The weather this Labor Day weekend did me a great service. The overcast, rainy days, with low clouds and high humidity still blinded me and forced me to wear my sunglasses, but provided a definite end to the glorious, sunny days of summer. In just a couple of days, Lily will be a first grader and yesterday's trip to Target finalized the mandatory shopping (tissues, hand sanitizer, pencil box, folders, crayons). We spent the last few weeks of the summer traipsing back and forth between home and Southampton, NY where the husband's employer and family relocated for the hazy days of summer. They were kind enough to rent a little house for our family in North Sea, and though we didn't spend any of the early summer there, it quickly became our "summer house" to the girls where we explored, relaxed, and regrouped.
The end of the summer brought for me, a love and a joy I have not felt since my childhood. I allowed myself to feel carefree, relaxed, unencumbered, all of which are extraordinarily difficult for me. Early summer was scheduled with camp and community pool time, play dates and playground visits, and while entertaining enough for the people, left me feeling overscheduled and busy, tense, guilty, and so adult. Stressed. I looked at the girls' time away from school and extracurricular activities as a punishment and not as a gift. I was constantly looking for a distraction--Facebook, Pinterest, magazines, rearranging the attic--and couldn't bring myself to just give up plans of my own and just be with the people. A neighborhood girlfriend told me to chill out, embrace the time with Lily and Virginie, just be. A late spring reading with an incredible psychic and clairvoyant encouraged the same. Claire, as the psychic is called, foresaw small trips and travel for the girls and me, events that would bring us closer, open my eyes to them, inspire. I couldn't have known how right she would turn out to be.
Our first trip out to the island, Didier and I packed the car with clothes, swimsuits, food, toys, books, magazines, an iPad full of games and movies, a portable DVD player, paper, crayons, art materials, and scooters. I didn't want to find myself out in the middle of nowhere with two kiddles staring at my face. I have mentioned numerous times that driving is not my favorite parental responsibility, and a part of me hoped that everything we'd want to do would be within walking distance. On arrival it was more than obvious that this would not be the case. Thanks to our Garmin GPS, I was willing to brave a new locale and landscape and took the girls immediately to a rocky beach on the bay side. We collected white stones, pink rocks, and the tiniest transparent yellow and orange shells that looked like flecks of candy or spun sugar. We would skip rocks across the water, load our pockets with our cache, and take pictures of each other. Yes, I put my camera in the hands of the wees. I asked them to think about how everything looked in the viewfinder, teaching them about composition, light, and contrast. Baby steps, of course, but the conversation has begun. They took loads of pictures. I caught myself smiling, really smiling in some of them. It had been a long time.
Watching the sun set from the beach or outside our little cottage, we'd talk about things we loved, things we wished for. I told them stories about when I was each of their ages and watched their eyes bug out trying desperately to visualize how it could even be possible that I was once a kid. We'd go home to dinner, experiencing our night time rituals with a new perspective in a new location. We could hear the crickets chirping and if we stood outside could see only stars, millions of stars. We talked about the universe and God, angels and spaceships. The three of us slept in a king-sized bed in the master bedroom while Didier was relegated to the guestroom in a smaller bed but with much more room and certainly more quiet. I did cartwheels and handstands that I paid dearly for the next morning with charlie horses and cramped muscles or a spasm in my back. But it was worth it to just be with them.
They ate popsicles and ice cream sandwiches, sometimes two a day, and did tricks on the Macked out playground in Southampton. All of us drew countless Rapunzels (Virginie's absolute favorite) and colored them in, and lay in the grass or jumped about in the Zen rock garden out back. I drank wine while cooking dinner and sang classic rock songs at the top of my lungs. Just like in Barbados, the girls sat about naked wasting time without a care in the world.
I felt grateful and excited for fall to come, for school, for change, for dropping temps because fall, always high on the season list (coming in close with spring) made me long for closeness, being held, cuddled, snuggled. I thought of blankets, fleece vests, scarves, and soft hats. Fall signifies a chance to hibernate, go into ourselves, regroup, then rest, only to do it all again. It was the changing seasons I missed most in Barbados. That and some temperature control.
The girls and I made many trips between home and the Hamptons this summer, each time new discoveries and revelations were made. We met new friends, realized new talents ("monkeybarring," bike riding, drawing), and grew more tolerant of each others' personalities and eccentricities. I was willing to love them all the way and be loved by them in this beautiful landscape. I've realized that I often don't want to slow down, stop and smell the roses so to speak, because in doing so I will feel, all the way, burst with a love that can only be contained if I keep moving, move myself to distraction, and deflect. It isn't that I don't want to feel it, who doesn't? Just that I have never learned the pure joy of a love like that and it's depth, which I have only tickled with my toes, leaves me gasping for breath.
When we drove away from the house in the middle of the night after Didier had worked a long shift at his employers' home, I felt a real longing for more journeys like this one. Turning to see the girls curled up in their carseats fighting sleep but dozing off, I planned more of them. I couldn't predict exactly what we'd be doing, but I knew I wanted more with these people. More summers. More living. More life.
(c)Copyright 2012. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Fantastic!!!
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