Sunday evening snapshot

It’s Sunday evening, and I’m writing at our dining room table. Suzannah sits across from me, coloring an elaborate butterfly with gel pens. My children have both taken to coloring mandalas lately; they wake early, and our mornings, now that we don’t have to take Isaac to daycare before school starts, are blessedly unhurried, so after bags are packed and teeth are brushed they often sit quietly and color. We fell in love with mandalas this summer when one of Matt’s cousins brought a book of them to the cabin, and now we color them all the time.

Isaac is in the family room playing in a fort constructed of a couple of our dining room chairs and the comforter from his bed. He’s taken the belt from his ninja costume and tied it around his head because the kids have spent the last week watching Karate Kid (I & II) and there’s a lot of crane moves and wild kicks happening around here these days.

Matt is out for an evening run. This afternoon he suggested a recipe I’ve had my eye on, too (a combination of vegetarian Italian “sausage”, escarole and white beans), and he volunteered to do all the food prep when he comes home, so I’m taking a moment to just enjoy the quiet. An hour ago I rose from the couch, frustrated because the nap I tried to take just didn’t happen, barked at the kids that they were not allowed to be in the same room because they were being terrible to each other and annoying the ever-loving shit out of me, and grumpily opened up my laptop to tweak a lesson plan I realized just won’t work this week. But the kids settled into their own quiet play, and I’m sipping a glass of wine, and the misty damp air hanging over our backyard is soothing my rough edges a bit. I do love this weather -- the stillness, the gradual darkening at five o’clock in the afternoon. I love that when I drove to school on Friday morning the light was still so soft even though the day promised sunshine, and Puget Sound shimmered against the mountains in a wash of brilliant blue. The leaves fall over the sidewalks, and there are certain ordinary streets around my neighborhood that take my breath away each morning right now. Yesterday afternoon I ran through those streets, through the fallen leaves still soft underneath my sneakers. A few weeks from now they’ll crunch and crumble and I will love that, too.

I paused in writing this to run a bath for my son, who’s spent the weekend playing soccer with his sister in the front yard and playing hard at gymnastics and is coated with that faint grime of boyhood, layers of sweat, that vaguely potato-y smell behind his ears. He danced around the hallway in his underwear, practicing his karate moves. I poured his bubble bath and returned to my laptop. He called to me, “Mommy? Did you check if there’s no spiders?”

“No spiders, Buddy,” I replied, distracted. He asks every time.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Did you check everywhere? Even the corners?”

“I always check everywhere, Baby,” I said. Satisfied, he proceeded to apply bubbles to his chin until he looked like Santa Claus. Now he’s got Batman and some other thing, a Rescue Bot maybe, and he’s absorbed in play. Five more minutes until we wash hair, I tell him.

I had an entire blog entry roiling about in my head earlier this week: it was about teaching and teenagers and how much I love them and how defensive I feel when someone who doesn’t work with them tries to tell me that they don’t know how I do it and how their kid is not like “those” kids and how I just smile even though I want to rage and how I wish I could talk about a frustrating day at work without it becoming a representation of all teenagers and all teachers and all of public education and how sometimes I feel sorry for people who don’t get to experience the hilarity and rawness and absurdity that I do in the course of a single day, because it is a privilege, a gift, a joy. But I’ve written that entry before, a million times. I will write it again. But tonight I’ve lost a little steam, I guess, and not in a bad way. Tonight I’m just trying to let go of my earlier grumpiness, the tiniest bitterness about my unsuccessful nap, and appreciate this moment: my son splashing in the tub. My husband, sautéing onions. My daughter, deep in concentration over her paper.

A bit ago I wrapped her in my arms and kissed her forehead. She tolerated it for a moment but grew impatient.

“Mom,” she complained.

“I know, I know,” I said. “But sometimes I just have to hug you for a second, because I know we get grumpy with each other, and I sound cranky, and I just want to have a moment when I get to remind you that I still love you so much, all the time.”

She smiled.

“I know,” she said, “but can you please let me go now?”

It’s so bittersweet. So much letting go.

And I suppose that’s why I write here, ultimately. To keep and hold each ordinary moment, because moments pass. But moments are also what make a life, and tonight, I am deeply grateful for mine.