There are people in this world who live for summer. Summer is seen as providing a laid back lifestyle that comes rushing in with the warmer weather and kids running quickly home from their last days of sitting at a desk and counting the quiet clicks of a clock. It’s days of water fun and lake life and sleeping in and having no particular place to be. It’s fireworks and milkshakes and time with friends.
I’ve never been that type of person.
To me, summer has always meant bug bites and exhausting heat and working long days and nights when the sun doesn’t seem to set until long after the kids go to bed. It’s kids who hang all over me on days I’m already so sweaty I can hardly wait to wash the stink off.
But, I can learn to love this season.
I’ve learned that this season will truly never come around again. Next summer my kids will be a little older, find a little less magic in the fireflies that come out at night, and hang on me a little less until they no longer do at all. The dreams I have in which I can no longer pick up my children because they’ve gotten too big — the ones that cause me to wake up in a panic — will one summer be a reality, one that is hard for me to swallow. As summer comes to an end, I realize that next year my kids will hang on me a little less.
Six summers with my twins have come and gone in a flash. People tell you not to blink and you try your hardest not to, but somehow you do anyway. A milestone, a phase, a chapter, a season — it all comes to an abrupt end when twins are all you know as a parent. It comes and goes and when it goes, it goes without ever coming around again.
So I can learn to love this season.
To not wish for the perfect days that are far too rare or for the perfect fall weather that creeps in and doesn’t stay long enough. Because when I wish away the days, I wish away time. I no longer get to sit and hold a sleeping baby. My six-year-olds are at least half my size now and holding them down long enough to wrap them in my arms for any length of time seems to be an impossible task. I wished too many days away when I just wanted to sleep through the rainy days and suddenly I didn’t have enough days with babbling babies or toddlers who needed me to wrap them in a cozy blanket and hold them through the storm.
I can learn to love this season without the fear of winter. I’ll play hide and seek inside when winter settles in and when my kids yell, “you’re getting hot” or “you’re extremely cold,” I’ll remember that this season is one to love too. While I can continually want the perfection of spring or fall weather, life and weather — well, they just aren’t perfect. We’ll stay inside and fight too much and crave the days we could get outside to play. We get back to school and back to routine. We’ll miss bike rides and seeing our neighbors often because they too are hibernating inside. We’ll watch movies and get excited about a snow that probably won’t come. But we’ll love and grow and be together anyway and in the end, that’s all we need.
Even when I go through my photos of the prior season, it’s hard to remember all the feelings that came with that time. How much younger their faces look even just six months ago or the things that were in the back of my mind that they had no idea about. The things that seemed so important at the time or the things that I couldn’t let go of that ate away the time I had with my kids. When I look at the photographs of their little faces, it’s hard to remember what could possibly have taken me away from an extra chance to just hug them.
