This too shall pass -- unfortunately

It’s inevitable at this time of year: from the day the kids return to classes after April vacation, it feels like a rapidly accelerating slide to the end of the school year.

This year, more than ever, I wish I could slow it down. But I can’t, not even a little bit. After last year’s winter of blizzards, school went through the end of June, stretching out the post-April interlude just a little; this year we have just one skimpy day to make up, and school year 2011-12 rolls on out of town with the last departing school bus on June 19.

It’s not the summer vacation part I’m concerned about. Being self-employed, I don’t have to worry about filling long hours for the kids while I’m at work, and they don’t need or expect a lot of structured activities. We have a pond membership, so we’ll go swimming often, and we’ll head up to Maine some weekends. Not ‘til August will we leave town for any length of time.

But that’s all fine. What bothers me about seeing the school year end is just that I am finally at the point of parenting at which it all seems to be slipping away too fast.

Other parents tend to reach this stage a lot earlier, if I’m to believe what they say. We were barely past the first year when my parenting peers started lamenting how fast the children were growing up. But I never saw it that way. It wasn’t that the time dragged; it was just that contrary to everyone else’s claims, the early years of parenting seemed to me to happen very much in real time. That first year of babyhood seemed like it lasted…well, about a year. Toddlerhood was another couple of years, and the preschool stages seemed to take a couple more years after that.

I never chimed in when other parents wished they could stop time while their children were very small. I enjoyed each new stage, and seldom felt sad about seeing one stage end and another one begin. “Someday you’ll miss these times,” grandmothers would tell me as I pushed a two-year-old on the swing at the playground or read to a three-year-old at the library. Maybe someday I will, but it hasn’t happened yet. It was wonderful as it was happening, but I was always fine with the passage of time.

This year, it’s different, though. I’ve been saying since last September that we’ll never have a year as good as this one. The kids are both simply at such delightful stages. Tim is serious and hardworking in seventh grade; he hangs tight with a small circle of friends and gets along fine with the kids to whom he’s not as close. Holly made new friends this year; they don’t just play together, they organize their own book group discussions, write plays and call the boys in the class on their occasionally egregious behavior. Both are happy to leave for school in the morning, happy to sit down to their homework in the afternoon, and happy with free time on the weekends.

It’s not only contentment with the present that makes me want to stop time. Though I wish this weren’t the case, it’s also apprehension about the future. I have lots of friends with kids a few years older than mine: the more I hear about the rigors of high school honors courses, driver’s ed and college searches, the less I want to reach any of it.

I also really like our current living situation, but we’re renters; it won’t last forever. And I like the fact that my parents and in-laws and sisters and almost all my extended family members and friends are healthy and well at the moment. Overall, I like the current absence of significantly problematic circumstances in my life.

Unfortunately, this too shall pass. It’s all too good to last. If I do eventually become the kind of person who looks back on past phases and wishes I were still in their midst, it won’t be the playground days or the infancy days; it will be these days right now.

It can’t last; there’s nothing I can do about that except enjoy it right now, and honor the present, and observe it, and commemorate it. And so I write about all that is good; it’s the closest thing I know of to preserving it forever.

All is well (even if that's not compelling prose)

I’m afraid that as an essayist and blogger, I might find contentment to be my downfall.

It’s true of my journals, also. I set myself a minimum word count of 1,000 words per day, and there’s an undeniable inverse correlation between my level of immediate happiness on any given day and the number of words I’m able to churn out. When people are annoying me, circumstances are frustrating me, fate is confounding me, or opportunity seems not to be availing itself to me, I have plenty to say. I can write for hours on days like that. The worse mood I’m in, the more I have to say in my journal. One thousand words is nothing when I’ve descended into what cartoonist Pat Brady calls “the dungeon of resentment.”

But somehow my fingers run a little less fast and loose on the keyboard when things are looking up.

It’s not particularly logical. It seems as if there should be just as much to say about life’s more positive times as its lesser moments. I should be able to enthuse for page upon page about how great it all is. I certainly could back in high school and college, when a good day with friends or an auspicious first date could fill up my one-thousand word quota almost before I reached the end of my opening paragraph.

It’s different now, though. I sit down to attempt a new essay or newspaper column or blog entry and find myself feeling strangely devoid of commentary. “All is well,” I think to myself. “The kids are happy and healthy. We have housing and gainful employment. As far as I know, no one plans to serve us with a subpoena this month. What’s to talk about?”

Well, there’s always the option of commenting on how good it all is. But after one beta reader of my running/parenting memoir scribbled in the margins, “Enough with the gratitude!”, I’ve been a little wary of that theme. Gratitude, I’ve come to suspect, is a fine emotion with which to govern one’s soul but not such a fruitful one when it comes to incisive prose.

And no, I have definitely never reached the point of desperation at which I’d trade happiness and contentment for more writing material. Not in the least. I still suspect I once lost a job due to contentment – my overall happiness with my workload and the company in general made me too unambitious for that hard-driving, fast-innovating corporate environment – but not having enough difficult material at this particular time of my life to fill out a few essays is not, at heart, a complaint.

Life is good. It doesn’t make for compelling narrative, which is one reason that I devote the bulk of my revenue-producing writing to features about other people – I can’t rely on my own circumstances for enough hard-hitting material these days – but I’ll take it. No complaints here when everyone in my close circles appears to be happy, healthy and emotionally well-balanced. Circumstances will change; fate will throw its inevitable curve balls; and I’ll find myself writing page upon page to exorcise my darker emotions once again. But at the moment, writer’s block is a welcome, if paradoxical, sign that there’s just nothing wrong. All is well, and even if those are the only three words I can find to write on any given day, they’re good enough.

An ordinary Sunday

Just an ordinary Sunday.

After breakfast, I ran three miles. Not a particularly impressive distance, but it was 14 degrees out as I headed out the door. Three miles was all I could brace myself to do, and it was enough. Day 1646 of my running streak.

At church, I was prepared to teach Sunday school, but none of my students showed up, which is not unusual during ski season. So instead, I was able to attend the sermon given by our impressive student minister.

After church I stopped by my parents’ house. Mom gave me a batch of brownies to take home, and I showed her how to transfer an audiobook onto her iPod so she could listen to it in the car.

Back home, the kids had just finished unloading the dishwasher. True, I had left a note before I went to church specifically asking them to do that, so I wasn’t surprised, but it was still nice to return home to a partially cleaned-up kitchen.

My friends Jane and Donna came over to join me for a walk in the woods. We bundled up against the cold – typical for February, but not typical for this particular winter – and headed out planning to walk for an hour, but we were having such a good time being out in the woods and talking about a variety of issues that we stayed out for an hour and twenty minutes. Then we came home and ate the chocolate cookies that Tim had asked me to make earlier in the weekend.

Later in the afternoon I read the paper for a while and mixed up a batch of vegetarian chili for weekday lunches before heating up dinner: leftover pizza contributed by my parents, who had stopped by a new pizza parlor late last week. Over dinner, the four of us joked about Valentine’s Day ideas and made plans for Rick’s upcoming birthday. Tim and Holly played a video game together before bath time.

It wasn’t a holiday or a travel day or a day when we did anything very unusual. It was an ordinary day. And yet absolutely wonderful in its ordinariness. The life I live now is the life I dreamed of living when I was in my twenties and thirties: happy, well-adjusted kids and husband, comfortable inviting house, good friends, welcoming community, parents nearby. Getting paid for writing articles and essays. Being able to head out the back door for a walk in the woods any time I want to is the icing on the cake.

These are the kinds of weekend days the kids will remember, I think to myself as the day ends. Yes, they’ll remember vacations and special occasions, but also the days when we mostly just hang around enjoying each other’s company. Pizza for dinner; a video game or two; nothing spectacular. An ordinary day. I look back at my own childhood and remember similar days: listening to records, playing with the dog, maybe a board game or a ping-pong match with my sisters. Regular daily life.

But such a happy reality, then and now. Sure, special events make for great memories, and those are the ones that end up in the photo album: family trips, birthday parties, class plays, enormous snowmen, sand castles, baseball championships. We didn’t take any pictures yesterday; it didn’t occur to us that any of it was worth photographing, and we were probably right.

Perfectly ordinary days are difficult to capture in images: what would the composition of the photo actually consist of? Fortunately, the requirements for good memories aren’t quite so stringent.