Things That End in August

Yesterday they said it would hit one hundred degrees.

Today I wake to clouds and thank the stars. I've got a nasty cold and the end of summer weighing me down. In the living room the goblins fight until they put on Michael Jackson videos and go slack-jawed and silent. I'm reminded of my young self, watching Kids Incorporated. I think how I still watch Kids Incorporated, only now it's called The Glee Project.

I've been waiting for Colorado peaches, but they haven't come.

The neighborhood kids walk up the block to school in the mornings. We've got until next Wednesday. I'm awake to see them because I'm headed to work at Borders. I jumped back on the sinking ship, thinking how Ayla wants an American Girl Doll for Christmas.

I tell myself this isn't going backwards.

It's noon. I hear it's Friday. Octoyeah is going down on twitter, otherwise I wouldn't know. I have spent the last week shopping for back-to-school shoes and jeans and fretting over finances. Indy is starting Kindergarten. I'm not worried the way I worried over Ayla, because by now we've been there and done that. But Indy is my baby. My last one. And her starting Kindergarten only means that I don't have babies anymore.

Ayla's Fairy Godmother sent her an ipod with Harajuku girl headphones. The word for how Ayla felt upon receiving the gift: honored.

She knows I'm a big girl, Ayla said with a tried-on solemnity. I'm going to call her and tell her how I feel like a big girl.

It took a Fairy Godmother to honor something Ayla felt within herself. Her mommy, my job is to keep her young. But I also want to honor her, when she shows me who she feels she is.

You are a big girl, Little Bird. In full bloom.



So it goes.

Brave New Girls

Nine months ago, Ayla couldn't write her name, or read. She didn't have any friends. She didn't know about cup-stacking, or Pavlovas, or Australia or flesh-eating sloths.

And now she does.

And Indy, well. I'm pretty sure nine months ago, Indy thought she was living in a land of princesses and sparkly play-dough, of dress up and face paint and pink-haired pirates. A world in which the greatest attainable pleasure involved a well-timed combination of a hot bath, a warm towel, and fresh cookies. A world of mama and daddy and Ayla and family, and a few assorted librarians and baristas dropped on the peripheries like flowers painted on a theater set.

Now she knows there are other wonderful things. All that and more. There is dress-up with Maya and kickball with Chase. There is the pride of it being your snack day, the flushed accomplishment of line leader. There is her teacher, who apparently on Tuesday afternoon took Indy to China. There is the joy of handing mama a painting she made all by herself. The thrill of standing in spring grass with your friends, putting out your arms, and spinning, spinning, until you crash, a beautiful mass of pale and coffee skin, blonde and black hair, holding each other on the damp warming earth.

The girls are lying on the couch, slurping popsicles. Beside them are their glossy new stacks of summer reading. Later there will be hot dogs and watermelon, coconut sunscreen, cool respite at the library and long days at the pool.

School's out for summer.

Forgive Me, Butt

This is how it went:

Indy came home from preschool and told me that her teachers had spent all day trying to find Plants vs Zombies for me. But they hadn't found it.

I find this totally plausible.

We went to Target. “Mom. I'm tired of listening to you all the time,” said Indy. Conversationally, without any real rancor. Here goes the rest of your life, Indy, I thought. Sick of me, yet craving my approval anyway. Sorry about that. Look, it's not my design. Blame the male god.

We get to the dollar section. I tell her she can pick out anything she wants—except candy. Indy literally tears at her her hair. “Ugh! Why do I listen to you all the time!”

Indy: You are different from me. You are so different from me. Please don't spend the rest of your life trying to prove it.

Mr. V orders a second Plants Vs Zombies, because we lost the original. The girls and I watch each other play. One evening, I get to the boss level. Dr. Edgar Zomboss in his big steampunk zombie robot machine comes to kill my plants on my fudging rooftop. I proceed to slay him without hesitation or fanfare.

I am a true hero.

To me.

The girls lie in my arms, watching. They cry: Oh, daddy is so good at this level! Daddy kills this guy so good! And (I kid you not) I love daddy when he does this level! I love daddy when he kills the boss!

I feel like tearing my own hair out. “Look at mommy,” I say. “Mommy is killing the boss. See! Mommy killed Dr. Edgar Zomboss.”

“Yeah,” they sigh, giddy. “Daddy does it so good!”

I read a book. It quotes a woman on the banality of playground conversations with other parents, and how they are all the same. The women, she says, all want forgiveness. The men all want applause.

I want forgiveness for everything. I drop Ayla off at kindergarten and nearly cry. I watch her, smiling and playing with her friends. Little Jack her boyfriend, little Isha whom she loves. Next year they'll all be together, without her. Ayla will be at a different school, one we don't have to pay for.

I feel awful. What if I am tearing her away from true love? What if the boys at her new school aren't as nice as these boys? Ayla's whole class gets along. Boys and girls slay zombies with finger guns, boys and girls sit down and play old maid. You know I'm a sucker for gender neutrality. I imagine the boys and girls at her new school like lord of the flies vs mean girls. Separated. Warring. Feral. Right now, her entire class lines up without being told and takes turns at the monkey bars, for heaven's sake. They cheer each other on. They work on art projects together and they all call out, “Hey Ayla, look at mine! Look at mine, Ayla!”

“Oh that's very beautiful,” Ayla says magnanimously to every one. “Oh, I love those colors. Oh, that is a very pretty horse.”

I mean, sweet heaven, what are the odds? Is there any other group of five-and-six-year-olds out there behaving this way?

(I don't know why they all want Ayla to look at their art. She is the oldest and maybe some kind of informal ringleader. Maybe it only happened that once, when I was there to see it. Maybe Ayla paid them smarties to make her look good in front of me, I don't know, I wouldn't put it past her.)

Ayla has six days left at her school. Then it is off to the unknown.

Would I like forgiveness? You bet I would.

I read Ayla Ivy and Bean. I feel bad about her room. I worry ridiculous things—that Ayla was meant to be lifelong friends with her buddy, little Jack. I worry realistic things—that the kids at the new school won't be such gems as these ones.

Mom, Ayla says. I love you with all my heart.

Ayla, I say. I love you with all my butt. Cause it's bigger than my heart.

Ayla laughs until she cries.

Still Have

I feel like summer is almost over and I'm sad, I said to a co-worker. Walking through the empty parking lot to work at seven in the morning on the first day of August. Already hot.

Oh I don't get summers anymore, she told me. Kinda scoffed.

I thought, do I look like I'm in high school? Isn't that the last time any of us had 'a summer'?

I was thinking about all the things we hadn't done. Hadn't gone camping, hadn't made it to Elitches, had only made it to the swimming pool once.

Count it: Once.

The season isn't changing yet, but is about to change. It's tilting but hasn't turned. At night I comfort myself with this mantra: We still have August. We still have August. Autumn begins September 21st.

But I had this secret, scratching at me with claws in the dark: I was going back to work full time.

I got home late from Bookstore Job one night. (The job that is part time and demands no daycare). Noah was in bed. The girls were asleep with 'The Sound of Music' playing at the best part--the part where Christopher Plummer is singing "Edelwiess", his eyes all misty with the weight of everything that is about to end.

I crawled into bed with Ayla and began to sob. I couldn't believe it was over all ready. The seasons of the earth change, but we are prepared. Change is on the wind. We see it in the light, feel it hovering in the air. The seasons of your life can change without warning. And they don't come back. Summer ends, but it comes again. The season of having infants only comes once. When it's really over, it's over. It shocks me, realizing the time in my life when I will be pregnant, await a birth, cradle a sleeping infant, change a diaper--it's over. A season that--barring a night of heavy drinking and extreme unpreparedness--will never come again.

And then, without much warning, another season was ending too. I was going to work full time, 8 to 5, every single Monday through every single Friday. I thought about my daughters, home on Christmas break. Except they wouldn't be home. They'd be at daycare. And we wouldn't be baking cookies and taking walks in the snow and trips in our boots and jackets to the coffee shop for lattes and hot chocolates. And if they got sick? If they just had a bad day and didn't feel up to school? What would I do? I'd have to go to work anyway. They'd have to be with someone who wasn't their mom, even on the days when mom was what they really needed. I thought about summers--next summer, the ones after that. The season of going to the library, to the pool, to the park with a picnic, was already over. Instead I'd be taking the girls to day camps, different ones throughout the weeks, while I went to work. 8 am to 5 pm.

Yes, I had gone out and sought a job. But somehow it still hit me without warning. Another season was coming to a close, and I?

I just wasn't ready.

All this time, all this time I've spent at home, and it's over before I know it. It's been so hard. I've enjoyed it whenever I could. I've felt deep insecurity. Low self-esteem over the fact that I don't have a job, that I 'just stay at home', that I spend my days bargaining and begging and pleading with two tiny tyrants. I've felt deep guilt over not doing it well enough, over not wanting to do it, over not being able to afford more toys or more pairs of shoes or fancy birthday parties, because I was 'just a stay-at-home' mother. All these days, day after day for six years, of being home alone with two beings who demand and drain and take every moment of it for complete granted, who may never, ever realize everything their mother--who was once a volitient, confident, independent human being, who had a life before and beyond them, who is something in her heart that isn't 'mom' or 'lunch-maker' or 'mess-cleaner'--has given up for them.

All of that was about to end and I held Ayla for as long as I dared and cried silently the way I do because I wasn't ready for the season to change.

(Then I got up pretty quickly and left because I'm sure I can't imagine anything more terrifying than waking to find your mother sobbing and clutching you in the dead of night. And lord knows I can't afford the therapy she'd need after that.)

The season was about to change. A huge change. A time of rushing to work and rushing home and wearing fancy clothes and talking to adults and bringing home a large paycheck. Of bagged lunches and babysitters and daycare juggling. Like it or not (I think I like it) the season of diapers and formula and tiny babies who want nothing more than to sleep on your chest and gaze in wild rapture at your own miraculous eyes has ended here. We are headed into a season of teachers, home work, art projects, science projects, spelling bees, math quizzes, book orders, lunch money.

And I could spend it being away from my kids every day from 7 am to 5:30 pm, at a job I didn't care one whit about--or not.

You can't stop what's coming. But you can stop how you react to it.

In the end, we went with not.

No lots of extra money. No fancy private education. No day care or babysitters or child juggling or summer spring and winter breaks at the office and day camps.

The lesson I have learned is this: If someone asks you, "Is this a position you feel you could be happy in long-term?" And everything in you screams, 'No!'--

Then just say it. "No."

Especially when, after you pay for day care, you're only going to be able to afford an extra pack of gum a week anyway.



Miss Indiana Sophie in August 2006/yesterday.



I am Vesuvius, and I can't turn back time but I can turn down office jobs.