Nine Reasons I Love Summer

Pool Digressions, Part II

All the swimming we've been doing around here might not seem momentous, but let me tell you, here  at "Camp Fun Mom" (which isn't, according to Elder Girleen, all that fun, and where the mornings' schedule of activities isn't complete until she teases Younger Girleen until she roars like a small enraged lion) it's a huge deal, particularly since Younger Girleen spent much of the previous month unwilling to stick much more than a big toe in water.  She didn't even want to get in the bathtub!* 

During the month of June, getting Younger Girleen in the swimming pool at all required the sort of diplomatic skills needed to diffuse high-level tensions between warring nations; once she was in the water, the only thing that kept her there was a death-grip on the straps of my bathing suit that, though comforting to her, played hell on my my sense of modesty.  Because of all that, I was pretty sure that July's twice-a-week swimming lessons, signed up for in February before we discovered this new-found dislike of water, would be a blood bath.  

I kept these dark thoughts to myself and talked up swimming lessons like nobody's business.  Wow, I have mermaids for daughters!  The teachers (from Emory U's swim team) are so cool!  They have swimming in the Olympics! The Olympics will be on TV in three weeks!  We'll stay up to watch them! 

Even so, when we got to the pool the first day, I was prepared to have to peel Younger Girleen off my body. 

But the teachers stood in a line in front of the pool and called out the names of their students.  Younger Girleen heard hers...

... and trotted off, her hand confidingly nestled in her teacher's.

And that was that.  

And by the time I looked at the other end of the pool,   Elder Girleen was occupied with her class, doing the back stroke.  Doing the breast stroke, which I didn't tackle until probably age 10 or 11.  

And me?  A moment's work, and there I was, transformed, for thirty minutes at least, into the sort of mom I'd always noticed and often envied, but never imagined I could ever be:  she who sits under an umbrella with something icy to drink and reads while her offspring are occupied in the water.  

Of course, because such a thing had never happened before, I had nothing to read.  But by the next lesson, I was prepared, with a copy of this year's Best American Short Stories (the one edited by Stephen King), tucked into the enormous tote bag any trip to the pool requires these days.  

I found my chair shaded-by-umbrella, I got my something icy from the snack bar upstairs, I opened  Best American Short Stories  to the first page of the first story.  

A mom acquaintance strolled by.  

— What're you reading?  she asked.

I closed the book and turned it so she could see the cover. 

—  Grown-up reading!  she said admiringly.

I admitted I hadn't actually read more than the first sentence; she resumed her stroll. 

Elder Girleen's lesson was taking place at the near end of the pool.  I glanced up from my book, searching for a glimpse of her wet, sleek head.  She was hanging on the side, listening carefully to the instructor as he modeled proper form for the crawl.  He said something, she nodded, a broad white-toothed smile transformed her face.  

I bent my head to my book and read the second sentence of the first story.

I looked up and toward the other end of the pool.  Younger Girleen's class sat at the edge of the pool, feet dangling, as their instructor took them one by one into the water. Younger Girleen's turn came; her instructor stretched out her arms, without hesitation Younger Girleen jumped into them.  

I bent my head and reread the second sentence of the first story.  

How odd it felt, to be off-stage.  It wasn't a bad feeling, by any means, but it was an unfamiliar one.  To step back and see my children as themselves, to be able to observe them from a remove:  parents of children under the age of six or so are seldom given such opportunities. 

I looked up again.  Elder Girleen hung on the side of the pool, chatting to the girl beside her.  

I bent my head and reread the second sentence of the first story. 

At the other end of the pool, Younger Girleen was steering a kickboard through the water,  serious as some small tug boat.

I looked down at my book.  And closed it.  

I suppose some mothers have the knack — of using their time wisely.  Of compartmentalizing...of making use of every single spare second they've got to keep a more grown-up life afloat.

Some mothers have the knack, but apparently I'm not one of them. 

I know I spend a lot of time — probably too much time – on this blog hashing out the either/or of motherhood and work, the before and after of childlessness and parenthood.  For some folks, these aren't even categories that invite discussion.  They don't matter — or maybe those folks just gotten past those questions.  

Me, I'm still standing here in the shallow end,  wondering how to make sense of my life, now that I'm audience, stagehand, and sometimes, yes,  even bit performer shoring up the leads, all of us participating in such a beautiful, beautiful, mesmerizing show.

 *Are you afraid of going down the drain? asked Shortsighted Mama when we first started having this "situation." Oh yeah, said Shortsighted Mama's higher-IQ'd offspring, grasping that tow rope of explanation thrown out so handily, even though such a thought had never occurred to her before).  

Pool Digressions, Part I

— Writing about driving??? an astute reader might ask.  —This woman thinks she writes a lot about driving?  Geez, her last six or so posts talk about the swimming pool! Not to mention the fact that we've visited that tired old that-was-then (before children), this-is-now (after them) rumination before.  

The astute reader who pointed this out would be right, of course.  I could retort it's my blog and I'll repeat myself if I want to, but I've only got about two people reading this who come to this site of their own free will and not because they're searching for information on potty training by the signs. God knows, I don't want to alienate them.  Besides, I'm a little bugged by this pattern myself.  

Ah ha!  Therein lies the rub of blogs, or one of them at least. Off-the-cuff, written on-the-fly, or seemingly so, blogs might be most seductive in their immediacy.  They're not life by any means, but they're more like the verbal equivalent of some running video-cam left pointed at a room than any writing that came before them. 

We live in such a segmented world.  A television channel devoted only to science fiction? Another only to labor-and-delivery stories?  Who would've thought it? There are better examples (or at least more bizarre ones) out there, but you get the gist.

Though saying I've chosen "writing" and "motherhood" as my beat (with digressions now and then into nature writing) implies a bit more agency about the decision to start this blog than there actually was,  I am writing within certain (self-imposed) confines.  It's a little like writing a sonnet, or a  villanelle:  because of the structural rules, each bears a family resemblance to the next.  And because of the requirements of the form, a lot is whittled away.  

And in my case, what seems to be left once all that whittling has taken place seems to be ruminations about youth, and the swimming pool.   

But as we all know,  the first axiom trotted out in a writing class is always this:  write what you know. 

And right now — apologies to everyone reading this stuck in an overly-air conditioned office out there somewhere — if I know anything, I know the pool.  

Hot Town

I know, I know:  if I were a better person,  driving would probably come up less often in my writing, the way of the world currently being $4.19 gas and an environmental crisis and all.  

The reality is, we actually don't do that much driving.   We live south of Interstate 20, and out of loyalty to the 'hood, stubbornness and just plain perversity, I try to stay on the wrong side of those tracks as often as I can.   

When I set up the Girleens' swimming lessons for the summer, though, I was asleep at the switch, and now I'm spending a couple  a days a week for the month of July shuttling them back and forth to the swimming pool.

But I suspect that even if this were not the case, the act of driving would take up more space in my writing than it probably should, simply because driving becomes a meditative act when one spends much of their waking time with small children:  yes, the small children are also right there with you, strapped into their seats like tiny paratroopers, but they're just as lulled as the next person by tires on asphalt, the blur of view beyond the window, and the dreamy life-is-a-beautiful-art-movie  sensation caused by being in a car with the radio on.  

In the car, I seem to have time to think.  Apparently Elder Girleen does to, for the car is where, the other afternoon, she asked me the following:

Mommy, why is Prince Eric always unconscious in the Little Mermaid?

In the car, we pass the HAND CAR WASH, a cinderblock building  painted a shout of orange so brilliant, so orange, it practically breaks eardrums,   where an itinerant BBQ cook has set up a rickety, surely-not-condoned-by-the-health-department smoker; we wait out the light, we turn, the dangerous, alluring scent of well-cooked ribs pervades the car.  

I'm hungry, the girleens chorus.   

In the car, we listen to Let It Be as we inch through rush hour traffic, because music hath charms that soothes the savage beast, also six-year-olds and three-year-olds who've been swimming for hours on July afternoons who have just been chauffeured past the mouth-watering aroma of BBQ ribs a mother would never dream of letting them eat.  

Oh, the summer I was sixteen, when the ashy, head-spinning taste of my first filched cigarettes filled my mouth and time was immaterial, the summer I was sixteen, when we debated life's big questions, one of which was this:

Beatles?  

or

Stones?

I was a girl for Mick, through and through.  The Beatles?  Too hippy-dippy; they didn't have that necessary edge.  Sentimental, I thought, sappy ... and then I lit another cigarette and set the record player needle into the groove of my current fave Patti Smith album, Easter. 

And now here I am, forty-three, and the Rolling Stones mean naught to the girleens, though Wild Horses is a song that's gotten their approval. The Beatles are the band we listen to.  

And all those songs I thought so sentimental 25 years ago?  What a beautiful soundtrack they make as you travel through your life with kids in tow,  your youth waving goodbye in the rear-view mirror.