Balance.

Everything seems to teeter like those acrobats on a board with a ball underneath. Back and forth: I know he won’t fall. But put me on one of those for 2 and 1/2 seconds and I’ll break my ankle.

Like how soon before we go to the wedding do I do my toddler’s hair? If I do it now (45 minutes before we have to leave) I won’t rush at the end, equalling less screams. But the downside is that she’ll probably mess it up. If I wait, she won’t mess it up, but there is always the mad dash at the end of the morning trying to get everyone out the door.

What is the perfect temperature to set the air conditioner at so we don’t foreclose trying to pay for our electric bill? Too low, I freeze when I get out of the shower. Too high and everyone is sweating.

Balance.

I booked myself and my kids way too many things this week. Nature camp in the mornings for Hope, then swim lessons. Add in a horseback riding lesson, her normal gymnastics class and then today’s make-up dance lesson and she’s bushed. Me too. I fell asleep last night at 8. And Naomi is just along for the ride.

Imbalance.

My eating has been off, my sleep has been disturbed and I worked myself so hard this week that by this morning, not only could I physically not make it out the front door to exercise, but I was so mentally tired that I couldn’t even think about it.

My daughter has been so tired that she turned down a trip to the movies with her grandparents yesterday. She came home and sat on the sofa with a cup of water for two hours. I didn’t make her move because she had been hiking and playing games all morning. She was exhausted and showed more self-awareness than her mother. She figured out that a trip to the movies would make her more tired so she asked to go home.

I guess I tried to “balance” the rest of our summer by getting some big responsibilities over with. I figured we could do it all at once, especially if our daily treks all the way down to the city pool weren’t until 5 every evening. The water would be warm. All lessons and camps would be done for the day. The kids would be ready to swim. Not so. They’ve been cranky and exhausted by the end of the day. I’m cranky and exhausted by the end of the day. I don’t know why I didn’t think they would be too.

I’m learning how much my kids can handle before they implode. I’m even learning how much I can take before I start using my scary-mommy voice regularly. I don’t want to feel like the acrobat guy: 2 seconds away from breaking my ankle.

So, this week, we’ll try to take it easier, plan less and play more. And I’ll take a lesson in self-awareness from my six-year-old.

When I was a little girl, my sister and I each had one single bathing suit.

We went shopping for it as soon as it got hot in the spring, and by the end of the summer it was fit for the trash. After swimming lessons each day, we’d hang them up to dry. The warm, dry smell of chlorine still in the threads, we’d put them on again the next day. By August, my suit would be stretched out, sandy and the bottom pilled and worn thin from sitting on the side of the pool. The following year, we’d each pick out a new suit to break in and then thrash by the end of the season.

I never knew a person had a need for more than one swimsuit. I don’t think it was about station or wealth, just need.

I’ve never lived in a house with a pool; we’d beg swim dates from friends or friends of friends. I remember vividly in junior high school I went to the home of a friend for a pool party. All the girls ended up in her bedroom for some reason and my 12 year old hostess opened up one of her drawers to change clothes. She had an entire drawer devoted to two-pieces and one-pieces, orange, blue, yellow, flowered, striped and solids! If she’d opened a pirate treasure chest full of gold coins, my reaction would have been the same.

She was either rich (well, she was rich) or just had different way of life than I did. In the summer, I imagine, she would wake up and swim, come in to watch Golden Girls reruns, then swim again in the afternoon.

She “needed” 25 bathing suits.

My girls have at least 8 bathing suits each. We don’t own a pool. We used to have a spa, but that’s another story.

Maybe it is because of the inexpensiveness and accessibility of products from Target that has made me provide so much water wear for my kids. They don’t actually need that many. We rarely swim or play in the water more than once in any day (unless we are on vacation and both the pool and the sea beckon). I really don’t know why they have drawers filled with swimsuits.

Maybe it was just different and more simple when I was a little girl. Maybe we didn’t need as much. Maybe we didn’t THINK we needed as much.

Maybe we were just happier with less.

Every once in awhile I need my little boy fix.

My house is filled with princess wands, dress-up boxes and flower stickers stuck covertly to my wall when I was not looking. Girls fill my days and my heart.

But sometimes, I just need me a little boy to hug and squeeze until he wiggles away.

Enter Hope’s “boyfriends”.

Fraternal twins. I’ve known their mother since before they were born and my girl and her two boys (added to a family of two older boys already = FOUR BOYS! – God help her) have known each other since they were all babies.

They are only 3 months apart in age and Hope loves each of them equally but in different ways. With one, she loves to build things – legos, playdough castles, blocks, train tracks. With the other one, she will create make-believe worlds that include various Star Wars characters and a few Indiana Jones ones thrown in there for good measure. She loves them both.

They’ve been at my house, under my roof, playing with my kids a couple times this week. Summer freedom allows for afternoon playdates with no real cause to come inside.

Today, the three of them stood shoulder to shoulder at the table in my patio mixing playdough colors. They must have had 15 cans of it open (I didn’t even know we had that many) and each of them was making something different.

As I am standing nearby but hidden from them, one of the boys, the Star Wars stud, says to Hope,

Do you like girls or boys better? (A common question at the tender age of 6 1/2. NOTHING is implied except if she likes to play with girls better or boys better. Remember, he comes from a house of boys, her a house of girls.)

Hope: Girls…duh! (She looks at him like he’s asked the stupidest question on the planet. All the while she is playing with her “boyfriends” and if given the choice to join a group of girls, she’d probably decline.) What about you; do you like to play with boys or girls?

Stud: Girls. (Hope doesn’t get it and waits for him to explain.) YOU CAN’T KISS BOYS! I’d rather play with girls!

Okay, my Mama ears perk and I wait and watch to see what happens next. I half expected him to lean over and plant one on her right there in my backyard. It could go one of two ways. This could be the biggest revelation to her. Kissing a boy? Or…what happened next:

She looks up at him confused, perplexed and a little unnerved, as if he’d just told her he was really a martian from outer space. She wrinkles her brow for a second or two, thinking about the prospect of boys kissing girls, and shakes her head and goes back to her playdough.

Thankfully.

She remains a little girl for awhile longer.

And our little stud friend is welcome at my house anytime, as long as he doesn’t kiss my daughter.

I’m not usually a procrastinator, but for some reason I haven’t been able to bring myself to clean out my six-year-old’s backpack from the end of the school year.

California schools get out in mid-June so really, I’m only about 4 weeks behind. The last week of school I had a house guest. The week after we left for vacation. Next, VBS. Now, Nature Camp and swimming lessons. I’m busy.

There it sits next to the piano. A pink, stained Kindergarten backpack, unzipped but still full of memorabilia from the school year. A note from her teacher. A yearbook with no signatures. A end of the year information sheet. Various toys and trinkets she’s won as “prizes” for doing well or not talking in class.

Maybe because it’s been really busy around my house. Maybe I haven’t emptied it because I have larger fish to fry. Or maybe I just don’t know what to do with the stuff.

Something deeper? I feel like I spend half of my life digging up the junk that is me.

Or maybe I don’t want her to move on. I don’t want her long girl legs to become even longer and want to run faster than me. I don’t want her to finish the summer older than when she began. A part of me doesn’t want her to go to the next grade with a new backpack and new homework and new questions for everyone she knows. I don’t want to clean out her old backpack because she’ll never be 6 again. She’ll always be something bigger than that.

So, I put it down on my list. In between Trader Joes and Make Dentist Appointments is Clean out Hope’s Backpack.

I’ll try not to procrastinate this tiny, significant thing much longer.

The ill-designed “Mommy and Me” class is a misnomer. It really shouldn’t be called “Mommy and Me,” as if it was all about the kid. Seriously.

I only signed up for the sub-three-year-old Parent and Me swimming lesson because I knew it would be impossible to keep Naomi out of the pool for the ten days of Hope’s Level Three lessons. For two weeks at 5:05 pm at the newly remodeled city pool all three of us are there “taking” lessons.

Hope is fine. She loves meeting the other kids in her class and trying new things like swimming backwards. She’s already fallen in love with the twenty-something girls who are the instructors.

On the far other side of the pool, in the 2 and a half foot deep kiddie area, Naomi and I struggle for thirty minutes. Her screams can be heard far above the din of the splashing and yells of about 50 or so kids taking various classes at the same time.

The class begins and as if on cue, she begins to wail. She doesn’t want to kick toward the floating duckie (its so far beneath her station); she doesn’t want to reach with “big arms” toward the wall to practice strokes, and she DOES NOT want to blow bubbles (I mean, who would want to submerge their face into the water hundreds of sweaty sunscreened kids have shared all day – there’s a film, you know).

She has fun for about 90 seconds near the end when she gets to jump into my arms.

So the class wasn’t about my two-year-old at all. She didn’t learn any water skills she didn’t already know. The Parent and Me class turned out to be all about me: apologies for the screaming; guilt over letting her sit on the stairs and play with the diving rings; frequent attempts to grab her wiggly wet body around the middle and force her to participate in the class activity. By the time the class ends, I’m injured (angry kicks to my chest in the struggles), exhasuted (who wouldn’t be), and a push-over (McDonalds anyone?). It is really all about me.

The class should never be classified as “Mommy and Me”, but perhaps “Me and my Slippery, Angry Toddler Who Won’t Obey.”

I have 9 more days of this. Pray for me.

I could complain. I’m not really a complainer, to categorize myself. But I do complain, whether it’s outwardly (Do you really have to work late again?) or on the inside.

Let me list all the stuff:
4 1/2 hours of sleep last night.
A too-hot July.
A toddler in the middle of a 2 week tantrum.
A husband working late tonight.
Clutter, disorganization and unfolded clothes.
An extra hateful 10 pounds that lives around my middle.

And there’s more. A lot more. I just haven’t dug that far deep inside yet today. Its the stuff that makes my frustration rise up from where it’s been hiding and bubble near the surface by 2 o’clock every day; its what makes me ignore my husband when he’s trying to talk to me and I’m just trying to get everyone out the door. I don’t have the time to crack open my heart and see what ick has settled in to stay. If I did, the lunches wouldn’t get made and the kids would be out the door without their shoes.

I usually complain for awhile. In bursts. And in deflection (I complain by treating my family in ways less than they deserve). But complaining always makes me feel silly in the end because so many have it far worse than me.

A bed to sleep in, even if its only for 4 hours (my choice, ultimately).
The luxury to turn on air conditioning if I need to.
The sweet kisses between the 2 year old tantrums.
The job my husband has when so many are out of work.

I want to live inside the contentment, realize while it is happening how good I have it. How much I am loved. How I don’t deserve the grace I’ve been shown, or the little girl kisses on my nose. I don’t ever want to complain, even on the inside. I don’t want to be a complainer.

Right now, I’m in the middle of it.

Tangly six-year-old hair, too many little toys strewn all over the tiled-downstairs, saggy overnight diapers, screams of rage and then immediate giggles, a two-year-old “monster”.
I’m in the middle of little girl voices meshing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” with “Jesus Loves Me” so that it comes out at the end: “The SPIDER tells me so…”

I know that I won’t always be in the middle of it. That when I am upstairs folding clothes I won’t always hear the constant downstairs ruckus, and then the dreaded silence: What are they getting into (silence usually accompanies naughtiness).

My memory is fresh right now. I can remember what they said yesterday or how they made me laugh this morning. Soon, even when they are tall teenagers, I know I will have to struggle to pull out the good (and bad) memories from the haze. I will have to pinch my arm and tell myself that it really happened. That I used to fold clothes with “M” or “T” at the end of the size, that their long brown legs used to belong to babies.

When I ran on the beach a few weeks ago on my vacation, my dad and I took longer than normal one morning and ran for a “pier” we saw in the distance. As we got closer, we realized it wasn’t a pier, but an old barge that had run aground and was now stuck on the beach. We found a shipwreck! It lay half in and half out of the waves, rusty, barnacle-ridden and had its own sand bar. We walked right up to it and if I hadn’t been worried about the thousands of crabs that scurried around its surface, I might have climbed right up on top of it.

No camera, of course. I’d been running and I don’t carry it with me while jogging.

Do you believe me? That I saw a shipwreck? I really did and I guess truth is stranger than fiction. And the further I get away from the 15 minutes we spent walking around inspecting it, the less I remember about it. The harder it is to pull up the memories from my mind. I am beginning to forget the sea and the two thigh-deep fishermen in the surf, and I am forgetting the noise it made when the waves hit the end and rushed inside the hold.

Its the same way with my girls. I already feel like they are flying away and I’m too late to catch their super-hero capes.

Or maybe its different. I didn’t snap a photo of the old barge – it only lives in my mind (and on the beach north of Marina). My girls, even as they grow, will be constant reminders of who they were and who they are becoming.

And then I will be in the middle of something else.

For as long as I have known my husband, he’s always had very vivid dreams at night.

So vivid that they spill over into the non-sleeping world. This translates into taking showers at 1:30 in the morning, some sleepwalking (he’s been known to go out the front door), and at the very least dreams so real that he attempts to complete the action sitting straight up in bed (playing solitaire? He doesn’t even play it when he’s awake).

I used to argue with him when he asked me crazy questions in the middle of the dark. I used to plead with him to get back into bed, that he was just dreaming. I used to try to convince him that what he thought was real was in fact not real at all.

There is no use arguing with a sleeping bear, or husband.

Last night he taps me on the shoulder (after I had fallen asleep to an episode of I Survived a Japanese Gameshow - that in itself will make for some freaky dreams).

He is moving his right hand in a stirring/rotating motion, “Where is that thingy? You know, that thing…that thingy?’

“You’re dreaming, honey. Please lay back down.”

He tries to get out of bed now and he’s angry, namely because I won’t buy into his version of reality, “NOO, that thingy! Where is it? I can’t find it!”

Again, stupidly, I argue with him. “Baby, you are ASLEEP! Just lay down.”

He asks me again, and in my middle-of-the-night haze, I try to think of something interesting, like the refrigerator, or in the garage, or “Honey, its in the trash can and if it isn’t there, try the shower!”

But I just mumble, “I don’t know.”

That was it. That was all he needed. He politely told me “Thank you” and turned over and began to sleep again.

I’m not sure what is really going through his mind when he was angrily asking me to locate the “thingy”. I am realizing that I have to choose my battles, even in the middle of the night. And that sometimes, just “agreeing” is enough to avoid an arguement.

Oh, and it was a whisk. He told me this morning. A whisk. I guess he was trying to make scrambled eggs.

This has been our first real week of summer.

Three weeks ago Hope was released from the confines of the miniature chairs and find-your-masking-tape-spot-on-the-carpet Kindergarten. Each week since then has been filled with something else.

Two weeks ago we were on vacation. Last week we went to Vacation Bible School.

This week, I got nothing. Yes, we visited the water park and did the park tour of northern Orange County, but it has been mostly unstructured. I was going to take them to the zoo this morning, but I just can’t do it. I’m exhausted. Instead they get the Kids’ Club at the gym and Trader Joes.

They’ve been spending long periods of time at home playing inside and outside and upstairs and downstairs. And my kids can’t stop fighting.

They both want the scooter at the same time (so much so that the little one runs after the big one until the big one “accidentally” runs over the little one’s toe). They don’t agree on the late morning DVD selection (the big one will whine and complain and pout, until she forgets that she “hates” Little Einsteins and is watching it too). They both want the red Moon Sand (seriously, what is the difference between yellow and red Moon Sand; they’re both weird).

Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe I should have every hour of their days planned out. Or maybe they will just argue because they are kids, whether their days are structured or not.

Or maybe, I should (within reason) let them work it out (insert: scream and yell at each other until one proves to be the bully). After all, when I was a kid, summers meant long months of pretty much nothing with only a week of a camping vacation sometime in July. My sister and I spent many days “working it out” during unstructured summers.

A little bit of “unstructure” is good for my kids. The school year provides enough confinement of its own.