peevish mama

that I find myself typing in a dark sunroom in the wee hours of the first day of school. I can’t sleep. In a few hours this house will spring to life and I will have little choice but to put on a pot of coffee and spring with it. It’s not typical for me to be up so much earlier than the rest, but after Devil Baby bashed into a door on her way back from the bathroom at 4 a.m., there was no getting back to sleep. And why not just get up, tuck the laptop under my arm and tip toe to the downstairs sunroom? Quietly. Quietly. Don’t wake the dog.

I feel like I spent all summer trying to wrap my head around summer. It was so odd, starting out cold and then getting unbearably hot, and then, just now it seems, falling into perfection. August was a gift this year. We rode our bikes, licked melty ice cream cones, scooped up countless outdoor concerts, lingered at farmers markets, swam in lakes, walked the dog in clusters of twos, threes and fives under streaky darkening skies. We packed up the minivan and spent a week on beautiful Spider Lake, just us, no phone, no internet. My family fished, I swam and read and cooked. Foxy morphed into a proper wild country dog, flying through the woods and into the lake.

It seems a pity, to have to put everything in a box just as things are getting good. Which is to say, I am sorry that my kids have to go to school today. Which is also to say, they are ready. I am ready. But I still feel a sharp pang at the thought that many many hours will go by without my seeing them. I will go about my day, my thoughts straying to one or the other of them, pretty certain (and honestly, glad) that they won’t be thinking about me.

It’s kind of lonely to be a mom on the first day back to school.