It has been a rainy one. We tried to host an end of kindergarten backyard BBQ and were quickly driven inside by thunder and lightening with 13 children and many adults. We packed up for a weekend long camping trip in the rain. We swim in the morning and watch it rain all afternoon... but it has still been fun.
I am just home from yoga. After nearly two years, I know most of the poses. Now I am struggling to stay with the breath - to be in the moment. It is nearly impossible for me. Two breaths and my mind is off... considering a comment I made, thinking about things to be done, wondering why I haven't called a friend, anything but staying in the moment.
But this summer has been a lesson in staying in the moment. Long, hot, glorious days are obviously not the norm. So we seize the moments we can. We swim when it isn't raining. We run to the garden and uncover the mysterious that have sprung forth while the skies were dark. Alex ate two beans and a snow pea for dinner last night - our first harvest. The kids were swimming in their grandparents' pool at 7:45 a.m. today. It wasn't exactly warm, but it wasn't raining. Sand at the lake packs a little better when it is wet.
Tonight I dashed into a store before yoga. I was inside less then three minutes, but when I came out again, it was a downpour. With no umbrella, I found myself trapped at the end of the alley leading to the shop with a group of southern tourists heatedly discussing Little League. It is a common pastime to dislike tourists, to look down at them. True New Yorkers never go to the top of the Empire State Building. Bostonians don't walk the Freedom Trail. Mainers would never step foot in a restaurant decorated with fish net and plastic lobsters. In Cooperstown, we mock the baseball fans - especially those who take Little League as seriously as the World Series. So there I stood in a certain kind of panic, trapped in the rain with no umbrella, wondering if all moments are moments worth trying to be in... (Did I mention one of them was smoking?)
"C'omon, y'all aren't made of suga, are you?" said the mom of the group to her family after about five minutes of unrelenting rain. It was my moment. I ran, splashed through the puddles and made it inside. No, it turns out, I am not made of sugar. But I would find my mind drifting back to those minutes as a voyeur all throughout yoga, feeling guilty for feeling such disdain toward this vacationing family, wondering when someone has looked at my own family the same way...
Motherhood is all about staying in the moment. Sometimes, it comes easily. Watching Alex at work, an architect of sand, intently building and constructing, his little body taking the shape of a true boy - all arms and muscle and nothing resembling the tiny soft roundness of his past five summers. Cate, happily turning her life into a musical while she sings her love of her family, her cats, her clothes, her breakfast in silly little phrases that always end with "so, so much." But at other times, it is a challenge. Getting the same singing girl dressed can be a slow act of torture as my mind races to what comes next. Why does she have to run away and giggle instead of just getting her shirt on? Why does Alex always need a drink just as I start to type? Motherhood is also a series of interruptions. I need to remind myself to breathe - to be in these moments of interruption. They are so brief. Most of my life will pass by without little people needing help rushing to the potty or just one more book or a third snack before they starve. Most of my life I will be able to hear my own breath.
And so this summer, we take the sunny moments when we get them and work hard to enjoy the clouds and rain.
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