To be all bloggy and serial-post-ish, if you read my last piece, you know that mushrooms did not make it better and that we’ve been having a few of those days (but who’s counting?). Throughout this swampy, soupy, clingy, dragged out week, I keep running into parents—even my Interweb partners-in-blog—having their own versions of Alexander’s most particularly terrible day. No one I know has yet fled down under.
True confession: we experienced more miserable moments this week, more of them than I’d care to admit to and certainly more than I’d have wished to endure. Alas, real life was a bit stinky this week, stinky in ways that weren’t unexpected. So, if you run into me—or jot a comment wanting color commentary and a play-by-play—I could regale you with no-grill Lucien, Saskia whacking her brother in the eye not by accident but not on purpose and really hurting him (she was horribly upset by what she’d done, for real scared—and he was very upset, too, although he’s okay) or the Japanese takeaway meal that the restaurant got wrong and how mama and eldest son then got into a tiff.
Again, forgive my writing from the middle of things (you can catch up), but in seriousness, after the mushroom debacle and before any much-needed sleep, came a call that a friend of ours had just died. Doug was a truly upstanding man, and he’d been in the hospital for a few weeks. Still, even if you know someone’s struggling in a hospital you try to let the he’s only 51 years-old part outweigh struggling in a hospital part. You are thus crushed to hear news like this (especially having lost another friend, another parent to a young child just three weeks earlier).
I’ve walked around all week being washed over by sadness at unexpected moments. I’ve also pushed through that sensation of straining to find air when the waves are crashing upon me by thinking: even this, the stinky week, the cranky, the seemingly endless, relentless, crabby hard time, savor it. And believe it or not, I haven’t just thought it I’ve felt it, grateful. Miserable, too, I’ve felt cranky and overtired and fried and cooked crisp and all that. And grateful, for the chance to be this unhappy in this moment.
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Oh, and I must add, during those two most clingy, miserable, no-good-very-bad days, my mother and stepfather swung back through en route from Maine to Philadelphia. It seemed that my stepfather brought a little of his own overheated ill humor with him, but he was quickly outdone by the crankiness we could produce. He has to work a little harder and dig a little deeper to outdo our cranks. He probably needs to start middle school or high school again to find his depth.
My mother said on Friday night, “Perhaps we came at the very worst moment.” She added, “I’d like to have been more helpful, but they really needed you.”
I’d already been thinking they’d picked a very worst moment—and I should have seen that very worst coming, since I’d been stressing about all these transitions for a while—and yet, I gamely hoped we’d be in better shape than we were.
Friday morning, though, she and I along with our cusp-of-second grader and toddler went up to Lucien’s new school for the all-school opening ceremony and so we all got to see the school brimming with community and welcome. I was blown away and a wee bit teary to experience that kind of love in a school. I was practically ready to leave my second grader there in hopes they’d just take one more at the very last second.
But the days-from-second-grader and I left Saskia with her grandmother (see, it was very helpful, in fact, that they were around; at the very same time, the grandfather was picking up school supplies for the seventh grader) and we went to meet Remy’s wonderful second grade teacher. Even my most reluctant student seemed to like her and he chatted up his student teacher (a graduate teaching fellow) and ran onto the playground towards his buddies (and also worriedly pointed out that there was too much grass on the kickball area, way too much grass).
Because the willing grandmother was with the toddler, we had time to pick up challah and a post-meeting-your-teacher smoothie. In fact, had the toddler not clocked him that evening, I think he was doing okay (I guess we’ll see; school doesn’t start until Wednesday).
So, the point is, I’m really lucky because our relationship with my mama and step-papa is this: they came, they saw us when things were admittedly as bad as they get—and they do, dear readers and friends—get bad sometimes (and on a week like this, when we lose a friend, we parents, not just me and my dear husband, but our entire cohort of parents in this small town, walk around especially tender), and well, it was kind of just okay.
The parts we hope significantly improve and require our creative and hardworking efforts, we’re on the case (with long ways to go); the parts that will pass, in truth, once at a tiny remove from their intensity, are already a bit better.
As in, the humidity broke. Remy and Lucien ended up bringing the birthday collage Remy made to Jake and staying for cake, an expedition to the fair, dinner and a sleepover. Ezekiel enjoyed his baby sister and his papa and grilled peaches and Buffy. I went to Boston, performed a most lovely wedding ceremony, and returned exhausted yet refreshed.
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Seventh grade requires a long, long list of supplies. You can almost see the stack of work that will be wrested from all those materials. If only I’d gotten a photograph of the almost second-grader (who won’t require any school supplies) coveting them.
