when I confess something about spring break

and motherhood

Okay, I have a confession: I’m not good at spring break.

Honestly what do I mean, I wonder as I type these words. I suppose I am better at setting the scene for you: I wake up frazzled like “a frazzled thing” in Sandra Boynton’s words, and I can’t find clean clothes despite my mother having folded three loads of laundry just a day or two ago. I fumble around, and trip over my slippers which I left at the foot of the bed thinking I’d slide into them like they do in commercials. I don’t.

My kids have been awake for a long while, and they’re already bounding off the furniture with a determination to break bones or toys or both, and they’re telling a fabulous story about knights and dragons and an evil witch and there is also a song that they simply must sing, all three of them, at the top of their lungs to get the flower to gleam and glow (thanks Tangled).

I get breakfast and I can already feel a rising tide somewhere between my heart and my belly button, a tide of worry about nothing in particular: the dust bunnies my vacuuming missed, the way the floor is always just kind of sticky, the fact that I can’t figure out what to eat for myself despite a full fridge and that my kids want pears, but only cut up, and they want milk, but chocolate, but we don’t have that, so they don’t want milk at all they want water.

The tide rises and soon it’s near my eyes, it’s around me no matter where I look, even in the midst of my kids being themselves which is to say, loud and bright and storytelling the same story 20,000 times and staring at me with disdain when I tell them not to knock all my bird feeders over or put their hands in the bird bath.

I hear someone far away, some voice in a caption on an Instagram tell me that these days run and these years fly and time, wow, it’s always moving, cherish it while you can, be amazed at them in all their child-ness.

Some days it feels inaccessible to me, that cherishing and amazing-ness feeling, that awe and wonder. Some days - especially spring break days - the tide that sweeps in is one of frazzled and fizz-less and frustrated. It’s a tide of emotions that don’t seem to fit an Instagram picture or a nice caption and so I think, no one else feels this way.

In yoga the teacher is often instructing me not to compare my body to anything else, but to gently and kindly be present to it. What is this body like today? What can it do today? Maybe today the hips and hamstrings are open, or maybe they are knotted and overworked. Maybe today the strength is present everywhere and maybe it is present nowhere. Yoga is a practice, they say, of listening attentively to your body and working with what is and not what is not.

So here, in the space of what is in these days of spring break where a tide of worry or frazzled-ness rises, and a cherishing or wonder or awe is further away, I will make space for that. I will make space for the songs that my kids sing and the stories they tell, and space for the way that those stories and songs also fill up my ears to overflowing and I crave silence and words on the page. Space for all these spring break emotions and tripping over my shoes, not drinking enough coffee and then drinking too much, and all of it happening somehow before noon.

Tomorrow is a new day, and next week is a new week. Where the body is, where the heart is, can change.

And maybe tomorrow I won’t trip over my shoes.