myLOVE: gathering nuts

When I'm busy, the first thing to fall by the wayside is always the housework, and so before school starts I guess I'll need to spend a couple of days playing catch-up - dusting, doing the weird bits of laundry (like the table cloth for the picnic table) that kept getting passed over for the regular wash, raking up the apples we've been so lazy about in the yard this summer, and pulling out the stove to get the piles of sand that have surely collected there over the last 12 or so weeks.

It's taken 8 months, but looking back it's abundantly clear I made the right choice to drastically slow things down this past January. The lighter schedule freed up the time I needed to endure an unforeseen family crisis, time I might not have had if I'd kept moving at the frantic pace I had become so accustomed to. I wasn't any less busy this summer, but I was certainly busy with things other than what I had hoped. Truthfully, it doesn't feel like it was much of a summer at all. I feel like I somehow missed out this year. No camping. Only one day-trip to the lake. One weekend visiting my sister. One solitary weekend of virtually everyone I know having their summer's end BBQ... during which I was teaching workshops ergo unable to attend all but 2...

This September is monumental and I guess I had hoped for a more festive passing of the season for this crossroads. You see, my oldest boy starts high school, my youngest boy starts junior high, and my sweet baby Jane starts Kindergarten. Thank goodness Mads is smack-dab in the middle of elementary or I'd probably be institutionalized next week. I'm trying not to be sad about it - the children haven't left home or anything - but three of four children are experiencing a milestone from which there is no turning back. While I'm excited to see their coming accomplishments I can't help but be saddened at such a gory reminder of how time marches on, and stands still for no one and nothing, not even a family crisis.

High school is so serious - messing up in high school can have some pretty serious consequences, and while most kids kind of get this on some level, in retrospect I'm not entirely I took it seriously enough. Instilling a healthy respect for the impact his actions in the next 3 years may have on his entire career path seems like such a cruel thing to have to do to a child I still picture wearing a soggy diaper and eating daddy-long-leg spiders with the legs pulled off after I told him not to eat ants or they'd crawl around in his belly. He's a good kid, but he's already asserting his independence in ways that alternately swell my heart with pride and break it. I picked up an argyll sweater-vest off the little boys' rack while jeans shopping and wistfully remembered a time when I could have bought it for Wil and he'd have worn it, simply because it was in his closet. Now he wears skinny jeans and dyes his hair black and wants to pick out his own t-shirts. He wouldn't be caught dead in a sweater vest.

Junior high, while it doesn't carry quite the same weight academically as high school, is instead a three-year rite of social passage. It's during junior high that most kids become sexually aware if not active, drugs become readily available in the hallways, parents start locking up their liquor cabinets, and everyone struggles to find their place on a rung of the social ladder whether they share that rung with the nerds, the cool kids, the druggies, or the drop-outs. No matter how hard you love your kids, no matter what you dress them in, no matter how smart they are, there is virtually nothing you can do to predict which rung your kids will end up on, and nothing you can do to prevent them from being bruised and battered in the battle for a spot - ANY spot - on any rung. While kids who didn't quite fit in throughout elementary school are more likely to find a peer group in the bigger pond of junior high, there are also that many bigger fish. Like many parents, I fear that junior high can only be one of two things - a brutal trip through the shark-infested waters and sharp flotsam and jetsam of choppy hormonal storms where our children somehow find a supportive social niche that floats them along relatively unscathed, or they get seduced into the black abyss of social fringe where smoking dope, lipping off teachers, and skipping classes is cool and we stand by helplessly as they self-destruct via their burning desire to belong.

Then there's Serejane. My youngest, my last, my sweet baby, who starts Kindergarten. She's excited as kids starting kindergarten are prone, for in their eyes, once they cross the threshold of that classroom on the first day they are officially Big Kids, no longer babies like those other preschoolers who still pee their pants and play in the toddler park and take afternoon naps. Of course, what our babies don't realize is that when they start kindergarten, they take that first big step away from us - we are no longer needed to change their pee pants, no longer have the privilege of using the gated toddler parks, no longer get to cuddle up with them for afternoon naps. Kindergarten is a bittersweet time for parents, and for the record it doesn't matter if it's your first, your middle, or your youngest children starting, your heartstrings are strummed a little to hard each and every time.

In the fray, I missed a few things and am trying not to beat myself up over it too hard. While I know I have no one to blame but myself for becoming so distracted this summer, I still feel somehow robbed of what should have been a celebration of innocence and freedom, for each of these three children in each of their own ways. I'm trying to not be bitter or angry at the circumstances that caused it to flash by in such a blur, but rather to accept it as a reminder of why I'd rather have apples on the ground and a dirty kitchen floor. I wonder how I will view this time in our lives many years from now. The best I can do now is gather as many nuts as I can before the sun goes down on Summer of 2009. Wish me luck.