The Fleeting Month of May

Where I live, May is the time for ephemeral things--apple blossoms, lilacs, migrating birds. Every year I'm reminded that if I don't pause, inhale, focus my binoculars, a sudden wind or rain or the mere passage of a few days will sweep away all of the sweet blossoms and feathers before I've taken the time to appreciate them. 

Fittingly, all my babies were born in May, their early days and weeks and months and years passing by like the flitting wing of a warbler, the falling petals of the serviceberry. But unlike spring, whose cycles repeat year after year after year, the progression of childhood is a one-way road. I marvel when I walk into a store that sells baby clothes and toys and books--so much STUFF for so fleeting a time. You'd be better off putting all that money toward their future college or car insurance and instead giving them a bit of crinckly paper or a cardboard box to play with for that microsecond of infancy.

For a while, the middle-childhood years feel a bit more like winter than spring, with days and weeks and months stretching out slow and taffy-like, and you begin to believe that you've been pushing the Sisyphean boulder of "brush your teeth" and "do your homework" and "stop tormenting your brother" up the mountain for eternity. But even that stage eventually passes and one day you wake up into a household of men, two actual 18-year-old MEN in your home, all simian arms and scratchy chins and rumbling baritone voices, and you gawp in disbelief that these six-foot bodies once fit inside your own (at the same time!).

My joke has always been, "He/they can't be one or five or twelve years old, because I'm not one or five or twelve years older." I'm certainly not eighteen and twenty-two years older than when my kids were born. There's nothing quite like witnessing your kids grow up to remind you that you yourself are aging. The other thing that raising kids reminds you of is your relative slacker-ness. In the first year alone, they learn to sit, crawl, walk, and talk. Meanwhile, you consider having taken a shower a major accomplishment. And it keeps going--reading, writing, long division, calculus, computer coding, Spanish, woodworking, pottery.

They just keep passing you by, each moment like a cottony aspen seed, exquisite as it drifts by on the slightest breeze, but impossible to grasp. Some years, like senior year, are like the snowstorm flurry of those seeds on a breezy May afternoon. So many moments passing by, and nothing to do but try your best to appreciate each one as it flits by, before May rolls into June and June into July and so on and on.

These babies turned 22, 18, and 18 last month!

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Transition Time

Over this holiday season, I've been conscious of experiencing many lasts as I contemplate the twins heading off to college next year--the last time I'll slip an ornament, a clementine, and chocolate into each shoe hastily placed before the wood stove on St. Nicholas Eve, the last time we'll trek into the woods as a family to find the perfect Christmas tree, the last time we'll fashion a Yule log menorah from a piece of firewood and invite friends over for latkes and dreidel. While all three kids will likely come home for some period of time around Christmas for many years to come, we'll no doubt let go of most of the small celebrations I've built in over the years to extend the holiday season, dissipate some of the anticipatory build-up of pressure around one big day of greed and gluttony, and focus on non-consumeristic, non-obligatory, non-performative ways of enjoying this time of year. Some of those rites have already gone by the wayside: the boys outgrew the Christmas Book Countdown years ago; they lost interest in the 12 Days of Christmas calendar a while back; and this year I had a book event on the Solstice, so we didn't have our traditional hike and small fire by the river.

It's a funny thing about parenting, how we anticipate, make note of, and remember each first--first clap, first word, first time riding a bike without training wheels--but lasts slip by without notice. Sometimes we don't even realize it was a last until weeks or months or years have passed. When was the last time he said 'vigenar" or "skabetti"? When was the last time I tied his shoes for him? When was the last time I could pick him up? So being aware of lasts as they happen is a strange feeling. It's tinged with both nostalgia and relief--nostalgia for the sweet time in my kids' lives when the holidays were full of magic and relief that I will soon be freed of the effort of keeping that magic alive.

People have been asking me for a while now if it isn't going to be hard to let my youngest two kids go when they head off to college next year, if I dread facing the empty nest. Of course I'll miss my kids, and I'm sure people mean well, but I have to admit to taking umbrage at the question. First, this was the goal of the whole project: to raise competent humans who can launch themselves out of the nest and live their own lives. I'm thrilled for them, and excited to see what this next phase brings. Second, the idea that something essential will be missing from my life with my kids away fails to account for the immense amount of self-sacrifice and physical and emotional labor I put into raising them or consider that maybe I'm exhausted by the effort and due for a break. Finally, the question implies that I *am* my kids, that I don't have an identity outside of "mother" and won't have a raison d'être once they're gone. So forgive me if I respond with a glib statement about being well shot of them as I dust my hands together.

While the time when I get to (more) fully inhabit myself as an individual human being is months in the future, I've been getting a preview of what it will be like to extract myself from the mother identity this week as I've begun recording my dreams and goals for 2023 and beyond. I still have to account for them and their not inconsiderable needs over the next nine months of getting them into and off to college, but after that there's a bit of a blank slate. Thinking about extracting me from them feels a bit like trying to take off a snug jacket with the zipper jammed in the up position. For so many years my goals have had to be either expanded to encompass a family or truncated by the limitations imposed by family life. I'm not sure I even know how to dream big anymore, or what my life will look and feel like next September. I had thought, at one time, that I'd drop the twins off at college and then keep on driving, west in a camper van, to explore deserts and mountains and rivers. But as the time draws nearer, I see that's not an entirely realistic plan. For one thing, I don't even have a camper van. 

2023 will be punctuated, no doubt, by many lasts, many moments of nostalgia and relief, as all three of my kids make big steps toward being their own adult selves. For me, I hope it will be marked by a few firsts, as I fiddle that jammed zipper loose, try new things, and learn to inhabit the post-mom me.

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Turn Toward the Light

We usually celebrate the Winter Solstice with stringing popcorn and cranberry garlands and birdseed ornaments on the spruce tree out front followed a walk into the woods and a small fire on the bank of the Eastern River. Sometimes we take Christmas cookies and a thermos of hot chocolate to enjoy by the fire, and once we had a picnic of cheese pasties. This year, though, the turn from darkening days back toward the light passed with barely a notice in our house. The boys were off on a last-minute shopping adventure and I was on a conference call. Such is the pull of capitalism and obligation that the rhythms of the earth get shunted aside. This is nothing new--back in those hot cocoa and cheese pasty days, we often practiced "Solstice, Observed," as if it were a federal holiday landing inconveniently on the calendar whenever work or a school concert or an ice storm interfered with the actual moment the earth turned back toward the sun.

The arrival of the shortest day of the year, however slight was my notice of it, did clarify for me why I've been so tired lately (other than, you know, the apocalypse); it's the time of year for burrowing, for hibernating, for settling into the subnivian zone with a cache of seeds and avoiding owls. It's not the time to scramble to finish my "21 in '21" list or to endlessly shop to fulfill an open-ended Christmas list. A cashier asked me yesterday if I was "almost done" and I answered truthfully, "I'm never done, I just keep shopping until Christmas." Much of that comes from having teenagers who can't think of a thing they want until a week before Christmas, but the rest I can attribute to an anxiety around not being enough, not "doing it right." Oh, yes, and a slight problem I have with buying myself a present for every two I buy for other people.

When I'm not out single-handedly propping up the economy, I try to get into the holiday spirit by watching cheesy Christmas movies on Netflix. I don't know who got the idea that Christmas was somehow an ideal setting for romance (I suppose Bing Crosby in White Christmas was the first culprit), but it is a thing, and most of the movies in this genre are painfully awful. I did, however, enjoy Holiday in the Wild, in which the protagonist (actress I didn't recognize) goes to Zambia on her second honeymoon--alone, because her husband leaves her the minute their kid heads off to college. (There's a recurring theme in these movies of characters planning elaborate, expensive trips without the buy-in or knowledge of the other person involved; see A Very Brady Christmas.) Once in Africa, she develops an attraction/antagonism for a bush pilot played by Rob Lowe. She ends up working on an elephant preserve and staying through Christmas. As far as the storyline goes, it was almost as cheesy as other holiday romance movies. But there were elephants. And Rob Lowe. And it wasn't the romance that fixed her life, it was the meaning brought to it by doing important and valuable work. It makes me think there's another, better way to do the holidays. Like rescuing orphaned elephants.

But unless tickets for an elaborate and expensive trip to Africa that's been planned without my knowledge appear in my stocking Christmas morning, I don't think baby elephants are in my future. I probably wouldn't be all that good at taking care of them anyway (I have issues with poop). But perhaps there's some other way of turning off the money spigot and finding meaning not only in this season, but in life in general. Maybe I'll start with a "Solstice, Observed" hike into the woods with my family, after the ice storm, were we can sit in the dark and listen to what each other has to say and what the trees have to tell us.

This post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child" and also be entered in a monthly drawing to win a print of one of the illustrations from Uphill Both Ways.

Finish it Friday ~ Holiday Edition

I didn't do a lot of hand-making this holiday, and the one big handmade gift I had planned likely won't be done for a long while, but I did put together little cardboard putz houses for the ornament exchange I do with my family (you can read more about the history of these houses here).



I had thought of making these a long while ago (maybe last Christmas), but of course I didn't get started until December, so there were a lot of late nights and assembly-line-style cutting and painting and gluing sessions. And my house looked like a glitter bomb went off in it for most of the month.

I found several patterns for these houses online, but ended up reading through their instructions and then making my own pattern using an old house I picked up at an antique store a while ago. After my first prototype house, I figured out that painting and glittering the pieces before assembling the houses was the easiest way to go. I also made the windows with orange kite paper rather than the transparent red tape I tried with the first house.

They looked so cute lined up with twinkly lights poked into the holes in back that I was tempted to keep them all for myself, but since Christmas is the time for giving, I sent them on their way to new homes, including the prototype, which I'd intended to keep until I realized I'd miscalculated the number I'd need.

Then I found out I needed an ornament for a Yankee swap at work, so I decided to make two more. These I made with simpler rooflines, because the double peaks were a little challenging to glue, and a little bigger, to fit with the larger bottle brush trees I had left. The bigger size made it possible to fit battery operated tea light candles inside, which made them even better.

Peak Grinch

I've hit peak Grinch this week. It happens this time every year, when expectations about how this holiday season should unfold collide with reality. The song "I hate Christmas" from the musical Scrooge runs through my mind on repeat, and I wish that Christmas could come at a quieter time of year, like February, or come but once every other year.

Each day, it seems, brings reminders of one more Secret Santa or Yankee swap gift I need to buy, one more dish I need to make for one more party. I obsessively watch the progress of the package I needed to arrive byTuesday as it ping-pongs back and forth between Massachusetts and Connecticut for five days. We haven't finished decorating the house, but it's already succumbed to entropy after all the careful pre-tree cleaning. I haven't baked a single cookie, and the handmade gifts, though few, may not be done till Valentine's Day.

I have, however, finally achieved my lifelong goal of reining in spending, gift-giving, and contributing to the too much stuff-ness of this holiday, though not through willpower or mindfulness, but rather because I don't get my first paycheck until Christmas Eve. Despite buying less, I'm having as hard a time as ever finding those very particular gifts I want to get.

Meanwhile, holidays with teenagers lack the magic of holidays with little kids that makes all of the headaches worthwhile. They don't ooh and ahh over lights. They sleep in late on a snow day rather than running outside in their pajamas to play in it. They're over all the holiday movies. They don't eve want to hang their own ornaments on the tree. I suppose I'll look back on these teenage holidays--when all they want is a ski pass, "soft, fluffy clothes," or a pair of black ripped-knee skinny jeans--with nostalgia in 20 years, when I'm mailing them gift cards for snow tires and a night out from their kids.

Don't worry about me--my heart will grow three sizes in five days, when all of the parties have been had, the gifts opened, the wrapping paper swept away, and the guests gone home. We'll crowd together on the one couch that remains in the living room after the other was evicted to make room for the tree, nibbling on cookies and candy and watching Scrooge, or perhaps all of the Friends Christmas episodes. Another holiday will have passed, pleasantly if imperfectly (what is perfect anyway?), and we'll enjoy the waning days of yet another year.

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Holiday Countdown Week 1 ~ Greenery

Thanksgiving came so late this year that there wasn't the usual lull of late November before the Christmas rush began, but instead here we are catapulted from one holiday to the next. We actually got our tree in November this year (which is anathema in this house, but at least it was the last day in November), because M was home for the weekend and we didn't expect to see him again until the weekend before Christmas.



My brother and my sister-in-law were also visiting for the weekend, so they joined us on our tree-getting expedition, which every year involves tromping through the woods and sizing up several dozen balsam firs and making the same tired jokes about taking a 30-foot tall tree or a hemlock, and pagan ritual of thanking the tree for givin its life to bring greenery and light into our lives. The tree right now is standing naked in our living room, until another weekend comes when we can rearrange furniture and haul ornament boxes up from the basement.



Once we settled on and sawed down a tree, we collected some extra greenery for wreath-making. Most years we go to wreath-making party at a friend's house and/or buy wreaths from one of the kids. This year our friend had her party the same weekend my brother was visiting, and, though E and Z were supposed to be selling wreaths for school, they both forgot about it until the last minute and couldn't find their order forms.



This was my sister-in-law's first wreath-making experience, and she did much better than C and I did the first time we made wreaths, back in our first apartment, when we bent green boughs into somewhat circular shapes and wired them together. They were a little wonky but had gorgeous bows that C had brought home from the gardening company he worked for that year. The next time, we wired boughs onto a wreath form, but it took a few tries before we learned about making bundles of fir tips and wiring those to the form. We still don't have the symmetry thing down, but someday we'll get there.


The traditional Maine Christmas wreath is made of balsam fir, which is what we used as the base, but we also incorporated spruce, hemlock, and white pine, as well as winterberry and red dogwood stems, for variety.



C went even wilder, literally, with a disk of larvae chambers from a wasp's next, pine cones, sumac fruits, and a polypore mushroom.



My brother and sister-in-law live in a condo, so they couldn't take theirs home with them. It now hangs on the playhouse, providing a little cheer and extra cover to the chickadees who visit this feeder.



We may be slow to get this whole holiday train moving, but at least we've got the greenery, just in time for the world outside to turn white.

Mother's Day Hike

I'm acutely aware these days—with my oldest son's 18th birthday and high school graduation approaching and the twins turning 14 and finishing up eighth grade—of the approaching finish line. I know, I know, once a mother, always a mother. But it feels like much (I was going to say "most," but I didn't want to jinx the next four years) of the heavy lifting is behind me, the caretaking, cake-baking years (though no doubt there will be plenty of heart-breaking years ahead). I approach this transition with a mixture of teary-eyed nostalgia and giddy anticipation—for all the adventures that lie ahead for my kids and for those that I hope lie ahead for me.



In the meantime, we celebrated Mother's Day by going on a hike at one of our favorite natural areas, after picking up pastries at one of my favorie bakeries. It's a place we've gone hiking at again and again over the years, usually around Easter or Mother's Day. We can measure the passage of time by how much the kids have grown in comparison to how much the fallen spruce tree's root mass has shrunk.



The place, as such places are, is infused with memories: Finding hermit crab shells and deer antlers. The time five-year-old M picked up a giant piece of birch bark as he was walking, not realizing it had been placed to cover a giant dog turd, which he proceeded to step in in his brand-new shoes. The enormous rock shaped like an Easter egg that three-year-old E found and then carried a couple of miles back to the car, staggering all the way  (and, of course, how a few months later Z threw said rock and hit E in the head, defending himself thus: "I said, 'Watch out!'").



In a sign of imminent independence, M met us partway around the hiking loop after he got off of work (a busy Mother's Day morning shift, which a secret informant told me M handled with aplomb), bearing a gift he went out of his way to get and a card he made with a message written in his uniquely funny and heartfelt voice.



There are so many times over the course of raising these three kids when I've felt out of my depth, certain I'm doing it all wrong. But for Mother's Day, at least, out in nature with my kids, with so many memories behind us and so much possibility ahead, I felt as if I haven't done all that bad.

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The Holiday Squeeze

I had to make some adjustments as I figured out—or relearned—how to Christmas while working full time.



We had the added complication this year of M's weekend work and play practice schedule.



Plus the plays and music concerts and other performances to attend ourselves.



We worked around, cut back, and made-do. I let some things drop—St. Nicholas Day, St. Lucia Day, the Winter Solstice hike and fire in the woods.



No one seemed to miss the missing celebrations, and I'm not sure how to take that—be happy that my kids are easy to please or disappointed that our traditions over the years didn't make more of an impression.



We DID host our traditional Hanukkah feast with friends, on the same afternoon we brought in our tree.



C and the boys took charge of decorating said tree, while I prepared latkes, and festooned it with miles of yarn garland from E and Z's finger-knitting days.



It took me until two days before Christmas to finish hanging all our ornaments, the same day I spun like a whirlwind, baking three kinds of cookies and my first-ever yule log cake (Black Forest flavor).



And we went on a traditional family Christmas Eve hike to the river with our guests.



Followed by family and feasting and, of course, round after round of gift-opening.



The greatest gift I received was five full days off to spend doing all of that baking and decorating, and a little last-minute shopping, and, of course, doing what I love best on Christmas: hanging out at home with my kids, watching them enjoy their gifts, nibbling all day on cookies and crackers and cheese, and just being for a little while, with nowhere to go and absolutely nothing we have to do.

I hope you and yours had a wonderful holiday season, too.

Lasts

When you have kids, you pay a lot of attention to firsts—the first tooth, the first word, the first step, all breathlessly anticipated, documented, and recorded. But lasts, those we often don't notice till long after the fact. When was the last time he fell asleep on my lap, or said "skabetti," or was small enough I could carry him? All lost to the mists of time.

Last year, as we were making our annual Halloween rounds of the neighborhood, I admit to thinking, "Thank goodness we're almost done!" Because kids can't go on trick-or-treating forever. Eventually they go away to college, right? (I remember thinking the same thing about breastfeeding and the family bed.)

So I surprised myself this year, when E and Z expressed ambivalence about the old trick-or-treat routine. Wait, I didn't know last year was going to be our last Halloween. And so, despite my own ambivalence, I coaxed them into Halloweening one last time.

E and I went out Tuesday afternoon and bought one of the last pumpkins at the apple orchard, which C helpt them carve into a great big eye (making use of a natural orifice in the pumpkin itself).


We had our usual jack-o-lantern bagel melts for dinner, which is as fancy as I get for Halloween vittles.



E and Z dug some old costume parts out of the dress-up bin.



And even I dressed up for the occasion.



We skipped the hay wagon, since it looked like rain, and our usual driver seemed less than enthusiastic, but we hit all the usual haunts, and spent the usual 10-20 minutes at each one, catching up with the whole neighborhood where C grew up.



It may not have been our last Halloween—who knows what the kids will want to do next year—but if it was, at least it was documented and recorded.

(Long) Weekend Things ~ Fourth of July

We usually stick close to home for the Fourth of July, but this year C's step-siblings were in town, so we headed up to camp for a few days.

But first, of course, we hit our town's parade, which was somewhat diminished due to new safety rules (no uninsured floats; no throwing candy from moving vehicles).




The rules didn't stop the fire truck brigade.




Nor the annual walking social justice float.



The fourth was hot and sticky, as I think it was all over the world, so afterward we found our way to a new swimming hole (which was an improvement over our original plan of running through the sprinklers). Afterward, we had a low-key cookout in the back yard.



I had thought this would be the year we finally made it to a firework show, but my brother-in-law showed up with a load of backyard fireworks just in time to save our children from a) having to leave the house and b) having to share space with strangers. Somewhere between the swimming hole and the cookout, the auto focus on my regular camera lens quit working, so no photos of the fireworks.

The next day, we headed up to camp, where the weather was perfect for soaking in the lake, canoeing, cooking out, and just general relaxicating.




We arrived home on Saturday, just in time for C and I to head out to a gala and performance of Pride@Prejudice (yes, the @ is intentional, and no, I did not even notice it when I bought the tickets; it refers to a device—literal and figurative, as in the actors made use of cell phones, laptops, etc.--the playwrite used for clever asides that explained some ambiguities to the audience and summarized bits of the narrative to scrunch the story into play length).

I was so excited about the gala (period costume optional), that I made a semi-regency dress to wear. I say semi because I bought a period-style pattern, but, taking one look at it realized it was way more complicated than I wanted to deal with so instead adapted the design of a blouse I have with an empire waist and raglan sleeves.