Summer's End

One of the reasons I'm pleased with my job is that I get summers off: almost three months in a row, one-fourth of a year. That is a pretty good deal. I don't get paid for these months, but we've been able to save up enough money to make it through each summer so far. I cherish these months of spending time with Elizabeth and the girls. But one difficulty with this schedule I've noticed particularly acutely this time around is that, when I go back to work, I go through withdrawals. The symptoms are sadness, frustration, and a sense of loss.

Elizabeth feels many of these same feelings when I go back to work. She can't just go outside and leave the baby. She can't just make a quick trip to town or run an errand without packing up the kids. Most days, she sees no other adults and spends her time reviewing the alphabet, wiping up curdled breast milk, making crafts and cleaning up the house. When I get home, we try to talk to each other about our respective days, to re-energize each other with casual, caring conversation, but we can't really talk, because Sonora becomes frustrated at the shift of attention away from herself and yelps "MOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMY" until one of us busies ourselves with her.

However, tonight, Sonora said something that led me to believe that she, too, senses that something has changed, that she, too, misses having her other parent around. "Daddy, do you feel okay?" she asked me. I had had a hard day, a long series of non-accomplishments at work. And I had had a couple of hard days before that--working a normal day, coming home for an hour to eat dinner, going to three-hour Scout meetings, and coming home to a dark, silent house. Tomorrow, I get to spend another Saturday doing Scout stuff.

"No, I don't feel that good," I told her.

"I wish we could play together more," was her reply. Since mid-September, I've only taken her to the park once.

"I wish we could, too."

I don't really have a right to complain. I love spending that time, those slow, warm, family months, with them. Few families get to spend that kind of time together. But the transition back out of that life is a shock, even though I knew it is coming. It's a sort of metamorphosis, I guess, like the cycle of a perennial plant that withers with the first frost, hunkers its essence down into its buried bulb and then waits, waits, those long, lonely months, for the sun to warm the earth and beckon it into bloom.