peevish mama

Here we go again, only this particular morning, with the dew point hanging heavily around the point of drenched while simply breathing, it feels unusually cruel to be sending my small people back to school. But I’ll do it anyway because I have no choice. If anyone had bothered to ask my opinion on the matter, I would take another week of lingering on beaches in the late summer sun. We would visit art museums and food trucks. We would have communal reading time. We would water color at the rose garden. We would rest.

Instead, just like every other summer, I am returning them to their teachers tanned and windblown, covered in mosquito bites and scrapes, ill-coiffed, ill-tempered and ill-shod. Actually, that’s not true – thanks to Zappos, we managed to get new shoes. So, at least there’s that.

It always seems to turn out the same. We play hard all summer long and the night before school starts, we stay out too late because the evening air is always perfection and the last night of freedom simply can’t be curtailed, and then in the morning I’m frantically pulling old uniforms out of drawers hoping something fits someone, while I throw together really random school lunches and we screech into the parking lot in the nick of time and I deposit them in their classrooms, breathless and dazed. I hug them too long and walk out feeling bereft because my companions are suddenly gone and I didn’t get a chance to idle with them as I dreamt I would during those April snows.

Actually, I exaggerate. My kids are fine and usually quite ready to return. Bright eyed and chipper, ready to roll. The fact that our rest and relaxation is supposed to happen during some elusive, non-existent week that hovers like a mirage at the end of August’s calendar page simply means one thing: we don’t roll that way.

Maybe someday I’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, happy back-to-school to everyone. Enjoy a little Arcade Fire.

One bite at a time. Or so they say.

This poor neglected blog is feeling like an elephant lately. Every time I have the shimmer to write something down, it just feels unwieldy. So much time has gone by, too many things have happened. I just haven’t had time this summer, between the swims and drives and music and family and friends, to write about any of it. Or, more truthfully, I didn’t make time. I’ve been feeling like I don’t need this blog like I used to and so I grapple with what that means for peevish mama the blog as well as peevish mama the person.

For whatever reason, whether it be older kids, busier schedule, actual paying freelance writing, richer friendships or the instant gratification of sharing on instagram, I don’t have the yen to vent as much on these pages. And without the peevishness, what is there? Am I losing my edge? Shit, man, too much good stuff, too much nice and this is just another boring mommy blog that’ll make ya barf. Make me barf. I’m not necessarily feeling less peevish, but I’m generally feeling as if, maybe, good thoughts will give way to good words which in turn give way to good living. And if I had to sum up the very thing I’m after these days, it’s exactly that: good living.

Sometimes you just have to live without writing about it because that’s what feels right.

Also, as the kids get older I feel like I need to tread more carefully with respect to what I write about. They are people now. Real people. One of them is even a teenager as of four days ago, and with that I feel like he deserves some modicum of privacy. My peeps don’t need me publicly working out all that there is to work out as we wade into these very cool and interesting but potentially fraught and intense years. The stakes are higher now. The stuff we’re dealing with isn’t as simple as potty training, snacks and fiendishly stubborn toddlers. Now we deal in character and morality, life’s dreams and matters of the heart. All good, but it’s bigger – not something I can just toss off like I used to.

So how’s that for a whole steaming load of excuses? Pretty good, eh?

Last night, I got a bit of shizz for being such a blogger bum from my friends Lady Tabouli and Sporty Spice. But, ever the supporters of my words, they gently prodded me to pick up the thread and get back to it. I may not need this blog like I used to, but I love this blog as much as I ever have – simply because it turned me into a writer and is the place where I have chosen to stash many of our family memories over the last four-ish(!)  years. And honestly, enough of you have given enough of a damn to come back to roost from time to time, and that, my friends, makes it very very worth it.

So.

I’ll start.

One bite at a time.