Summer

When I am with Quinn, I want more than anything to exist with her completely, so the moment will somehow get absorbed into my cells and stay there forever. I want it all to be saved, in detail. I want desperately, to control my wandering thoughts, ignore my impulse to check email, and stop my mental tallying of what work is left to do. I want to stop thinking about other people’s needs when I am with her; I just want to be there with and for her. I want this and yet I often fail to achieve it. 

By the end of this school year, Quinn would often call to me impatiently, while I replied to just one more message. The tone in her voice made clear that she knew I was putting meaningless things before her, before I had realized that that was what I was doing. The school year felt out of control for me by the end. I hadn’t exercised in months, I hadn’t slept well, I hadn’t taken any breaks. In April, when we had two weeks off, I checked and responded to email every day. By the end of that vacation, I felt more exhausted than before. So exhausted, in fact, that even though I knew my Vitamin D level was probably low, I couldn’t muster the energy to swallow a pill. I’d open the medicine cabinet, look at the vitamin bottle, sigh hopelessly, and close the medicine cabinet. I gave up trying and kept thinking, I just have to make it to summer. And in the meantime, through the month of May, I often woke up at 5 am and snuck out of the house by 6 am so Sam and Quinn could sleep and I could get to work. Many mornings I was at my desk before 6:30 am, and I wouldn’t see her until 5:15 pm when I picked her up.

As the weeks ticked by, each seemingly more busy than the last, Quinn held up pretty well, but she was always craving more time with us. Our weekends usually involved taking turns: on Saturday I would go to work and Sam would “take Quinn,” and then on Sunday we’d swap. I usually preferred to work Saturday so that I would have Sunday to look forward to--it would motivate me to get as much done on Saturday as possible, so I could actually enjoy my time with her, rather than be stuck feeling like it was another duty I had to perform. Still, our time together on Sundays was often spent catching up from the week past or preparing for the one ahead--we’d do laundry, clean, grocery shop--and Quinn was generally pretty tolerant. 

On one Sunday in particular, I recall her working on chores with me from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. Even Sam would have difficulty keeping his head in the game for that long, but Quinn, at four years old, worked without complaint for six hours. She emptied the dishwasher, raked leaves out of the gardens, folded laundry...and who knows what else. And even when she hit her limit, she was good humored about it. “Mom!” she urged, “we’ve been working for hours! Can we please do something fun now?” It was a reasonable request and fortunately she didn’t notice that the “fun” thing I offered was also, partially, one of our remaining chores: “How about a bath,” I asked her, “and after your bath we can cut your hair and paint your nails?” Quinn loves to “get fancy,” so to her this was a perfect idea. When the bath was done and I had snipped off two or three inches of her hair, I set her up on a low stool in my bedroom, and I sat at her feet with nail clippers and polish. To start, I rubbed some lotion onto her little freshly bathed feet and legs. “What is that!?!” she asked. “Just some lotion to keep your skin feeling smooth,” I told her. “OH!” she said, sounding a bit like someone’s grandmother, “that is a squirt of JOY!” 

I fell over laughing and then she did too. When we spend time together, and we’re not working, we crack each other up.

I thought of that moment again and again as spring wore on and it was one of the many sweet memories that finally helped me to set some boundaries for myself this summer. Quinn is only going to be four once. And I’ve been missing some of this time, putting her off, rushing her, listening to her with only a portion of my attention. I haven’t disciplined myself well enough in this regard and haven’t forced myself to block out the ridiculous internet distractions I’m susceptible to when I’m tired--even though I know how pointless they are. And yet in all my wasted internet time, I haven’t even written stories for my blog. I’ve become increasingly protective of her privacy as she’s gotten older, especially this year as I watched a lot of mean things happen between kids on the internet, and I don’t want to contribute any material that might some day be used to embarrass her. Still, I want to keep writing and saving her stories; this is a problem I’m working to solve for myself.

When Quinn was a language-less baby, lying on a blanket, often seemingly in another world than the one I was inhabiting, these issues weren’t issues. But now that she is my action-packed, observant, thoughtful little buddy, everything is different. By the time I had to start making summer daycare plans for Quinn this spring, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to make summer daycare plans; I wanted to take her out of school completely and have her to myself. For the past three summers, because we’ve had to pay to hold her spot, it’s been easy for me to justify continuing to drop her off, keeping her in her routine at school, and using that time for other things. But all I could think of this year was that I wanted Quinn to have the kind of summer vacation that I used to have as a kid. 

Memories of summers with my family are vivid. I remember dividing the back of my dad’s Volkswagen Rabbit in half with the big blue suitcase so my sister and I could each make a fort with pillows and blankets and books for the long drive from Rochester to Lake Winnepesauke. I remember the taste of the birch beer soda my grandfather would have stocked for us in the garage when we arrived, and the maple candy, playing cards and stationery my grandmother would tuck into the cubbies of our shared desk in the back bedroom. I remember always being in a bathing suit, and my mom and grandmother always being in their bathing suits, and I remember that the days and weeks and months of summer felt very long.

It’s a hard fact of life to know that time speeds up and then never slows down again. But it is also true that when you can exist fully in a moment, that moment is like a long hard squeeze on the brakes--the earth spins a bit more slowly for that instant...just long enough for you to look around and breathe it in and acknowledge the full volume of joy, or satisfaction, or gratitude, or maybe just rightness that you feel. So right now I’m working to break some bad habits of time and mind that have started to take root in the chaos of a busy year, and I’m bearing down hard on the brakes for this short bit of summer we have.

On Father’s Day weekend, as I watched Sam carrying our exhausted daughter down the bottom portion of the trail from Taft Lodge on Mount Mansfield, after a grueling six hour roundtrip hike, I felt that slow motion swell of love and gratitude. It was supposed to have been an overnight. I got Quinn pumped to sleep in the cabin on the top of Vermont’s highest peak, to ensure she would make it up the trail. She had her brand new purple sleeping bag packed up, and her purple pocket knife with her name on it, and she was ready. And when we got to the top and decided with our friends that, because of the weather moving in, we were going to hike back down while it was still dry, Quinn handled the news pretty well. She cried at first, disappointed, and that made me cry a bit too, but I told her how proud I was of her, and how impressed I was that she made it all the way up to the top, and then she took a deep thoughtful breath and said, “Thanks for saying that, Mom. Okay. I’m ready to go down now.”  By the end, her eyes were closing as she walked, and Sam carried her, along with her Frozen backpack that had her pink blanket and some GORP in it, and his own gigantic backpack, with his sleeping gear, all of our food, and a bottle of wine he carried up as a surprise. And as I watched them go down the trail in front of me, my heart swelled and time slowed down and I felt it all absorb into my cells.

There have been many moments like that already this summer. Like when she sat on the front of my paddleboard for the first time and leaned against my legs as I paddled her around Blueberry Lake. And when she sat on my lap in the Poconos with dozens of Jackson cousins and second cousins all around, with her cheek nestled against my cheek, as we watched the family’s Fourth of July fireworks. And again later that night when we snuck back to our bed in the Secret Hideout above grandma’s shed to sleep in the woods. 

Or when I looked over at her, at the sandy beach on Saranac Lake, and realized she trusted her pink shark life jacket for the first time and was swimming, on her own, with arms and legs in motion. I felt it watching her hold Char’s hand as they walked around the Adirondack Wild Center talking about flowers and turtles and owls and things. And again, a few days later, when she asked me for one more hug before she worked up the courage to let my hairdresser wash her hair for the first time. And then, a couple of hours after that, when she sat on Church Street eating her strawberry ice cream watching “Tony Briefcase” do his juggling show. And when she started a back and forth banter with the street performer, to the delight of strangers all around, until he begged, “Would someone please get this kid her own show!?!” 

I felt focused and happy the day Quinn and I gathered buckets of lupine seeds and spread them all around our yard in hopes they might take hold for next year. And the day Quinn agreed to help us stack wood and she came out wearing her pink princess “work” gloves, and she actually worked hard for hours...filling the tractor bucket with wood, her dad’s earplugs in her ears for protection from the loud noise, driving the tractor on his lap, scrambling to get each log that was her size and add it to the pile. That night at dinner, when I told her what a “bad ass” she was turning into, she asked me what that meant. I told her a bad ass is someone who is tough and does it all--hikes big mountains, swims in cold lakes and rivers, stacks wood, is strong and brave. “Well, what about a “good ass” then? I want to be a good ass!” When we all spend time together, and we’re not worrying about work, we crack each other up.

Four years ago, Sam and I took Quinn camping for the first time, at Green River Reservoir. She was ten months old and had just started crawling. I had imagined it would be a heavenly and memorable time, but it was mostly a hot, buggy, screaming-baby disaster. It’s taken us four years to reattempt it. This time it was all I hoped for the first time, and more. In our 24 hour stay this week, we canoed, swam, picnicked, read books, whittled sticks, roasted marshmallows, listened to loons, watched for fish, checked out beaver dams, and looked out at the world silently for long periods of time.

Right before bed the other night, looking out at the calm lake, I couldn’t resist the pull to go out in the boat one more time. Quinn felt the pull too and wanted to come with me. We slid the canoe back into the water and paddled out through the lily pads to open water. We glided past the campsite where Sam and I stayed five years ago, when I was at the very end of my pregnancy, just weeks away from her birth. I showed her the spot where I swam buoyed by her, and where I paddled by myself at sunset wondering about her. This time, Quinn and I paddled out over glassy water together, admiring the purple in the evening sky. She looked back at me periodically to remind herself how to hold the paddle, and to smile at me. I felt certain that we were sharing the same feelings in that moment. I told her I had waited a very long time to be doing what we were doing right then--maybe even my whole life--to be canoeing with my own wonderful daughter. “Thanks for saying that to me, Mom,” she said. And that’s all we said for a long while after. It was all we had to say.

As much as I often feel like I understand her, Quinn still surprises me all the time. When we paddled back to camp the next morning, after exploring out on the lake, and swimming and reading the end of Charlotte’s Web on an island, she said “Mom? Can I have a little private talk with you over by the tent?” I’ve learned to trust her when she says she wants to talk to me privately, as they are always meaningful talks, so I followed her to the tent. “Do you want to know why my eyes had tears back in the boat? It’s because Charlotte died,” she said, as she tried, but failed, to hold her fresh tears back. I picked her up and she wrapped her arms around me and buried her face at the curve of my neck. “Thank you for buying that book for me, Mom. I really loved it.” I was amazed to see her already capable of recognizing the potential for beauty even in sadness.  “You’re a girl with a really big heart, aren’t you,” I asked. And she nodded as she tried to pull herself together. 

I don’t know when my earliest memories started to take hold. They blur together now in categories rather than in a specific timeline. There are memories of summer, and of my mom, of early adventures and important firsts and favorite books. I had a lot of time as a kid, and freedom, and the focused attention of my mom and dad when I wanted it. These factors, I’m sure, combined to make all that was good possible. I realize now what tremendous gifts they were. I really hope I don’t screw up the formula.