Last day of summer vacation . . .

Last day of summer vacation and I’m sitting in a chair in the sun, struggling with the decision of what to do, how to make it meaningful.   The kids are on the trampoline, not fighting for a moment.  

Summer has rushed by again, and I’m left with that sense of disappointment we sometimes feel when we overplan a holiday celebration that somehow didn’t quite live up to expectations.    

Once again, I’m kicking myself for overdoing everything that now seems unimportant and underdoing things that I think would have been more special.   Next year, I swear, I’m not overscheduling like I always do.  

My kids are old enough now that they can entertain themselves and I’m old enough now to let them.   When your kids were younger, didn’t it seem like there was just this tremendous pressure to enroll them in classes, camps, activities?   Especially your oldest?   Gymboree, junior soccer, swimming for tots, music lessons . . .  because we can’t let them get BEHIND.   Behind what?   All the other two-year-old who are doing THINGS.  

I still feel a bit of that pressure every summer.   Though I have two kids now who definitely have developed their own interests and know what they want to do, and I don’t have to offer up the summer camp sampler platter.   

Still felt the pressure, though.   Austin needed some dance workshops, Will needed sports camps, they are California boys and by God this is the year they learn to surf.   And so on.    

Austin, always wanting to please everyone around him, simply said okay.   Will, however, always determined to please Will, put his foot down.   “I want to do beach camp and swimming lessons.   Maybe tennis.   That’s all.”   Art classes where you learn to draw superheroes, Will?  No.    Science camp where you build robots?  No.   Hiphop?    No.   

Will may have saved my life this summer.    In the end, though, we still did too much.   Won’t go into all of it.    Austin is blessed to have reached a place where people now call him to do shows.    We just have to occasionally learn to tell them “no,” now.    Or perhaps we let Will take the call.  

So last day of summer vacation, and I’m wondering:   beach?   zoo?  Universal Studios?    pool?   

The day is getting later, yet I still sit in the sun, watching the boys play on the trampoline, not fighting.   

Thieves in the Temple

I've been shaking my head in amazement a lot over the past year, and I have been even more so in this week as I've heard and read people's reactions over this health bill.    I understand the concern about the expense . . .  except it's the first major government expenditure in the past ten years that actually has a budget and plan to pay for it.    And I can't take your criticisms about the expense of the bill all of that too seriously or consider it very sincere, unless you just as vehemently protested the expenses of the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  

But the most surprising reaction has been from the evangelical Christians who make up the tea party crowd.   How Christian is it to deny healthcare to people who are sick?    For profit medicine, the healthcare model of our country, seems to me the best modern day example of thieves in the temple that we encounter in our society.   What I've found as I've dug deeper is that many people simply know nothing about the bill or what's in it, but that doesn't seem to stop the spewing of misinformation.  

But, enough from me on this.   Emily says it all much better here.

I understand why people pressure their adult children for grandkids

Spring break approaches as the year flies by.    I sat in the Kindergarten classroom this week looking at all the kids, realizing with a little surprise, a little pride, a little nostalgia how much they’ve all grown, how confident they’ve become since September.    

I’ve had more of a shocking experience, yet similar, with Austin’s fifth grade class.   I pretty much dropped out of volunteering in his classroom after third grade.   At that point the teachers need more clerical help; and I’m always the parent who jams the copier, three-hole punches the wrong side of the paper, tears out the wrong workbook page . . .  so I decided to bow out.   I much prefer the kind of classroom volunteer work where I’m on the carpet with the kids doing art projects or leading storytime.   

But I’ve been back with the fifth graders this winter/spring for a few events and have really been shocked, forgive the cliche, at how much they’ve grown.    These kids are still, in my mind, the first graders we met four years ago.     But no, they aren’t.   None of them have that baby look anymore, none of them speak with an adorable little lisp, and some of the girls are almost as tall as I am.   These are almost-middle schoolers.     These are on their way.

I’ve sat watching their presentations, marveling at this process, feeling like they are growing up before my eyes.    There is the coolness factor developing in them, too,    I get the polite “hello, Mrs. K” from some of them, ignored by many more of them.   Definitely a far cry from being mauled by hugging throngs of the six-year-olds I remember them to be.   

I stretched out in the bed next to Austin one night, talking to him as he was falling asleep.   Hard to believe I have a ten, actually almost-eleven-year-old.    Stretched out beside me, he’s coming awfully close to being almost as long as I am.   In my mind he should still be curled up in the crook of my arm, head on my shoulder.    

I thought of this, too, as I watched the fifth graders in class this week.    I’m sure I’m not the only parent out there feeling this way, even as we watch with pride as our children, barreling toward young adulthood with great speed, progress along their paths.   

So, I left a fifth grade assembly I had attended, with all of this sort of mixed emotion, and it weighed heavily as much as I knew how silly it was to feel that way.   

Then, I saw the Kindergarten classes on the playground, so I decided to go over and say hi to Will.    As soon as he saw me he yelled, “MOM!”  and ran toward me.   And he was followed by a wonderful, music-to-my-ears chorus of “WILL’S MOM!” as his friends made his way toward me and mauled me with hugs and excited questions of “Are you playing with us today?!”   

It made me feel as if I’d been granted a few years of reprieve from something.    

Small things with great love . . .

I spend a lot of time sacrificing good in the search for perfect.   For that matter, actually, I spend more time than I’d like to admit sitting still and never even trying because perfection seems unattainable.    This remains the biggest challenge I face when tackling anything new, creating anything.   With raging ego, I want whatever I do to be huge, great, original, unsurpassed - perfect.   Standards impossible to live up to, right?   

Wandered through a really cool gallery while in San Diego last month, with a lot of different vendors and artists’ work on display.   It seems art with themes of India seems to be the hot new thing with a lot of artists, at least out here.   Appears to be the trend du jour along with all things from Asia.    Much of it is beautiful, reds and golds, silks and jade and marble carvings, exotic and pleasing to the eye.    I wandered into one area with wooden, ivory and jade carvings of different little Hindu gods and mythological characters.   

I spent a moment with Ganesh, always one of my favorites to examine.   The god with the head and trunk of an elephant.    The carvings were fantastic.    Ganesh is supposed to be the remover of obstacles, or according to some interpretations, the god who places obstacles in your way to help you grow.   Either way, he represents growth and change.    I found a great handmade keychain last summer in Maui, with antique beads and a small Ganesh on it that I bought for a friend who I felt could use some help with obstacles in her life.   It was so beautiful, I almost kept it.   That was my obstacle.  

Anyway, so I’m standing in this beautiful gallery, surrounded by beautiful things - original art, antique art, and artish things, fondling an ivory Ganesh, trunk and all, and I look over and see there’s a little gardening section right next to where I’m standing.    There’s a shelf of rocks with quotes carved into them.   I’m fascinated so I wander over.   

My eyes are drawn to one rock in particular.   “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”   It’s a quote attributed to Mother Theresa.   It’s a message I’ve been getting a long time in many ways from many sources, but until that moment, it had never actually taken root.    

I just read it and said to myself, very meekly, “oh.”   

Sometimes it just takes being hit over the head with a rock to make things crystal clear, doesn’t it?   

Paths

“Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking”   

Antonio Machado.  

Sometimes it is just oh so hard to make that simple gesture of just putting one foot in front of the other, though, isn't it?

Looking ahead and behind

When Brian was in his first year of law school, we were friends with another law school couple, and they met us for dinner one evening with a replay of a conversation they’d had earlier at their church.    New to the community and the church, they were meeting lots of new friends and lots of new families.    One man, a father with several children in his forties, after hearing about their struggles as they embarked on their first year of marriage and graduate school, said, “Wow.  I’d love to have it all ahead of me like that.”  

At dinner that evening, we decided the guy was crazy.    All we could see were the piles of student loan debt threatening to swallow us whole as we sat in our crummy apartments with crummy jobs, with several years of the intense workload of law school ahead of half of us.   We were ready to have all of this behind us and reach the point where we could actually get started with life.

I hadn’t thought of that dinner, that conversation, in years until recently, as I sat in a local cafe talking to a young friend of mine who just started college.    

I feel fortunate that as Austin blazes his trail through the local musical theatre scene, and as I walk along behind him, I have the chance to get to know some of the teens and young adults that he works with.    I am the happy recipient of their strange text messages (does anyone email anymore?) and sometimes see more of their Facebook world than I need to.    

Watching them travel their respective paths, as the twenty-somethings struggle with self-discovery and the battle of their relationships and as the new high school grads face the shock and joy of the next steps and college life, should make me feel even older than I already do.    I hear myself thinking, “I remember how hard it was to deal with THAT,” and can picture this grandmotherly image of myself saying it, complete with rocking chair.    

But the reality is that when I’m sitting in the carpool line and receive a text message from a seventeen-year-old college freshman that I adore, and once I translate it, I realize she’s telling me how great her new acting class just was, I feel an uplifting joy as if I were the one who just left that acting class and realize what a rush I feel living vicariously through all of their adventures.   

So I sat in this little cafe a few weekends ago, where Austin and I had stopped between Will’s soccer game and Austin’s voice lesson, and I listened to my young friend/our waiter, also a college freshman, talk about the first few months of college life and pour out all of his angst and fears and confusion.   He’s a film student, a total artist type, incredibly brilliant, with all of the darkness that goes with that personality.    He’s anxious to get on with life, to move ahead, he’s tired of feeling in limbo.    

As he walked us out to our car, I refuse to tell him that in some ways limbo is all we ever really have.  

Instead I say, “Honey, you have all of this ahead of you.   Just enjoy this place you are now.   Stop worrying and just have some fun.    You’re going to wake up one day and wonder where it all went.”

Then I added, “Do it for me.   Just enjoy the ride.”   

He smiled and hugged me, but I realize no matter how strongly I feel, I’ll never convert him to the religion of enjoy your youth while you can hold it in your hand.    I guess some things we just don’t understand until we’re on the other side; at least, that’s what my sixty-year-old self whispers to me every now and then.    

Come have tea with me