Sunday morning, Massachusetts: it’s 23 degrees outside and there are just a few tired patches of snow left. I hear birdsong.
How impossibly magical is it that a morning ago I woke to the fullest orange moon hovering in the charcoal grey sky above the ocean? There was no wind. The light lifted itself up and brought blue sky, bright sun. Sand on our feet was hot and dry and damp and cool, depending where we walked.
The swimming pool was almost chilly. From chlorine to clothing to suitcases onto things like lunch and an ice cream, airport, tram to terminal, security (Remy: “You can’t believe what they can see when you walk through; it’s disgusting.”) to the crowded airplane.
We were three rows, strung like beads in seat E (let me say, I’m going to write about this, someday soon, just this phenomenon of how people help—or don’t—when you seat a just turned-three year-old on her own on an airplane). Less than three hours later, airport and forty past that, home. I don’t care that I’ve flown my entire life it’s an astonishing thing, really.
**
On the beach, Remy walked ahead whilst Saskia scrambled to keep up. That was one dynamic I felt much more aware of hanging with my two youngest kiddies for a week. Those little legs hurrying, those arms pumping—that entire being—focused upon one thing: Rem-y.
She wanted to play Yahtzee, too. She snuggled up and listened to our chapter book. She wanted to sit next to him at the table. You get the picture.
Remy would get annoyed. Understandably. There was so much she couldn’t keep up with; so many times she slowed him down. And then, she’d do something so funny and silly and sweet—blow bubbles in the swimming pool, let’s say—he couldn’t help but laugh along with me at her utter cuteness.
It wasn’t all annoyance or amusement; he played with her lots. They would commune, and sometimes when they did, her very own her-ness shone through and I, the mama, would appreciate how much she is who she is because these big brothers—this one, with her for a week perhaps more than the others since they end up together so very often (they both wake up in the mornings, natch)—have shaped her, not always by what they are doing with her but by their them-ness. When Saskia sings, she includes Ballad of Czolgose, Bohemian Rhapsody, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Counting to Four and Song of the Soul in her repertoire. She was confident enough to befriend pretty much anyone and everyone, including Ava, aged four.
I really admired and reveled in them both, Remy and Saskia, all week long (oh, and wrangled with her, too—thinking often three is just not a reasonable age—and sometimes placated him to the brink of my breaking point). I really admire them both, I mean, all the time (and their brothers, too).
**
As absorbing and demanding as it can be (and was, even, thank goodness with a lovely and beloved grandmother, who did oh-so-much) to be the sole parent for the younger set for a week, I drank in place and my trio of companions and the constant sound of waves against shore and return to the dregs of winter and the promise of spring restored. That, too, is wholly magical.
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Until the end of April I am participating in the National Network of Abortion Funds’ second annual Bowlathon for abortion access. If you’d like to help support this critical cause, you can sponsor my Standing in the Shadows’ team (that’s you, folks, my readers). I’d love it if people bowled or otherwise got together, passed around a bowling ball bag or a hat and raised monies that way—and sent me photos of your gathering.
