit who taught Roley to yodel and "the hills were alive..."

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The boys loved that show, but it was all nails on a chalkboard to me. Laughing with them as we cheered Indy's hijinks last weekend, I realized how much fun it is when you start to enjoy watching and reading and doing some of the same things as your kids.

Despite my dislike of Bob, I did my time with him. I built construction zones, bought hardhats, gamely wore tool belts, even made these (really time-consuming) Oliver the Builder birthday invitations (this is an incomplete one as I did make a tool belt and tools for Bob to wear). These were a labor of love, but they are cute, aren't they!?

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And while I look back on those years with complete and loving fondness, I don't actually miss them. I was there. Boy was I there.

Tom and the boys jumped into film #2, my feeling being that The Temple of Doom is no good at all and should go the way of Bob the Builder. I mean, that kid Shorty makes me want to jump off a bridge screaming with glee that I'm leaving him behind, and Kate Capshaw is just god-awful.

The series redeems itself with The Last Crusade not least because in addition to the Harrison Ford eye candy, we are also gifted with a bonus treat in the form of Sean Connery. What handsome men. Mon dieu! By the time we rolled tape on this last film, Jack had fashioned one whip each for himself and Oliver, out of rubber bands and dried-out markers and duct tape and yarn. They practiced cracking them towards one another and later around tree branches, chair legs, door knobs and shower curtain rods.

With amused pride, I watched Jack work and Oliver watching him, mouth agape with wonder and admiration. I could see Ol thinking, "I have such a cool big brother!" and I could tell that Jack was ruffled with pride, both because of his own ability and also our esteem.

They are both very creative, imaginative children, but Oliver is more risk-averse in expressing that than is Jack. It is fascinating and fun to watch them become more and more their own people every day. And while I'm sad that at some point I won't be able to cup Ol's perfect tush in one hand anymore and that (purportedly) Jack will no longer want to kiss and tell me he loves me publicly, I enjoy these capable, engaging young people as they are now (see below), with nothing but the most affectionate sweet memories of how they once were.

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