Back to School.
My kids are back in school. This is the most time they have been away from me on the daily since before the twins were born. Back then Little Man was only 3 years old, I was pregnant with our two girls and Big Daddy Man (as we’ve been calling him recently) was in Afghanistan for the third time. At that time, I was running my own buisness, training interns and trying to secure a nanny to watch the girls once they arrived. Our girls were born in December 2019, which means when I was ready to go back to work in March of 2020 the world all but shut down. The five of us lived and worked in our small, but very cool downtown apartment during the following months. My business slowly faded into something I did part-time and then painfully decided to end completely.
Once the girls started crawling in the summer of 2020, we knew we needed a bigger place. So, we left our ever-so-cool downtown apartment and traded it for a 1970’s fixer upper outside of the city, and right on the beach. That was four years ago.
And now the babies are almost five, and Little Man is a solid 8.5 years old, and I am here, trying to figure out how to transition into this next phase of life. It’s hard. The first few weeks of school I almost cried every day when I dropped off my three little people.
My friend told me last night that I have been too hard on myself.
“It’s only September,” she said, “We’re all still transitioning, right now. Give yourself time.”
It’s not that I don’t have anything to do. We’re finishing up a total DIY renovation of our kitchen. It’s 95% done right now, and there is spackle drying as we speak, waiting for the final layer. I also have a client I’ve been working with once a month who just asked if we could move up the deadline on our project. I have things to do in these few hours a day that the babies are in preschool, but honestly…this is the first day I’ve actually spent my morning how I wanted to without the cloud of guilt hanging above me. I cleaned the studio, I talked with a friend, I made mysef a really good lunch, I read a book. I am sitting on the back deck with a mug of tea, writing. This is what I have been craving, what my soul needed just as much as it needs squishy hugs from those beautiful souls that I birthed. It needs both. The Ying and Yang of motherhood. The intense caring and also the freedom and time to sit and look out at the trees blowing in the wind and think a thought from beginning to end. The untangling of ideas into something that really refelcts who I am. And so that’s it. It is my goal to sit down like this and write everyday, either in blog form, or working on a new story, or sumerizing my book so I can finally send it out to publishers. I am terrifed. I am thrilled. I am moving forward, because that’s all we can do. And then I will pick up the girls and we will walk to the library, and make bread this afternoon and then go get brother. We have big plans this afternoon to play with clay, and go for a fall walk. Then I will make soup for my family, and we will sit and eat and break up fights and laugh and cuddle scraps, and finally get them into bed and kiss their foreheads. And I will lean into my partner’s body on the couch as we watch a show and whisper words about our day. That is all. It isn’t much, and yet it is all together more than anything I could have imagined. -Helen