Cycling city

From window shopping to roads

(It’s heaven on earth)

Homecoming spirit 

Shared with my three growing girls

My babies no more

i’ve hit the gold mine 

with my daughters, coworkers,park, architecture:

the microcosm 

of the world we wish for:

flowered, diverse, fire.

i just want flowers

that i’m not allergic to 

to brighten my day

Twenty minutes. That’s the exact time from clipping in to standing in line, 5.6 miles, endless car traffic, and a nearly-empty bike lane later. 

I do love Mr. White. He’s a beautiful human being in every way, shape and form. He knows how to make a presentation, with few words and lots of pictures on a PowerPoint, and he genuinely cares about our kids.

But this is my third back-to-school night, I had to leave my three girls in a mess of emotions and mess of a kitchen as my oldest cried and begged again for Snapchat because all her friends are planning Homecoming on a thread without her and because my youngest wants to sell cookies on the corner to earn money for her school Yellowstone trip.

I was reminded, as I pedaled across my city, answering two phone calls (WTF??–one from the school district, one from an insurance salesman) on the way through my Bluetooth headphones, after checking my email and seeing Riona’s latest missing homework, after arguing with Mythili about leaving Izzy alone about the quality of character of her latest crush (whom a colleague warned me about today), that it’s only. Tuesday.

But. It was a pedal, not a drive. There was no traffic. There was no string of red lights. There were only a mostly-empty path and the brutality of my frustrated shouts of, “On your left!!” Mythili set up my saddlebags for me before I left. Riona managed not to burn the cookies. I sent Isabella the snapshot text of what Riona’s missing, leaving her in charge. And I have given in to Snapchat for my in-the-closet-crying daughter, if only for a week. 

And in twenty minutes, my filled-to-the-brim-with-ice water bottle melted into lukewarm, late-summer water. In twenty minutes, Pandora pounded out my angst. In twenty minutes, I made it to back-to-school-night number three.
In twenty minutes, I wrote this post.
And it’s only Tuesday. Let’s see what I can make of twenty minutes tomorrow.

for spirit week: twins
flower girls for surf’s up day
(glad to relish her)

in my backyard garden,
i grow zucchinis and beans
and lemon drop tomatoes
that pop with sweetness like a peach
when you pop them into your mouth.

i grow sugar snap peas and bright cornflowers
and peonies that sing for spring,
lilies that light up June,
and raspberries that show their blush
intermittently through three seasons.

i grow mint that makes mojitos
to cool the stress of a late summer evening,
and adds a spicy freshness to cold black iced tea,
a mum that has grown to twice its size
since last autumn’s dark planting,
yellow squash, misshapen and smooth,
to quickly toss into a rushed weeknight meal.

in my backyard garden, i grow children
who learn to clip the peonies to their knees,
who mow the lawn in erratic circles,
who search for the best recipes
for zucchini bread, lemon-drop salsa,
and cookies that make mouths water,
who cut and pull and cook and clean,
who grow into young women,
bright as a garden on a late summer day,
worth all the watering… the wait… the work.

i found my haiku:
 it hid under the bushes
 waiting for my words
 
 (sometimes i lose them
 at parties or fits of sleep
 but they wait with jest)
 
 tomorrow we’ll laugh
 at haikus we could have found
 if only we’d looked
 
 
 

catch me a moon, earthburned as bright as smoky suN
all from my street view

Whatever happened to marriage and kids? Is it a disappearing act? I hear young people (I’m not one of them anymore) telling me that kids are such a burden, that marriage is too traditional, that life is only worth living if you’re free. Maybe it’s true, because the weight of children, the responsibility of them, can be one of the heaviest weights in the world. No matter what we do, we feel we’re failing. And marriage can be weighty, too–full of twists and turns, loyalties and lies, stress and annoyances (it’s not romantic–it’s work, the work of making a relationship the most important part of your life, of prioritizing your spouse over everyone even when that’s hard to imagine doing when he says he wants to get rid of the meowing cats or when I buy too many things from Amazon without telling him).

Whatever happened to it, though? The thought of sticking to someone, to US, to our families? Instead of flippantly ending relationships for mundane reasons such as, “We don’t have anything in common.” Isn’t your love for each other something in common? Can’t you find things that you both enjoy? Can’t you commit to one person for life?

Whatever happened to the joy that children bring, sitting on top of that weight you carry after spending two hours on six problems of long division, tears dry now, reaching up and giving you her red-rimmed-eyes-wide, grateful hug? After dinner conversations where your teen, just a freshman, still opens up about the truth behind her teachers, her crushes, her plans with friends? About your middle child, oh, your middle child, who adapts to every situation, the school she doesn’t like but gets nearly perfect grades in, the troop she’s smack in the middle of and finds friends on either edge of the age spectrum, whose know-it-all attitude and dry humor is sometimes all one needs to laugh off the pain of the day?

Whatever happened to marriage? Both sets of my grandparents were married for more than fifty years, my in-laws as well, and today my parents celebrate the great forty-two. Forty-two years of trials and tribulations, failures and successes, raising two daughters to be both defiant and reserved, working through marital problems, money problems, commonality problems, and finding the answers in each other’s hobbies and habits and smiles.

My mother texted last week to tell me that the husband of what I would consider my third set of grandparents, who had celebrated seventy-two years of marriage and raised three children, had passed away early in August. He was ninety-two. He always had a white beard and dressed like Santa at Christmas. He hugged with his whole body, his arms up under your armpits as if he were going to lift you to the sky. He and his wife drove through every state at least twice and lived through open heart surgery, the death of two of their children, and every one of their friends.

But they had each other. They had their marriage, and it carried them through a long and beautiful life. Their marriage and their commitment to finding commonalities (he liked to drive and she liked to read, so she read aloud to him while he drove).

Is this a lost cause? Will there be no families in our future?

Whatever happened to the idea, the very idea, of truly being committed to something, someone, other than ourselves?

I hope our families, the very idea of families, aren’t lost between tweets and streaks and posts. Between the balancing act of too much and not enough. Between travel and “freedom” and climbing career ladders.

Because without the love and support and commitment of all of my grandparents and in-laws and parents, I wouldn’t know how to function as a human. Without his love, without their small smiles, without my marriage and my family, I would hardly be myself. And what would ever happen to me?