Remembering Summer

Hi, friends! I’m still here, but summer 2017 is kicking my butt, really it is. Well, I suppose I should say my legs, yes, summer is kicking my legs. You probably think I’m training for a marathon or perfecting my squat form or that I’m a new beach body coach – ha! When in reality, I am just clumsy and have fallen down several times – no joke! In fact, two weeks ago I bit it when I fell off of my parents dock and landed back first in the lake; I scraped up my left leg pretty badly. I’ll spare you the gruesome pictures, but we’ll just say I needed prescription pain meds and antibiotics.

Besides my big fall, I’ve just been busy with summer life – you know how it goes, the days are long and they fill up fast. We play hard; our clothes are stained with watermelon juice and lemonade; our fingers sticky from holding melting Popsicle sticks; our bodies become bronzed and we smell of aerosol sunscreen, camp fires, and lake water; we stay up later, listen to music a little louder and dance in our driveways.  It’s all so marvelously ordinary and maybe that’s why it’s getting to me.

Summer seems to be slipping away like sand in my hand. The tighter I squeeze it the more quickly it escapes my grasp. I worry that I won’t remember how my daughter says headfore when she means forehead and clothwash when she means washcloth, or the way my kids melt into my arms when they want to snuggle. I worry that I haven’t taken them on enough adventures, or enough trips to the pool and park, enough play dates and story times, or read them enough books, or taught them enough about God. I try to memorize their smiles, their eyes, their tiny little noses. I drink espresso to keep my eyes open, I don’t want to miss a single moment.

And the not missing anything is exhausting – the most emotionally taxing type of exhaustion I’ve ever experienced.  In all my efforts and good intentions to never miss a thing – it, ironically, feels like I accidentally slept in one morning and when I finally woke up my tiny humans had started to dress themselves and feed themselves and busy themselves.

Even though my husband and I taught them to do these things slowly, diligently, lovingly over many months, when I wake from my slumber I forget the vexing days that went into the teaching. You forget all the hard, long, exasperating hours.

It just SMACK hit me in the face that my babies are trying so hard to grow up and become adults, to be like mommy and daddy. And I want nothing more than to stop them, suspend the moments of their youth, freeze time, and let them be little for a little while longer.

I worry that they will never have enough of a childhood and that I simply cannot keep up with slowing them down in the face-paced world I brought them into.  I wonder who they would be if they grew up in a different place and a different time. I wonder what type of mom I would be if I was raising them in a different place and a different time. I wonder if they wouldn’t be in such rush to the destination of adulthood if the world moved a little slower. If calendars didn’t exist to fill up, and days didn’t need schedules and agendas and to do lists.

And when I worry all I can do is pray that I am getting it right. That when I choose love over hate and giving over taking and joy over sadness and adventure over certainty and humility over arrogance and patience over haste that my children are watching me and learning from me and wanting to be like me.  I pray that even on the hardest days I remember that I am who they want to become and that I have to be my very best self.

So, I will try to remember this summer, to slow it down, to savor it like a heady glass of Cabernet. I’ll swirl it around in my mind, painting a picture in my head. I’ll revel in the moments of my children’s youth.