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where we are slowed down by searching for pacifiers, sweeping beach sand out of the house, and figuring out what to do with the eighteen zucchinis we picked this morning.
I have a handful of essays that are simmering away on the back burner, but none of them are quite ready yet. Instead, I thought I’d give you a glimpse of life lately, plus a peek inside my brain (including pictures!) à la a blog post from the early aughts.
In a grocery store parking lot the other day, I saw a baby maple tree whose leaves were turning red, and I made the sign of the cross at it.
We are tiptoeing into the last third of summer, all afraid to scare it away. In my family, we are in what I call the Post-Baseball-Season Vacuum, where the day after the final out is called, we are suddenly eating dinner at a normal time like normal people who haven’t consumed their body weight in concession stand hot dogs between the hours of 4-9 p.m. for the prior three months. This is the time of year when I kick into summer overdrive and pester my family to come with me to the beach, the creek, the pool, to paddle board and kayak and bask in the sun like lizards. Quick, I tell them, the water will be frozen soon. We must SAVOR! I get desperate like the late-summer wasps as I witness the extinction burst of the season in real time. I sit outside at nights and swat off the mosquitos so I can listen to the chorus of crickets. I speak encouragingly to my growing cucumbers and spend literal minutes inhaling the tomato plants. I eat an alarming amount of zucchini like it will help me ward off the fish-underbelly white coming for my tanned forearms in just a few months’ time.
Recently I joked that with my kids at ages 14, 12, and 10, and me at 43, our household is a hot mess of hormones. Thoughts and prayers for Eric and the dog.
My kids are going through it, and why did none of you warn me that I would carry every single thing they’re feeling and experiencing in that weird space behind my sternum? One kid hit their first home run. One kid got rocked while pitching as the batter they faced sent a grand slam over the fence in the last inning of a tied playoff game. One kid won a tournament championship. One kid didn’t get a speaking part in the play when all their friends did. One kid made a new friend. One kid feels left out. One kid wants a phone more than oxygen. One kid learned to do a front flip off the diving board. All of them occasionally address me as bruh. No one ever wants to do any chores.
Last week, the air quality in Minneapolis was some of the worst in the world as the smoke from the raging fires up north made its way to our skies. Our neighbors’ houses across the street were shrouded by an unnatural haze, the lack of clarity turning the sun into a neon-orange button sewn into a dimensionless gray sky and providing me a glass-darkly metaphor for the coming year.
We are staring into a bevy of unknowns.
Because, for the first time, all my kids will be going to school.
I don’t talk about it a whole lot here, but for the last eight years, I’ve homeschooled my kids, a choice that continues to surprise no one more than me, even after close to a decade. Before anyone heads to the comment section to tell me why I’m very wrong or very right, let’s get the disclaimer out of the way: I have attended or taught at almost every kind of school system - charter, private, Christian, public, homeschool. Each system has wonderful and terrible things about it, and what I believe most strongly is that every family gets to choose what works best for them, no judgment.
I know, in my bones, that the choice to move my kids to school this year is the right one. It came after a lot of thought and prayer and tears and forcing my closest friends to join me on a zoom call at 7 a.m. last spring in an attempt to accommodate a vast array of time zones so they could offer advice after reading my six typed pages of pro/con indecision, plus a color-coded spreadsheet. Eric and I have talked about the factors ad nauseam. There is, as much as my anxious bowels can give me, a sense of peace about this change. In many ways, it feels like the right time…for me and for them.
But, you know, they’re my babies, and what do you mean, they’re going to be gone for 8+ hours and I won’t know what’s happening to them every single minute of every day? What do you mean they might get bullied? What do you mean the IEP might not be honored? What do mean I have to pry my bony fingers off controlling every single aspect of their education? What do you mean I might have to clean out a moldy lunch box?
But what if it’s so good? my friends have reminded me.
What if they meet their best friend or figure out they actually love biology or learn resilience or find their voices? What if they make the team or get a glimpse of their future or meet the teacher they’ll still think about in their forties?
I try to peer through the haze to take it all in.
As for me, I’ll be home, sans kids, for the first time in 14 years. I do not know what the future holds beyond the sabbatical I’ve requested to spend the next four months clearing out the detritus of the last decade from every corner of our house and doing a long-overdue deep clean while I tear through a backlog of audiobooks. (I have been pricing out dumpster rentals.) I plan to June Cleaver my way through September and October, trying to be the most present mother I can (with snacks!) to help doula my kids through this major transition. I hope to sit in silence here and there, under the dog’s doleful gaze, as we both make peace with a quiet house.
I hope to give some time and attention to the writing ideas that have been tugging at my sleeve all summer while I’ve swatted them away with a gentle Not now, darlings, mommy needs to figure out how to to get the kids signed up for bussing! I hope to talk to more groups about the mother-love of God. I hope to finish a few half-baked essays that have been squatting in my google drive for way too long. I think about seminary and learning Hebrew and a degree in immigration law. I would also love to get a job because our grocery bill has begun to rival the combined GDP of several developing nations. I worry how we’ll pay for college and shoeing everyone’s growing feet and those lemon pepper chickpea crisps from Costco that I can’t lay off of.
Early yesterday morning, awake once again with the rising sea levels of cortisol in my body, I sat on the front steps in the cleared air as the restored sun peeked over the backyard trees of the houses across the street. The dog flumped beside me on the cool concrete, emitting a soft growl of either dominance or jealousy at each dog strolling by on an early morning walk. I watch the annual pollinator party that happens among our front-yard alliums and the welcomed invasion of milkweed - bees buzzed on happiness, the occasional butterfly landing to gulp the sustenance.
The world’s a huge stockpile of God-wonders and God-thoughts, wrote David in Psalm 40.*
The world is charged with the grandeur of God, wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, nearly 2,000 years later.
Both of them eventually getting around to telling us to listen and look.
So I am looking and listening even while I worry about forests on fire and lettuce parasites and data centers and if my kids will have anyone to sit with at lunch and wonder what to do with my life. I am listening to the buzzing bumble bees and the bluejays calling out the directions south and the triumphal battle cries coming from across the table as my oldest finally beats me in Scrabble. I am listening to the wind blow the air clear, the quiet relief of the trees, the snapping of our beach towels drying in the sun. I am looking at the snozzcumber-sized zucchinis lining my counter, prolific in ways my word count has been dreaming of this summer. I am looking at the way my kayak paddle moves through the water and how my son’s forehead is level with the bridge of my nose and the river current dancing in my daughter’s eyes and the way my youngest flies through the air off the diving board. I am trying not to see so far into the hazy next that I miss the sparkling clarity of now, because what if it’s so good?
What have you been looking at and listening to this summer? How are you soaking up the last of this season? What is coming through the haze for you this fall? What should I do while my kids are at school? Answer all this and more in the comments!
PS - I am actively looking for opportunities to speak at churches, moms’ groups, book stores, and more this year! If you’d be interested in hearing me talk about Love like a Mother, will you let me know? Some travel is possible, and I promise I’ll tell jokes and stories and not be boring.
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