Where You Rushing Off To?

My summer? Oh, oh, it was great. I spent it driving. Driving my 15-year-old boys to two different gyms every day (don’t ask). Driving both of them to baseball practice, and then just driving one to baseball practice, while driving the other to two-a-day football practices (also, don’t ask). They did different summer programs on opposite sides of the city. They had plans here and then there. And as a work-from-home parent, it was my job to get them here and then there. My summer job. And if my kids had gotten a summer job, then I would have had to drive them there as well.

In between, I was a short order cook as well, the kind that gets their food sent back. That was fun. I would fill our house with food (heavy on the proteins because, duh, the gains), and then without even checking the fridge, my kids would say, “We have nothing for lunch.” So then I would open said fridge and, like a QVC host, highlight our array of main dish stunners: salmon and ground beef and grilled chicken thighs and the full pound of cooked rice I had already prepped, plus all the fruit and the whole milk and the Greek yogurts they had ASKED for. Then, as though the emperor had no clothes, they would reiterate that we had no food, or some manifestation of that like, “You know I don’t like my chicken grilled,” or “That smells weird, no,” or “I don’t think that’s still good.” And by that, he meant the salmon I had made the day before.

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What a privilege one might think this was to to have all of this quality time with my sons. Except it didn’t feel that valuable. There were no core memories being made, no deep chats. There weren’t even shallow chats. Do you think they talked to me? Ha, that’s funny, you must have girls. I mean, yes, they talked to me, but it was usually just short, grunting answers to my mundane questions about the gym and their sports, while I tried to push leftover chicken on them and asked if they’d done their summer reading.

Next summer, they’ll be driving, which everyone keeps reminding me, much in the way seasoned parents would tell me how the days were long but the years were short when my babies were throwing off their dirty diapers during naps, or my toddlers would run opposite directions in busy parking lots, or when they would stave off sleep by jumping back and forth between their beds until we heard a thunk and maybe another thunk, and then a screaming cry.

Those long days feel like a lifetime ago, and when I look at pictures of my curly blond cherubs, frozen in time, their fleshy arms and legs covered in cartoon Band-Aids and fake tattoos, it’s easy to forget about the chaos. They were so “effing cute” (as my mom liked to say). So effing cute. Did I not notice? Why didn’t I appreciate it more? Why didn’t I realize how precious and fleeting this time was? Oh right, because the days were long.

My boys are back at school now, and my summer jobs have come to an end, allowing me to focus on my own job now, focus on myself. There are fewer dishes in the sink, no shoes and sports equipment laying around, no uncomfortably deep voice calling for me to make him avocado toast. No one’s asking me for anything. My days are kind of quiet now, and while I relish it, I do, I also look forward to the moment when they burst through the front door, loud and full-bodied, and call out, “Mom, what’s for dinner?!”

I’m just happy to see their faces again, happy that they’re safe at home, happy that they’re home. It was a long day without them, and the years are short.