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I have nightmares about school starting. I schedule and never miss appointments with all these boys around to remind me. Hair, dentist, orthodontist—check, check, check. I just barely collected then trashed the burnt up firework cylinders from the 4th. I have a craving for Red Mango with a granola mix in. All the time. The kids go back and forth from filthy to clean but only because they’re wet from the garden hose. Boxes of otter pops are dusted off as soon as they’re opened. Afternoons are frittered away on stacks of library books. Okay, I’m lying: Spongebob. We’ve broken four super soaker squirt guns and now we’re on to water balloons whose plastic fragments cling to my windows and driveway. We know the skateguards’ names at the rink. Worse, they know ours! And they yell them out loud while my kids prove their learned summer bravery: the youngest playing glove hockey, throwing his gloves all over the ice, the older one ignoring my cries for them to stop throwing things on the ice, to watch where they jump, to give the cone back to the kid they just stole it from. I think nothing of spending $14 on sub-zero just to make it from evening to bedtime without locking my kids in the backyard while I zone out staring at the computer.
We’ve reached it, we’re here: the dog days.
My flowers have died from my lack of watering. (The kids are hogging the hose.) And when I do finally water, I watch it as it percolates down through the bone dry soil and lament my carelessness while making silent promises to not buy hanging baskets next spring. I will forget, allured by their beauty, my grand visions of not losing all will to do anything productive mid-summer. I just spent too much money on groceries that have already been eaten! Morgen has had cereal for dinner not once, not twice, but three times in a week’s time. We’ve forgotten what bedtime is and we are like monks now—rising with the sun, going to sleep with it too.
Really, I love it like this. When the force of my day is like ocean’s tidal shift—and I just float with it, in and out, doing whatever, whenever. I can’t help it. Really. It must be a July thing. I’m sweaty. I’m hot and tired. I feel the physical toils of mothering down in my bones and across my back, and at night I sleep and sleep the deep slumber of a mother hard-worked. And that’s got to mean something, right? Because even in the midst of the dog days, when I feel at my least productive and run haggard by having fun (imagine the thought!) I still always think: they are such good kids.
Tell me...what do you do in the summertime?
