Travels and Tempests
It’s supposed to be 90 degrees today, which is probably the hottest it will get all year. Two days after school starts, of course. This feels like the summer that never quite got started. It rained on and off, which NEVER happens in July and August, and in between spells of warmer weather there were a lot of cool days. Our family also travelled a good bit, enjoying our adventures but missing out on that sense of long, lazy summer days. And now they’re back at school and I have time again - to write, to think, to breathe.
And as I’ve been doing that thinking, I’ve realized that last spring, I had two goals for my summer. Unspoken goals, mostly unarticulated even to myself, but they were there. The first was to survive our travel. I was plagues much of last year with health issues that spike when I’m stressed and they’re severe enough to derail the kind of international travel we were planning on. Forrest and I had lots of conversations about how to do travel differently, how to learn a better way. This mirrored the changes we were making more generally and he, like always, has been supportive of doing less, but doing it better. Less boxes checked off the list, more beautiful moments. Less frantic planning and waiting in lines, more walking around and seeing where the world takes us.
And I’m proud to say we did all that. The list of what we didn’t see in the UK is long. But we did see the people we love, we shared laughter over meals, and made memories that the girls will never forget. It’s still hard to watch the Instagram reels of other people and know that our photos don’t match up and the reason they don’t is because of me. But I wanted to get through it and that meant doing things differently, so if the perfect social media picture is what had to go, so be it.
The second goal, again unspoken, was to cocoon my kids in a bit of a bubble for the summer. That might sound weird, given the whole last paragraph about travel. It might sound overindulgent, but this was a different kind of cocoon. I wanted to give them space away. Away from what, I wasn’t even fully sure. But away. Away from the popularity games of middle school. Away from having to be so connected to everything all the time. Away from the enforced perfectionism that our culture places atop teen girls like a too-heavy crown.
I wanted to give them a summer where they could sleep in and forget to shower and decide to make pancakes for breakfast at noon. I wanted to give them a summer with quiet afternoons where we could talk, really talk, about how they are just starting to feel the pressure from the impossible demands of a culture who wants to tell women they have to be all things to all people at all times. Because I saw a change last year, especially in my younger two. Those messages were starting to creep in and their still-childish brains weren’t quite ready to handle them.
It all seemed to come to a head on a car ride to go get new shoes for school. One of them, I’m not sure who, had brought home-made cookies over to a friend’s house and the friend had talked about how those would make the two of them fat. My daughter was sad but mostly confused. Her friend had eaten cookies before. There had never been any comments. What was going on?
I asked my usual question. “Do you want the mom answer or the Serenity answer?” The mom answer is usually kind, measured and sprinkled with a liberal dose of language from parenting books and psychology classes. The Serenity answer is perhaps less kind but more true, usually looking past the question asked to why the person is asking that question and what’s maybe going on underneath.
They all wanted the Serenity answer. So we talked about how uncertain it is to be an adolescent with body and brain constantly changing. How when things are uncertain we look for any port in a storm. And how there are people who make their living off of keeping women on shaky foundations. Because if we stay uncertain, trying to live up to standards of appearance and behavior that are constantly changing, and conflicting, well, then, their affordably priced product (diet plan/makeup/home organization system/dating app) might seem like the perfect port in the storm. And we talked about how we’ve all done it. How many times each of us thought the haircut or daily planner would get everything back in order.
I don’t know how much of it sank in, but my girls definitely left for school a little more sturdy. They seemed more steady and less wind-tossed. To keep the maritime metaphor going, after a summer at harbor, they’re a bit more even-keeled and not searching so hard for any port in a storm, but rather maybe a little bit more ready to face what tempests will inevitably arise.
As for me? I’m exhausted. I did a deep breathing exercise this morning and woke up 45 minutes later after falling asleep. But that’s ok. Now that summer’s over, I’ve got all the time in the world.
