Late summer blows in like a sudden storm.  The cold front sends me rushing to close the windows, their casings swollen open for three months straight.

I remember the heat wave now like a lost lover, blurred with nostalgia and regret. Why didn’t I savor it while it was here?  Why did I wish it away as I lay naked with the fan on, unable to sleep under that heavy summer blanket?

Now it is gone, gone for the year, and Autumn is upon us once more. I’m staring down the long tunnel of Fall and Winter, the light of next spring barely a pinprick in the distance.

Every year I think I will survive this change with some semblance of grace. And every year it floors me, knocks the wind out till I’m gasping like a kid fallen off a high swing, flat on her back in the dirt.  All summer I was giddy with constant sunshine and ice cream and spontaneous swimming adventures in ponds and rivers.  Suddenly we’re trading bikinis for fleece.  Soon it will be time to get out the wool hats.

If I could go back to the scarlet poppies in May, those showgirls tossing their crinkled silks, I would.  I’d go back to peonies, lilacs, back further to planting peas in the 8 o’ clock spring twilight.

But it’s late August.  We still have two weeks till school, and my children won’t stop fighting. Summer has turned them into feral animals, eating with their hands, running around naked, scratching and biting and pulling hair. Our doctor gave me a little lecture about enforcing mealtimes rather than letting the girls snack all day on demand.  She also told me to get firm at bedtime. It’s true, the best parents set clear limits with their children, but I’m just too tired to do it myself. I wish someone else could handle the discipline and let me lie back in bed, snuggling my girls and reading books.

I’m too tired to do much these days.  Cooking dinner, for example.  A real dinner, not just frozen pizza and some carrot sticks.  Too tired to write the scintillating Vermont version of Eat, Pray, Love and send it off to potential agents.  Too tired to build up my private teaching business, designing the perfect logo on the couch while the girls watch Angelina Ballerina.  And too tired, way too tired, to slip into something silky and try to seduce my husband at 10 o’clock at night.

Most nights, I am praying to be a better mother.  I’m running down a mental checklist of the good and bad I’ve done today.

GOOD: made fairy princess crowns out of cardboard and tinfoil.

BAD: screamed “STOP THE FIGHTING!” and slammed car door for emphasis.

GOOD: baked banana muffins with flaxseed meal.

BAD:  bribed girls with ice cream if they cooperated while shopping at Price Chopper.

I pray for more patience, more kindness, more parenting skills.  Several of my mom friends say they recite similar prayers at night.  Are the dads staying up late worrying about being better fathers? Maybe some of them are, but it’s the mothers I know who feel a profound sense of inadequacy.

There’s no torment quite like the mental anguish of depression, the relentless voice of self-laceration. If allowed to go unchecked, it drowns out all other sound. Sometimes I can’t even hear my children play, so deafened am I by the noise in my head.

When the rain came, the girls got out the wooden blocks and built a giant 4-story apartment building for their princess dolls. Then they added bridges, barns, and walkways for their kitties. It was an architectural feat, absorbing them for hours. Ava, already elated at the approach of her fifth birthday, had never been more proud of her handiwork.  When the inevitable happened and Carmen smashed the masterpiece, Ava handled herself with aplomb.  After an initial cry of devastation, she picked up the pieces and started rebuilding.

Sometimes the clichés are true: we can learn from our children.  Fully present in every moment, they aren’t victims of their negative minds. They don’t write scripts about the future. Their play is their work and they always “trust the process” (my mother’s favorite Sixties mantra). If I had my five-year-old’s big, innocent confidence, what couldn’t I accomplish?

The first yellow leaves swirl from the pear tree.  “It’s Fall!” yells Ava, running to catch them in mid-air.  The light is ochre now, the whole green world going to seed.  Purple morning glories climb the bean tower, cascading like jewels in the tangle of neglected garden.  They are my favorite bloom, small and vulnerable, not the brassy sunflowers– too cheerful.

The Sunflower House I planted in June sits moldering and stunted like a shrine to failure.  Ravaged by Japanese beetles, its leaves are wilted brown.  For hours, I dug sod out of a patch of field to make the structure, envisioning a magical, secret playhouse.   I dug and heaved while my children sprayed the hose and frolicked naked in mud at my feet.  Later I wrote about the ill-fated project, an article that was rejected by The Boston Globe.

Everything I do seems to be jinxed, and then I rediscover a book by Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times.  I receive her words in gratitude:

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.  We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.  Then they come together again and fall apart again.  It’s just like that.  The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen…”

Tags:   depression · motherhood · mothering guilt · Pema Chodron · when things fall apartNo Comments