To Be Known

Our fleet of SUV's and minivans makes its way into the parking lot. We all use our turn signals. Our eyes dart left and right, prepared to break at the sight of a wayward toddler. We are careful people. Outside, children stand with their arms outstretched as they are doused with a fine mist of chemicals used to shield them from the sun. Waxy sticks get rubbed across freckled noses for the same purpose.

These children will be kept safe. We send our sons and daughters to these fields because there is little danger and even less pressure here. No child will shine, but no child will fail. It is a sport without great consequences.

Some children are being dropped off by working parents, a few by grandparents, but mostly we appear to be a mass of stay at home mothers, a fact made obvious by our ill-fitting clothing and fuss free hair. We are practical and styleless. We are indistinguishable. Faceless. Nameless. Defined only by our offspring.

I want to scream that I used to be someone. A person all my own. Interesting and excitable. Maybe a little wild, a little weird. I want to make it known that I am not one of them. I am altogether different. But the baby on my hip, the toddler on my hand, the eight year old with his ball clenched to his side, they tell a different story, a story we do not star in. We are just extras in a giant scene of sameness.

I look at the women who pass me. I wonder if they too want to be known. If they too want to be understood. If they want to be altogether different.

Among them I begin to cling to my flakiness as a prize, as if it proves that I must have other thoughts and desires that keep my mind from catering to my children's every want. I never remember to sign them up for  teams in time, and I am happy to hold on to my Saturday mornings and weekday dinners. This week of camp becomes my oldest son's only foray into the world of organized sports. And I desperately want it to stay that way, but I can feel the pull, his desire to be a part of a team, one of a crowd, a desire I don't think I ever felt, but one which I certainly do not feel now as I dream of wildly fleeing from this parking lot, my children in tow, into the woods beyond the campus, away from these children with braces and mothers with sensible shoes. Away to a place where I am known and understood and yet, still, altogether different.

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Group Shot

This is who we are, right now, relative to one another.

Next year, we will be different. Next year, each of us will be changed.

Next year, our numbers may have grown, and these babies certainly will.

We are an ensemble cast, except in the versions that plays in my own head, which I, of course, star in.

 Dunkirk Baptist Church's Father's Day Car Show / 2015

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Our Tribe Has Grown

I have to keep telling my heart that Jettie Blythe isn't mine. But my heart won't listen. My heart has grown to hold her, and my arms constantly ache to hold her as well.  She feels nearly as much a part of me as my own children. I am overwhelmed with the deepth of my love. My mind now ticks through five people, constantly taking inventory of where they are and what they are doing. 

Oh Jettie, I love you so very much. I love your long arms and your raspy cry. I love that you look just like my beautiful sister, and that you will be my youngest daughter's best friend. You showed me that my siblings were not lying; I know now that they do love my children as they would love their own. I never really believed them, but Jettie you have shown me that their words are true. Because my dear wild nice, I love you in a way I never knew I would. 

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This Weekend We // Alumni Weekend

I really want to find all the words I'm looking for, the one's that explain how special this place is, how special the people I met there are, what it's like to get to return there year after year, with more and more of my own children in tow.

The weekend makes me feel. Feel everything. All at once. With every inch. It leaves me nearly empty at the end.  I spend forty-eight hours wanting to be everywhere, with everyone, all the time. And I simultaneously want to be with every single person, one on one, alone, somewhere quiet over looking the water, reminiscing, catching up.

If you didn't go to St. Mary's and you're around St. Mary's people, it would be easy to find us pretty insufferable. We are all so damn pleased with ourselves for having gone there, for having found each other.

I have become increasingly disillusioned with the concept of college; as it turns out, a college degree doesn't mean as much as people told me it would. I feel like my generation and the ones coming up behind us were sold a bill of goods. And yet, I would never want my own children to miss out on what college can be. Those years practicing being an adult in the most contrived ways while discussing politics and poetry and art and philosophy with trippy music playing in the background. Best done along the banks of a river surrounded by brick buildings.

Those years meant a lot to me. They meant a lot to a lot of people. We needed them. Need them still. They continue to influence us and to shape us, even after nearly a dozen years since we were in those classrooms.

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Ordinary

I assess what needs to be done. The plants need to be watered, and I need to do enough laundry so I can pack for a weekend away. But the rest, the dirty bathroom mirrors, the dusty fan blades, the finger prints on glass doors, that can all wait because I would so much rather spend the afternoon with my sisters and kids at the beach doing all the ordinary things we do, and have done, and will do again, over and over for years.  I would so much rather get my own skin sticky and sandy than I would like get rid of the sticky, sandy messes hidden around my house.  

I never regret the hours spent out doors, watching my kids clamber over fallen logs, bury each other in sand, and make mud pies. I never worry that those days were wasted. 

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This Weekend We // Friday Night Farmer's Market

I remember when then the town first announced that they were starting a Friday night farmer's market. It seemed poorly planned: who wants to go food shopping on a Friday night? Little did I know how perfect the concept was. It's only one part shopping. It's a weekly giant block party with music and food and wine and beer.

It's a little overwhelming sometimes. The journey to buy our weekly ration of five dozen eggs ( we really love eggs), is interrupted by a half dozen people to wave to or shake hands with or hug depending on familiarity.

This year two of my aunts and my brother started selling in the art section-- planters and drift wood hangings and beaded jewelry. If you end up down there, you should swing by and say hi. It's practically a family reunion down there.

You run into friends who offer you a covert orange crush. You get a few quarts of strawberries right before the season ends. You try to remember to get your shoes from the beach gate before venturing home with a stroller loaded down with what you hope is a week's worth of produce.  And as it turns out, it's a perfectly great way to spend a Friday night and the town knew what it was doing.

Farmer's Market Year's Past : One and Two

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