Summer 2002:

I spend the summer sitting in the shade, watching four year old Zachary somersault under water, swimming like a porpoise every afternoon. I hold a novel in one hand, a bottle of water in the other. I might look inactive, but I am busy growing a human being. On Labor Day, the last day the pool is open, I send my husband with the boys to swim. I tell him that I just need to rest a little and then I’ll join them. Instead, I go into labor, call the midwife and two hours later, give birth to a baby girl in a rented birthing tub in the privacy of my bedroom.

Summer 2003:

My baby girl hates the water. I purchase one of those complicated baby floating devices, dress her in a cute swimsuit with flouncy skirt. I wrangle her into the float and she is screaming before her toes even touch the water. She hates the pool. Every time I dip her into the pool, she screams her hatred of all things wet. (In contrast, a baby boy six weeks younger floats placidly in the middle of the pool, bobbing along.) By the end of the summer, I spend my time at the pool crouched over, holding her hands so she can practice walking her around the concrete. She still rebuffs my attempts to introduce her to the joys of the water.

Summer 2004:

She’ll be two soon. This is the summer she goes into the pool–as long as I am also in the pool with her. I spend a lot of time sitting in the baby pool, water at shoulder level. She clings to me, my own personal koala baby. One day, I’m in the pool while my husband sits on the side visiting with invited guests. Their two year old is also in the pool, but he loved the water and was unafraid. Meanwhile, I had to be in the pool with my cautious daughter. Suddenly, the boy’s mom called his name. His father splashed into the pool and scooped up their son who had been floating face down, only feet from me. (Yeah, way to let the kid drown without even noticing, Mel!) All the same, I had a moment of smug self-satisfaction–that was exactly why I was in the pool within arm’s reach of my daughter. A bit later, my daughter plunged like a rock underwater as I watched, only inches away. She screams, sputters.

Summer 2005:

She’ll be three at the end of the summer. She likes the pool, but it takes her a few weeks to warm up to the idea of getting in. She spends the summer cringing when other kids splash, turning her face away. She likes to sit on the steps of the big pool and likes for me to get in with her, but most of the time, she is content to play in the wading pool. Sometimes she begs to go come to the pool, then is ready to leave after twenty minutes. I don’t have to get in anymore, much to my relief. By the end of the summer, she finally dips her face into the water and shocking us all, plunges under the surface of the water completely.

Summer 2006:

She’s three and three-quarters. She picks up this summer where she left off the summer before. She occasionally dips her face into water–while pinching closed her nose–and she doesn’t mind the splashing so much. She’s become a big fan of the pool. At the end of summer, she’s experimenting with kicking and swimming.

Summer 2007:

She’ll be five by the end of the summer. She teaches herself to swim at the beginning of summer and learns to hold her breath so she no longer has to hold her nose. She becomes obsessed with the diving board and wants to jump but she is too afraid. She walks to the very end of the board, wearing a life jacket, peers over the edge and can’t quite get up the nerve. After several weeks of this, near the end of summer, she finally jumps. Her life jacket helps her bob right back up and she is hooked. From this moment on, she jumps off the diving board with great glee.

Summer 2008:

She’s five now, but will turn six at the end of the summer. Since the pool closed last September, she’s been asking when it would open again. A week after it opens, she insists she is ready to take the swim test: a swim down the length of the pool, then thirty seconds of treading water. (“Shredding water,” she calls it.) And so, yesterday, that’s what she did. She and her long-time buddy, a fellow five-and-a-half-year-old) both took and passed the swim test.

Now, my baby girl is a swimming fool. She swam for four straight hours today and tonight, when I said, “You look tired,” she didn’t disagree as she usually does. She loves to do various dives off the board.

And I sit in the shade, looking up from my novel occasionally, thankful that I am not seven months pregnant.

 

My husband dropped off a carload of boys. They appeared noisily in the backyard. I heard them before I saw them, as usual.

Then the phone rang. “Hey, I just dropped off the boys. You need to check on your boy. He wasn’t chosen for the talent show and he cried the whole way home.”

I peered out the kitchen window after I hung up the phone. Sure enough, my boy stood alone by the tire swing, clutching the chain with both hands, leaning his cheek on the metal links.

The other kids had all come bounding inside and were upstairs starting a video game. (“I call the green controller!”) I slid open the door and walked to my boy, this ten year old child with a broken heart.

“Hey, are you okay?”

“No.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I rubbed his back.

He turned a tear-stained face to me and said, “It’s just that when something really disappointing happens and everyone keeps talking about it that makes it so much worse!” His friends had tried to console him on the ten minute ride home and their very acts of boyish kindness turned my son into a sobbing mess.

I hugged him, told him I was sorry and that lots of times I wasn’t chosen for things either and that I knew how upsetting it was. “Do you want to stay out here for awhile?” Yes, he did.

The next time I glanced out the window, he was lying on his stomach on the tire swing, swaying slightly, weeping.

When I looked again, he was prone under the tire swing, chin propped on his hands, still crying.

A bit later, he’d rotated onto his back in the sandy playground mulch, still under the tire swing. His fleece jackets picked up bits of woody mulch. Now he not only looked sad, he also looked like he lived in the wilderness with Survivorman.

I thought wallowing in his sorrow was understandable and I’m all for feeling one’s feelings. However, after an hour of snotty distress, I suggested a bath. What better place to finish crying, right? He agreed and stood to his feet, so I brushed off the mulch from his front and back. I pushed his sweaty hair back from his reddened face and noted the snotty dirt clinging to the tip of his nose.

And so, while bathing, he finished mourning his lost dream of making his whole school laugh. When he finally appeared again, clean and in his right mind, all the neighborhood kids were gone. My husband had taken our daughter to visit a friend. The teenagers had gone to a movie. So, my boy and I were alone.

I baked brownies and when I brought him one, I said, “Shall we never speak of it again?” and he said, “Never.”

The problem with being optimistic is that from time to time, your expectations are crushed. When all your friends watch, the humiliation is almost more than you can bear. I know this because back in the day (before the Internet, IMAGINE!), I auditioned for music groups in college and was rejected. To this day, my writing is sometimes rejected for publication (when I manage to send it out). I know what it’s like to not be chosen.

The difference between me and my son is that he is still an optimist. Also? I have never wept while rolling in the dirt under a tire swing.

I wish I could protect my kids from this sort of distress. In fact, while he composed his comedy routine last weekend, I wanted to stop him. I wanted to tell him not to do it, not to try out. I wanted to warn him that being hit by a banana and saying “fo-shizzle” is just not funny. But his friends thought he was hilarious and furthermore, he thought he was oh-so-funny. Who am I to dent his confidence?

So I watched him go out into the world, figuring he’d return to me roughed up a bit. I hate this part of being a parent. Wouldn’t it be better just to keep the kids inside, remote control clutched in one hand, protected from what might happen out there?

Of course, it’s better to let them go, to be a safe place for them to return, even if they choose to cry while rolling in the dirt. Disappointment is part of life. I have better perspective than he does: I know that this is a small thing in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps next time I am a weeping mess, I will remember that perspective changes everything.

(And I must confess that I am sort of grateful that he wasn’t chosen because how much more humiliating might it have been if he performed his comedy routine and NO ONE LAUGHED in the whole school.)

Did I mention that my husband, a pastor, is leaving the pastorate as of July 1? After eighteen years in the ministry, he’s decided to veer off in a slightly different direction, one which does not require a sermon delivery every Sunday morning. And so, like a stage-coach turning into a pumpkin, I become a regular person, no longer a pastor’s wife.

Which is really fine by me. I never did take that class at Bible College: The Pastor’s Wife. I took Greek and Old Testament and even The Pastor and His Ministry because I never intended to become a pastor’s wife. For one thing, I don’t have the hair for it. For another, I’m introverted, not good at hand-shaking and wide smiles and inviting church ladies over for hot cups of tea in delicate china cups.

The sad thing, though, as I ponder our ten years in this church is that I’ve become close to virtually no one. No one really telephones me to see how I’m doing or to invite me to go anywhere. I put the blame on myself, of course. For one thing, there’s my pesky introverted personality. For another, my life since we’ve been here has been dominated by one clingy baby (my son) after the next (my daughter). And now that my daughter heads off to school, I’m homebound again because of my job (at home) working on the computer.

These outer circumstances cannot possibly tell the whole story. I have lived behind a moat in many ways since becoming pastor’s wife. Sure, there’s a bridge over the moat, but usually that bridge is in the upright and locked position.

I sense that people view me as a self-sufficient island, a woman who needs no shoulder to cry upon, no hand to hold, and in some ways that’s true. The older I get, the more confident I become, the less needy and desperate to funnel my sorrows into the nearest available ear. However, I think back to college when making friends was second-nature, the the inevitable drawing together of magnets with opposite poles. I miss that. I miss the immediate connection that I found with those friends so long ago. (Many of those friends are still dear to me.)

I don’t know. It just seems sad to me that I am leaving our church and I feel so disconnected already. I never let down my guard, never lowered the drawbridge and even though I am safe, I am untouched.

We’re not moving, so I imagine that friendships can continue to develop, but I mourn for what never was, for what never grew. I don’t quite understand it–I wonder if I’ve become so dull, so unapproachable, so glum that no one wants to hang out with me? Or is it that adult friendships among women with families and jobs and responsibilities are impossible to establish? I have tried–God knows I have tried–but nothing has caught fire. My attempts are like a pile of damp firewood, unable to respond to a spark, smoldering but never lighting.

I’m a fun girl, I really am. I was, at least. I hope to be again. Maybe that will be easier since I will no longer bear the title “Pastor’s Wife.” I’m passing along the tiara and sash.

The pool opened today.  So naturally, my daughter woke up at 6:22 a.m., asking to take a shower.  I told her to go back to bed, that it was too early and she returned at 6:45 a.m. with a follow-up request.

So, she showered for . . . a long time.  I slept while she showered and sang.  My husband got up at some point and went to the office.  My son came through my room on his way to the shower and took a very long shower himself.

Meanwhile, I rebuffed every attempt my daughter made to engage me in conversation.  Mainly, she wanted to know if it was time to go to the pool yet.  She asked this in twenty minute intervals.

The the phone rang and it was the guy from India (Dell) and he wanted to guide me through installing my hard drive and I said no thank you, can you please email me the instructions?  And he said, “Well, you just remove two screws, slide out the old hard drive and slide in the new.”  I can do that, having done that same open-heart surgery repeatedly last Thursday.

My husband telephoned.

At which point (9:30 a.m.), I gave up the attempt to sleep and muddled from bed and headed immediately downstairs to switch the laundry from dryer to basket, washer to dryer and dirty clothes head to washer.

My husband returned home to mock my appearance and I can’t blame him.  You’d mock, too.

We had a change in plans and he took our son to baseball practice.  My daughter and I went to Goodwill to browse the stuffed animal bins and emerged $9.73 poorer with two bags full of stuff that I will threaten to throw away by Monday.  It’s the browsing and shopping that makes her so happy.  Plus it distracted her from the vast hours until it was time for the pool.

After baseball practice, I took a van full of kids to the pool, leaving my husband home to study.  My daughter (in her aqua blue swimsuit dotted with cherries) hesitated for a bit and then literally plunged into the pool, dunking her head and kicking her legs.  She requested permission to jump from the diving board with her life jacket on (she hasn’t passed the swim test yet, but I think she probably could).  Permission was granted, so she spent the rest of her time standing in line, leaping, swimming to the side and repeating the process.

I started reading Atonement.

Then my husband arrived and we switched off.  I didn’t have enough time to really do much, so I went to the fruit market and stopped by the grocery store for milk.  I am unimaginative.

Oh, and I know it’s dull, but the weather was glorious.  The meteorologists told us it would be 66 degrees and partly sunny, but it was 75 degrees with clouds only on the far reaches of the horizons, clinging to the mountains like well-lathered sheep.  Truly, a perfect opening day for the pool.

And now, for the next ninety days, I will have to answer this question:  “Can we go to the pool?” which is always followed up with this question as we leave the pool, “Can we get some ice cream at McDonald’s?”   Ah, summertime.

My computer still lives.

Which is very strange.

However, I am grateful for each moment it still breathes.

Oh, here’s a funny thing.  I taught my daughter how to turn on the shower (two cranks of the hot water knob, one crank of the cold water knob for the perfect temperature) and now she’s Miss Independent.  She took four showers today, two of them without bothering to ask me.

(Shhhh, don’t tell the water conservation people.  If you do tattle, be sure to mention that sometimes we drive recreationally, too!)

I am living under my own personal storm cloud which rains on me and only me for no particular reason.  And I have no umbrella.

Yesterday morning, my laptop refused to load.  After some time, it chose to do what it was supposed to do.  And I began to work.  I work online, you know, right?  And about, oh, ninety minutes into my shift, my computer began to spontaneously type a string of the letter Q, something like this:  qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq.  And then it beeped.  A lot.
I frantically began shutting down windows, trying to stop the madness.  I snatched the ethernet cord from the router.  I may have whimpered.

I resorted to pressing the power button until the computer grew silent.  Comatose.  Perhaps dead.

Then I turned it back on and it froze on the DELL screen.

So I switched chairs and used my kids’ computer for the rest of my shift.  Periodically, I’d glance over at my laptop to make sure it was still sitting with that stupid screen frozen on its face.

After my shift, I ran a diagnostic scan, got an error message and decided to call Dell . . . and reached India.  I wondered what time it could possibly be in India if it was 6 p.m. here.  Before the man would help me, he informed me that I’d have to pay $39 since my warranty had expired.  Of course it had because my computer is almost eighteen months old after all.  Ancient, right?

I spent nearly two hours on the phone with the guy in India.  I had to ask him to repeat pretty much every sentence, which made me feel stupid and half-deaf, but I couldn’t understand his quick cadence.  He had me pulling out the battery, draining the power, unscrewing screws, sliding out the hard drive, removing the CD/DVD drive, reassembling everything–all of this repeated in various configurations.  I felt like I was doing unauthorized open heart surgery with a pocket knife.  Sometimes I’d see the blessed sight of my own icons and thought all was not lost.

Then he’d tell me to shut the computer down, reboot it and I’d get the frozen DELL screen again.

At last, he suggested that perhaps my hard drive was dying and that maybe I could salvage the stuff on it.  I ordered a new hard drive.  He told me to leave the computer gutted overnight, then drain the power, reattach the power cord and reboot the computer and that if I were very very very lucky I’d be able to access the contents of my hard drive again.

I did that this morning and the computer responded normally.  I was able to email myself all the important documents I hadn’t backed up.  I uploaded all my pictures to Costco so I can order them at some point.  I have no blank discs in the house since I live with teenage boys who have run through every blank disc we’ve ever had almost as quickly and pointlessly as they consume all the Cheerios.  So I couldn’t download my iTunes to a disc, but I did hook up the iPod and get all the music on it.

But what a nightmare.

Hey, the computer is still working!  I’m typing on it right now, but I fully expect it to be dead as a doorknob in the morning when I turn it on.

Oh, and so today while I’m working on my boys’ computer (and uploading pictures to Costco from my laptop), all three computers on our network stalled.  Our internet connection never goes out but it did today, right in the middle of my shift.  I had to call Comcast and the impatient woman on the phone instructed me to unplug both modem and router, which reset the internet.  I guess.  I don’t know what it did, but we were back online.

Hopefully, now, the Universe has collected whatever debt I owed and will stop raining upon me.

My son knocked at the front door at 9:30 p.m. Friday night.  I opened the door and turned back to the kitchen without looking at him. “Mom.  Mom,” he said, “It’s bad.”

I peered at him in the dark entryway.  His chin, nose and mouth were bloodied.

“What happened?”

He fell while playing basketball, tripping over a big chunk of nothing, and then another kid landed on his head, smashing his face into the street.

His front teeth were loosened.  This fact made me see dollar signs, seven thousand dollar signs’ worth of fake teeth.  Instead of screaming, I got out an ice tray to fix him a little pack.
His teeth did not fall out and now, only a few days later, he is healing quite nicely.

Meanwhile, my kids are passing cold germs from one to another.  My daughter is mad at her 10-year old brother for giving her his cold.  She’s feverish and has a cough and she is not pleased.
I can only be thankful that she is five and doesn’t require around-the-clock pampering when she’s sick.

I am thankful that my son retains his teeth.

To me, anxiety feels like a fire in my sternum, a round flash of heat that rotates inside me. I experienced that flush this week during a phone call. It reminded me of the time that I raised my hand in my sixth grade homeroom to ask my teacher, “Do we really have to go through every single problem?” She sent me to the principle’s office, or maybe it was the counselor. I can’t remember, but I was in Big Trouble.

I do remember the mortification, though, of being viewed as a rabblerouser, when all I really wanted was to be teacher’s pet and to get a perfect grade. I never once in my whole life wanted to rebel. Ever.

That incident marked the end of my willingness to participate wholeheartedly in a classroom setting. I learned to keep my opinion to myself. I learned to keep my arms and legs tucked inside the ride, no wild flinging of life or limbs.

Except sometimes. Except last week in a vastly different setting, in a situation that I cannot disclose in any detail here. However, as a result of my actions and a misunderstanding, I felt the heavy weight of disapproval. It was just like being sent to the principal’s office and as a result, I melted into a puddle of teenage angst and thought how much better the world would be if I were banished to a deserted island–or, for that matter, to a dessert island where I would drown my sorrows in hot fudge and creamy banana pies, and roll around in beds of marshmallows and creme puffs.

Really, for two days, I thought seriously that staying in bed, under the covers, would be the best possible solution to the conflict I cannot talk about. I stared at my gloomy reflection in the mirror and considered what a great failure I had become at life. But I cannot talk about it.

But it is not my marriage, nor my family, nor anything that happened in my community or my church. It happened in another realm, but an important one–and I hate it, as you do, when bloggers or writers won’t just spit out the details, but I can’t.

I do consider myself to be a decent human being. When others see me as a deficient human being, one prone to errors more than not, a person who needs to be reprimanded for the mistakes she’s made–well, I take that hard. Very hard. Ridiculously hard and I want to run away, far, far away. But I can’t. Because I am a grown-up. The luxury of collapse is not mine to be had.

On that very same day which was crowded with my own self-loathing, my husband visited a widow in our church and brought home an armful of neckties. I contrasted my distress with true heartbreak and loss and still could not snap out of it. I saw news footage of a Chinese mother looking in the rubble of an earthquake for her missing six-year old son and yet the despair of my own little tragedy clung to me like stubborn fog.

I even recognized what I had done–this downward spiraling negative talk, this personal cyclone of disaster that I’d spun out of a mistake and a misjudgment–yet I couldn’t seem to steady myself, to turn my frown upside down.

I’m too old, though, to wallow for long. So I literally told myself, out loud, “Let it go. Just let it go.” I cannot control circumstances beyond me, nor minds independent of my own. I have to just release situations that spin outside of my orbit in the first place. Do my best and trust the rest will sort themselves out.

Save the freaking out for situations which deserve it. Grow up. Get a grip. Move on.

1) I hate playing board games.

2) My ten year old son who excels in all areas of his life still cannot tie his shoes.

3) I roll my eyes at my children. (My mother was right: they did get stuck that way.)

4) I tell my kids baked goods have nuts in them to dissuade the children from partaking. Even if no nuts are involved.

5) My fantasy weekend involves my children being absent from my house, while I am home alone.

6) I hardly ever read books to my five and a half year old. I KNOW! I am doomed, she is doomed. We are all doomed.

7) I do not hug enough, apologize enough or praise enough.

8) Unlike a Mother’s Day commercial I just heard, I do not give 100% of myself at all times to my children.

9) From time to time, I put myself first. Okay, more often than from time to time.

10) I hog all the ice. I can be heard saying, “DO NOT USE ALL THE ICE! I MEAN IT!”

Every time I go into my bathroom, I see the WORLD magazine in the basket by the toilet and I think about people in Haiti eating dirt cookies. Did you know that? People in Haiti eat dirt cookies because they have no food. I find this so distressing that I Googled “Haiti” to find out how many people live there and if I could possibly solve this problem with a few dozen bags of rice from Costco.

But, alas. Haiti is the second poorest country in (the world? the hemisphere?) and has 8 million people. EIGHT MILLION PEOPLE. Eighty percent of them are unbelievably poor. The unemployment rate is . . . did it say 90%? All I know is that Haiti is an impossible problem and the people there are eating dirt cookies.

This hurts my heart.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Tucked next to that obsession in my head is this thought: I love that Oprah is kind of chubby again. It makes me feel marginally better about my ten pounds weight gain. I intend to write a letter to myself on my other blog one of these days soon. I need to straighten myself up, remind myself that I am more than my waistline.
Oh, get this. A book publisher sent me $300.00 worth of books as a gift. Just for fun. Honestly, could anything be better? (Chocolate? Did someone say “chocolate”?)

Also, please, Neighborhood Boys, I am begging you to stop knocking over my flimsy white wire fence onto my pathetic flower bed. I only have one flowerbed, things are growing and YOU ARE RUINING MY LIFE.

My computer went into a coma this morning–absolutely refused to load. That freaked me out. I ran a diagnostic scan (I have no idea how I did that) and the computer roared back to life. I am Annie Sullivan. Yes, a Miracle Worker.

I recently read my first two Dean Koontz books, two of the “Odd Thomas” books. I adored those books and read them practically non-stop. I also read an Elizabeth Berg novel . . . and a few other things. Tomorrow I will post about a book I reviewed for a blog tour. I’m going to update my Librarything.com account–I like to keep track of what I’ve read using that website. Do you know about it? You should. It is such a great website.

Oh! And last weekend I saw “Iron Man” with Robert Downey Junior. (Robert Downey, Jr.?) He is exactly my age, by the way. So is Brooke Shields and Melissa Gilbert. Just in case you were wondering. Anyway, the movie was really good, very entertaining, funny and worthy of its success. The only thing is that I wouldn’t take a three year old, as some of the people in the theater did. I have to say that if your three year old is NOT sensitive to violence that appears in movies rated PG that perhaps that is a problem. I would hope that small children would be too sensitive to see action movies like Iron Man. (See: Melodee’s Biggest Pet Peeve.) Small children should be protected from inappropriate visual images.

Last night I stayed up until 1:20 a.m. because I had washed a million loads of laundry this week that sat in baskets all week, unfolded. Usually I fold each load as it comes out, but I have been swamped by the tidal wave that is my life. I also did a load of dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. What a delight it was to stumble downstairs this morning, blind without my glasses, to a cleanish kitchen and folded baskets of clothes.

Well. I guess that’s all.

But what are we going to do about Haitians eating dirt cookies?

Oh, don’t forget to put out food for the mail carrier to pick up tomorrow. It’s the Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive.