Yesterday, I dug out of my jewelry box a brooch I seldom wear. It is silvertone and yellow brass, and depicts happy animals crowding the top deck of Noah's ark, presumably during a sunny moment immediately following the 40 days of rainfall. It was given to me by Mary Lee Sirkin, in appreciation for the many hours I spent in the preschool "muscle room", donating a mural for the children there. Yesterday, I needed any good karma that might be stored in this pin. I needed my children to feel as happy and secure as the smiling giraffe and hippo. Essentially, I needed an ark.
While in between car ownerships, just the other day, I received an email asking me (1) to what extent and (2) how I wanted to participate in a local carpool for my sons' upcoming production of Grease.
My answers were:
(1) fully!
and
(2) with deep gratitude, as the new owner of another minivan or its equivalent.
This email brought an extra frisson to what was already proving to be a very disquieting adventure. It added a small measure of desperation to my increasingly urgent search for three rows of fun for under $30,000. Every other mother in this very desirable carpool could take another 3 children in addition to her own. In order to participate fully, in this any any future carpool, I was going to have to find some spacious wheels, and soon.
On our way to camp earlier this month - the first of ten trips I will make to the kids' camp this summer - Max wanted to drive, since he would be unable to access a car for ten weeks. We were nearly there when I thought I hard a race car about to pass us on the highway. I looked up from my iphone, where I had been peacefully reading friends' facebook status updates, but could not detect the source of the revving engine. I looked all around us, but the race car was nowhere to be found. Turns out, that revving engine was ours.
(to be continued...)
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
storing away the popsicle stick star
I knew it had seemed much too easy.
Yesterday, I dropped my boys off at camp. We are empty nesters for the next 12 days, and we've planned a trip so that we don't have to look at their empty beds. That's what I told them, so that they wouldn't feel bad about missing out.
"You'll be at camp, so what else can we do? You can't expect us to wake up and see your empty beds each day, your empty chairs at the breakfast table..."
But secretly, I was gleeful. This was a dream we had concocted when they were both still in diapers: someday, when they'd both be grown up enough to join their big brother, Max, at sleep-away camp in Indiana, we would have a couple of weeks of freedom: to sleep, to have uninterrupted conversations, to travel, to get to know one another again...
It had seemed so remote, and yet now, here we are.
An unexpected wrinkle on this page was that on the way to camp we had to visit the minivan the boys had grown up in and remove the license plates, put the key and the title in the glove compartment. I photographed the boys standing beside our collection of bumpers stickers, purchased each Mother's Day in Yellow Springs, Ohio and plastered all over the van's rear half. I filled two shopping bags with paraphernalia gathered from the van's innards and we went across the street to have lunch.
After our last meal together of fruit, yogurt, bagel and burrito, we went to camp. They needed my help, to varying degrees, with making their beds and sorting their clothes and possessions, but eventually, I was lovingly dismissed by two very happy campers.
On the ride back to our vehicles, the busload of cheerfully bereft parents compared notes on what we planned to do with all of our free time for the next 2, 4, or 8 weeks. I was in a bit of a rush to return my rental van and meet up with dear friends in a nearby Starbucks, who were waiting to drive me back to Cincinnati.
We zoomed homeward for two hours until we met up with Paul, dined al fresco, and then decided to stay out and see the 9:45 screening of Midnight in Paris. I felt fine; tired from a long day's work, but content, and generally unburdened. We walked the dog together, I dunked a forgotten nightgown, rescued from my erstwhile minivan, into a bowl of Oxiclean, and fell into bed, exhausted.
An hour or so ago, I rose to brew coffee as I do every morning, and stooped to poke through one of the bags of items collected from the van. I pulled out the popsicle stick Magen David that I'd ceremoniously kissed as the boys watched me cut it down from the rear view mirror. As I gazed upon its glitter glue embellished surface, the blue paint now completely faded away, the glitter bleached from rainbow to a pale gold, I felt my face crumple.
First, I realized I had no vehicle with which to adorn it. This is fine, a situation that will be addressed soon after we return from Paris. But immediately thereafter, I knew that I could not put the star up in my new car. It would be ridiculous to choose to hang a pre-school judaica project in the front window of a vehicle used to transport children who will soon be turning 9 and 11. Even if the boys were to indulge me, as they surely would, it would be a clear sign - to my orchestra carpool and many others - that I was trapped in the past, out of step with reality's forward lurching. In the next moment, I was back in bed, crushing myself into Paul's back as the tears rushed up to moisten his pajamas and fill my sinuses.
My outburst was lovingly dismissed as "hormonal living" and then Paul suggested that someone might make me a new mirror dangle while at camp. As I walked the dog, just now, with my first cuppa joe, I realized it was inevitable that the emotion of this milestone would hit me as hard as it just did. By releasing us from minivan ownership on the very same day our youngest child becomes a camper, the Universe is sending a clear message: we are in a new chapter of our lives.
And, as the Woody Allen movie impressed upon us for about two hours last night, we must live in the present. Life is by definition somewhat unsatisfying, the film's protagonist observes, but for maximum enjoyment, we must embrace the time in which we find ourselves. This era; this moment. I'm all in.
Yesterday, I dropped my boys off at camp. We are empty nesters for the next 12 days, and we've planned a trip so that we don't have to look at their empty beds. That's what I told them, so that they wouldn't feel bad about missing out.
"You'll be at camp, so what else can we do? You can't expect us to wake up and see your empty beds each day, your empty chairs at the breakfast table..."
But secretly, I was gleeful. This was a dream we had concocted when they were both still in diapers: someday, when they'd both be grown up enough to join their big brother, Max, at sleep-away camp in Indiana, we would have a couple of weeks of freedom: to sleep, to have uninterrupted conversations, to travel, to get to know one another again...
It had seemed so remote, and yet now, here we are.
An unexpected wrinkle on this page was that on the way to camp we had to visit the minivan the boys had grown up in and remove the license plates, put the key and the title in the glove compartment. I photographed the boys standing beside our collection of bumpers stickers, purchased each Mother's Day in Yellow Springs, Ohio and plastered all over the van's rear half. I filled two shopping bags with paraphernalia gathered from the van's innards and we went across the street to have lunch.
After our last meal together of fruit, yogurt, bagel and burrito, we went to camp. They needed my help, to varying degrees, with making their beds and sorting their clothes and possessions, but eventually, I was lovingly dismissed by two very happy campers.
On the ride back to our vehicles, the busload of cheerfully bereft parents compared notes on what we planned to do with all of our free time for the next 2, 4, or 8 weeks. I was in a bit of a rush to return my rental van and meet up with dear friends in a nearby Starbucks, who were waiting to drive me back to Cincinnati.
We zoomed homeward for two hours until we met up with Paul, dined al fresco, and then decided to stay out and see the 9:45 screening of Midnight in Paris. I felt fine; tired from a long day's work, but content, and generally unburdened. We walked the dog together, I dunked a forgotten nightgown, rescued from my erstwhile minivan, into a bowl of Oxiclean, and fell into bed, exhausted.
An hour or so ago, I rose to brew coffee as I do every morning, and stooped to poke through one of the bags of items collected from the van. I pulled out the popsicle stick Magen David that I'd ceremoniously kissed as the boys watched me cut it down from the rear view mirror. As I gazed upon its glitter glue embellished surface, the blue paint now completely faded away, the glitter bleached from rainbow to a pale gold, I felt my face crumple.
First, I realized I had no vehicle with which to adorn it. This is fine, a situation that will be addressed soon after we return from Paris. But immediately thereafter, I knew that I could not put the star up in my new car. It would be ridiculous to choose to hang a pre-school judaica project in the front window of a vehicle used to transport children who will soon be turning 9 and 11. Even if the boys were to indulge me, as they surely would, it would be a clear sign - to my orchestra carpool and many others - that I was trapped in the past, out of step with reality's forward lurching. In the next moment, I was back in bed, crushing myself into Paul's back as the tears rushed up to moisten his pajamas and fill my sinuses.
My outburst was lovingly dismissed as "hormonal living" and then Paul suggested that someone might make me a new mirror dangle while at camp. As I walked the dog, just now, with my first cuppa joe, I realized it was inevitable that the emotion of this milestone would hit me as hard as it just did. By releasing us from minivan ownership on the very same day our youngest child becomes a camper, the Universe is sending a clear message: we are in a new chapter of our lives.
And, as the Woody Allen movie impressed upon us for about two hours last night, we must live in the present. Life is by definition somewhat unsatisfying, the film's protagonist observes, but for maximum enjoyment, we must embrace the time in which we find ourselves. This era; this moment. I'm all in.
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