5 posts tagged “kids are the bomb”
in my head, i lay down and rest. felt the wind on my cheeks as the grass spun around me, and i stopped the clouds just by staring at them for long enough.
real time kicked in, and i was raking leaves. traveling back and forth from 12 years old, awkward and alone. it's the last time i remember raking leaves. it's the last time i remember those big orange pumpkin bags (is that why i was so insistent upon buying them?).
12 years old was the most awkward and alone time that i recall. so frequently, we forget these times, especially when we grow up and are forced to make decisions. there's the stress of everyday looming over us, bills-responsibilities-pmsing-holidayplans-multivitamins-antacids-furniture-cancer.... it all just sits there, and we forget about those moments when we were merely twelve years old and the world was going to frikkin end because you just hadn't hit puberty like all the other girls. it's a vicious cycle really. between the highs and lows in our personal sagas, we just forget to remember when everything was ok, when we were focused on raking leaves.
i bundled all the leaves safe away into the bright orange bags with the pumpkin faces. and i was fairly proud of myself when my husband pulled into the driveway. it wasn't necessarily for raking the full yard of leaves, but for conquering at least some small part of being awkward and alone. i had spent many years of my life that way, but i had never felt such control over it.
i'm certainly still an awkward girl, and a lot of times, i choose to be alone. but neither are to my detriment anymore. neither make me less of a person. in fact, frequently, they contribute to the eccentric but loveable girl i'm proud to be.
yesterday, i accompanied one of my favorite families to the zoo. enlightening and enveloping, and i got to have a bratwurst for lunch.
we went with our nieces to the pumpkin patch on saturday. quite an experience!
The extreme outskirts of Chicago, this is the area that is populated solely with confusing access roads and hotels with conference rooms and continental breakfasts. We were staying in a Holiday Inn for the weekend, relishing the indoor courtyard and heated pool.
The hotel was the repetitive design of so many other Holiday Inns scattered across the world. There were seven floors of rooms, stacked identically on top of one another. The rooms lined the perimeter of the rectangular building, allowing you to step out of your room across seven or eight feet of carpet and look down upon the palm-filled, Spanish tiled, indoor courtyard.
It was my boyfriend’s grandfather’s birthday that week. He was turning seventy-five years old, and someone decided to throw him a surprise party. This was the incidental cause for my stay in a suburb of Chicago with my boyfriend, three kids and my boyfriend’s mom and step-father for exactly three days.
Our rooms were side by side on the fifth floor, and the two youngest liked to run ahead of us to fight over who got to push the button to summon the elevator. Ben, being a couple inches taller and a couple years older than little chestnut-haired Julia, usually won out, but she would giggle and run after him just the same. Her pint-sized legs would carry her just swiftly enough to witness Ben pressing the button, again, and she would scream about how it was her turn to push the button. Ellen’s motherly voice would ring out each time, “Ben, let Julia push the button!”
The afternoon of the party, all seven of us were rushing to get out the door and over to the hall to help set up for the main event. While my boyfriend and I were waiting for the elevator, I realized that I had forgotten my camera, and so we doubled back to our room. I popped in, retrieved my camera, and made a comment about how he should get his coat while we were there.
As we were leaving our room, Ellen and the kids were leaving theirs as well. Ben and Julia had run up ahead of their parents as usual, and Julia, trailing behind, stopped to talk to us as we came out of the room. Instead of actually stopping though, she continued a few feet, and in her three-year-old way, stared at us over her shoulder as her feet made dilly-dallying and shuffling sorts of movements. She was fussing around restlessly and trying to get a few words together over her sudden shyness. He and I messed with the card key to get back in to get his coat.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement that wasn’t quite right.
I turned around to see that Julia had slipped her tiny toddler frame through the bars of the railing. She was now standing on the half a foot ledge. There was nothing but a breath of air between her and the five-story drop to the courtyard floor.
Just ten feet away, Ellen stood, unable to move, and stared at her baby girl. I saw Ellen’s hands move to her mouth, covering a silent scream. Julia stood on the edge, in no way realizing that one foot-shuffle could be catastrophic.
Slowly and without hesitation, I moved toward Julia. I put my hand down at my side and turned my palm to my boyfriend, telling him silently to stay still and not make a noise. I did not look at Ellen.
Julia watched me with her inquisitive blue eyes from the wrong side of the railing. I approached her cautiously but with the necessary speed. The couple of seconds it took me to reach her stretched out to seem like hours.
When I stepped up to the railing, I reached over the thick hotel-type banister and softly put my hand on her brown curls. My hand led her back through the bars without effort and without a twitch. It was only after she set both of her feet on the carpet that any of us began to breathe again.
I didn’t know Julia well, having only met her once. So, when she looked at me standing next to her, it was with an air of question and hesitance, a why are you doing this? sort of expression.
Ellen finally made a noise; it was somewhere between a screech and a sob, and Julia ran over to her. Crying, Ellen crouched down and hugged her smallest child close to her. “I would have scared her. She would have jumped. I would have gone too quickly.” And if only because mommy was crying, Julia began to cry too.
