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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Lean into the Feelings

A lot is happening in our neck of the woods over the next few months. Three kids have birthdays (18, 18, and 22). Three kids graduate (college, high school squared). Family will visit from across the country. Parties and ceremonies and events will attend it all. And then the five of us will depart on a VERY BIG trip. 

I'm trying to lean into the abundance of it all, coaching myself to revel in each moment as it happens rather than feel like a steamroller is bearing down on me. My nature is, of course, to want to panic about all of the details that have not yet been resolved (hotel rooms, rental cars, house sitters, announcements, invitations, cleaning), and after 18 years of three kids' birthdays in May, my muscle memory of this time of year is wired to anxiety, even if big kids' birthdays aren't as big a deal as little ones'.

I read recently that it's not in human nature to be comfortable with feeling good. After millions of years of evolution preparing us to expect a saber-toothed tiger around every corner, we're wired to be suspicious when things are going well and we tend to short-circuit those good feelings with worry, deflection, and self-sabotage. I don't know if there's any scientific evidence of this theory's accuracy, but it makes sense. And I'm making a conscious effort to feel good about this moment in time: Our kids are nearly grown up! They've made it into/through college! We're finally getting a chance to travel after all these years! Hurrah!

I've also recently heard that it's important to be comfortable with uncomfortable feelings as well. It's natural for anxiety to arise in the face of uncertainty---and until the twins settled on the colleges they are going to attend and until we pushed "purchase" on our plane tickets, we were swimming in a sea of uncertainty. There will continue to be uncertainty until each item over the next few months is checked off our lists---until the twins are settled into their dorms and M into his first post-college job---but I'm resisting the pull to hurry through it all and get to the other side, where the answers may be known, but it will all be over. This, here, now---in the sea of uncertainty and in the face of the steamroller of life changes is where life takes place. And I don't want to miss that, either the good feelings or the anxiety. 

A version of 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."

I Did It! 2021 (Apocalypse Year 2) Edition

For the past eight years, I've tracked my annual accomplishments via an annual I Did It! list, originally inspired by writer Lisa Romeo. Previous posts can be found here: 2020 (Apocalypse Year 1), 2019 (including decade-in-review), 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013. 

This year has felt strange, like suspended animation (or, perhaps, like college friends and I used to joke, animated suspense). Part of that has been the ongoing (never-ending) pandemic, of course, but also the limbo phase between having a book accepted for publication and actually seeing it in print (for all of you who keep asking me, "Isn't it published yet?" believe me, I feel your pain). Book work over the last year has been marked by long periods of waiting punctuated by brief flurries of activity (copy edits, proof review, etc.), which makes it hard to feel like I've accomplished anything at all. Let's review the last year and see if that's actually true.

Writing I-Did-Its!

There were the aforementioned layers of review of The Book, as well as inroads into promotion, reveal of the cover, and corresponding updates to my website and various profiles. (Do go here to pre-order if you haven't already.)

I also finished drafting a second book, a collection of essays on nature and motherhood. For some reason finishing this book felt anticlimactic. Maybe because three-fifths of it had already been written and published, so most of "drafting" it involved revising words already on the page. Or maybe because I expect the road to publication to be steeply uphill. But none of that means I don't deserve a little pat on the back, so here it is: pat, pat.

As far as short pieces go, I'm still struggling to both write and submit/publish. My submission stats for the year:

• Submissions: 8
• Acceptances: 0
• Rejections: 6
• Publications: 1

"A Review of World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil" Literary Mama, May/June 2021

I know this is supposed to be a positive post, but oof, that's painful. Possibly the worst since I started this tradition. 

Other writing accomplishments:

• 11 Newsletters
• 36 blog posts (plus this one, which puts us one ahead of 2020)
• I worked on a novel (a different one from the one I worked on last year), getting to 14,000 words before deciding I can't stand it. One day I'll make it all the way to 60,000.
• I continued editing the Literary Reflections department at Literary Mama as well as being a senior editor, helping to bring each issue to publication.
• I started training to become a book coach. I didn't get as far into the program as I would have liked due to time management issues, but it's my goal for 2022 to complete the training and start bringing on clients.
• I got back into teaching nature journaling, with one remote workshop and two in-person, including one at a nature journaling conference in Acadia National Park, which was a delight.
• I gathered a group of Maine writers I know (some of whom I only knew from the internet), who all happen to be knitters, and formed a writing group called Maine Writers and Knitters. I hosted our first get-together in October, which mostly involved getting to know each other and eating, but also included a fun and slightly woo-woo writing exercise. We clicked really well and had a second get-together early this month, this time with actual writing workshops, and we have a third planned for February. It feels so good to have some actual writing community.
• I (virtually) attended a poetry festival and a crime writing conference.

Travel and Adventure I Did Its!

Again it wasn't much of a year for travel, but I got out a bit more than I did last year.

• We resumed our annual Hermit Island camping trip after a two-year hiatus (one year because of the pandemic and one because of work), and I resolved to never let a crappy job get between me and my family again (ultimately quitting that crappy job).
• We went on a fair number of kayak and canoe trips on local lakes and ponds (some of which I did solo).
• I swam across a nearby pond with a friend once or twice a week during July and August.
• I went on a solo hike to a tiny cabin at a nearby nature preserve.
• I drove all the way to Colorado and back, all by myself, to help out my parents for a couple of weeks in November.

Arts and Crafts I Did Its!

My word for 2021 was "finish" and I had a list of 21 things I wanted to finish this year, many of them craft projects (some of which were WIPs and some of which were mere ideas). These are the crafty things that got finished:

• Some handmade dollhouse furniture.
• That '70s quilt
• Wavy charms quilt
• Chalk painted furniture
• New bedroom curtains
• Birds & blooms quilt
• Little bird embroideries
• The endless knitting project that I'd started at the beginning of the pandemic I put down sometime last spring and didn't pick it up again until October. It's nearly done, but I'm at a stumbling place and not quite sure how to go on, so it will have to hold off until next year's list. I also have another needlework project that's so close to being done, but not close enough to make it onto this year's list.
• Finally, I started doing illustrations for my second book (mentioned above). I'd hoped to finish them up this month, but all of my time got sucked up by holidays, child transporting, and pandemic/ democracy anxiety.

Household I Did Its!

• My big accomplishment here was my bedroom refresh and reading nook. 
• I also deep-cleaned the living room and finally replaced our 1990s college student decor with a real couch and two swivel/glider chairs (I can't believe I don't have any photos or a blog post of these--probably because they are not the beautiful midnight blue velvet couch and orange patterned chairs I dreamed of but rather boring tan, gray, and beige). 
• I made some more inroads into basement cleaning (two steps forward and one back in that department, always--E moved out of the room he shared with Z to the basement; and lives sprawled between the main area and M's room; then this month M moved all of his stuff home from college in preparation for a semester abroad. And everyone throws anything they don't want down there.)
• I continued to expand my Fiesta ware collection, but at a more sedate pace than the previous year (I think this is a topic that deserves a blog post).
• I cleaned up the sunroom, repotted several plants so now almost everything is in a pretty, non-plastic pot, and repainted two ugly plant stands a lovely bright turquoise (again, gonna need a blog post on this!).
• I expanded my pollinator garden and kept it semi-weed-free.

Nature I Did Its!

• I did a lot of birding, especially in the spring (110 eBird checklists and 118 species), and C and I did the Christmas Bird Count for something like the seventh year in a row. I even got a couple of life birds right here on our own property, as well as one in Colorado.
• I did a little bit of butterfly-ing and dragonfly-ing, but not as much as I would have liked.
• I kept track of all of the wildflowers (starting with tree flowers) as they emerged in the spring and early summer (falling out of the habit in July/August) with a photo on Instagram.

Goodbye First Car

Earlier this week I had to take my car to the mechanic for some repairs. I brought M with me so he could clean all the stuff out of his car, which had joined the 100 or so other Volvos in the bone yard out back after it died two days before graduation. After we'd cleared out the tennis rackets and school notebooks, loose change, rearview mirror ornaments, and yerba mate cans, after we'd taken off the license plates and removed the registration from the glove box, I gave them a few minutes alone together.

The black wagon was only "his" car by dint of an overindulgent father and a mother who prefers not spending all of her time carting kids around. Yet once he had the keys in his hand, he started calling "my car," and no one contradicted him, except for a perceptive and indignant younger brother.

We didn't intend to send M to college with the car, and so the parting would have happened even if the engine hadn't blown. Knowing this did not make the moment of goodbye less poignant. There was a summer's worth of transportation needs to consider, aside from the fact that it was his first car. A boy's first car is a big deal. It means freedom, especially where we live, miles from the nearest sidewalk, bike path, or bus. Like a tribal coming-of-age custom, driving is the bridge from childhood into manhood.

I have before me for this summer and the fall (and quite possibly the next ten years) the project of clearing our house of the trappings of childhood—the story books and stuffed animals still crammed in the twins' closet, boxes and bins of blocks and Legos and wooden toys piled in the basement and garage, bicycles to match every stage of childhood, pint-sized lifejackets, three-quarter length sleeping bags, Matchbox cars, plastic dinosaurs, wooden trains.

Each of these things is weighted with memories, with hopes and possibilities, disappointment and fulfillment. We imbue material items with too much value and emotional power in our culture, and I tend toward the sentimental. C doesn't help, with all his talk of "save it for the grandchildren."

The car was easy, for me—being pronounced dead at the mechanic's shop, letting it go entailed little effort, no rereading of pages or stroking worn fur, no packing into a box and delivering to the thrift store. The car is not connected to that time, long gone, when my children were children. But for M, too young and too practical for nostalgia and more interested in the future than the past, this more recent parting will likely hold significance until he hangs his wooden pineapple from the rearview mirror of another car.

This post went out last week to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. You can subscribe here.

Momentous

M played his last baseball game of his elementary/middle school years last night. Maybe it was his last baseball game ever, if he decides not to play in high school. I remember noticing somewhere around the preschool years that lasts began to outnumber firsts--the last time your baby crawls, the last new tooth, the last time he says "skabetti"--and yet lasts were so much more elusive; you rarely knew when a last was a last until after the fact.

Now that M is in his teenage years, I sense that the lasts are going to come flying at us like balls in a batting cage (so, too, no doubt, will new firsts; some of which I don't want to think about right now).

M graduates from eight grade in a little over a week. It will be the first (if you don't count preschool graduation) of hopefully many graduations. I'm really excited for what high school has in store for him, and I'm pretty ready to be done with some of the headaches that come with middle school (done for one year anyway, before E and Z start). But still I can't help feeling the bitter-sweetness of this moment--M moving on from the school where he's spent the better part of nine years of his life. NINE years (that's 64.2 percent of his years so far). It feels momentous (to me anyway; when I ask M about how he feels, he responds, in typical 14-year-old fashion: "I don't really care.").

I don't really know what to say about this all...or even what to think about it. I'm too much in the moment to really process and reflect. Instead, I think I'll leave you with the poem I wrote on the occasion of M's first baseball practice, when he was in second grade.

First Practice
I glance up
from my book
slumped on the
hard corner of
the bleachers
to see bat smack
ball hit floor bounce
into the black
glove we brought
home less than
24 hours ago.
Milo's eyes,
astonished,
meet mine,
my arm reaches
out, thumbs-up.
We leave the
gym into blue
sky day. Him,
ecstatic; me, terrified
my Saturdays will
be swallowed whole.

Maybe I need to write a poem for his last baseball game...if it is the last.