Summer holidays!

I have found myself reaching for a book I bought a while ago, Buddhism for Mothers of Young Children.  Oh the unbridled joy of a three month summer holiday! Yes, we are somewhere in the middle of that savage territory...and everyone's sanity must be restored.  I can't believe I once entertained the idea of homeschooling.  Stay present, stay present. That seems to be the mantra. I blame my frontal lobe - isn't that the place in my head that refuses to 'stay present' and is always casting back and forth in time - 'Must quickly check in on the future or back on the past, see if I match up.' Well, no hope of that.  I wasn't planning on being called Mrs Poo Poo Diaper by a five year old, especially not one I was related to. So much for the pleasures of several weeks of unstructured play and spectacle parenting - where your best efforts are under close observation by those who, you naturally assume, are busy packing and unpacking their own cerebral suitcases - remembering how it was to parent three decades ago or wondering whether a child who calls his mother Poo Poo Diaper will, in a few short years, be looting in the streets of London.
Not to say we haven't had a lovely summer in parts. Who can argue with a family vacation Stateside? Days at the beach, searching for sea glass and collecting periwinkles. Camp fires on the gravelly shore and suppers of steamed shellfish.  We also headed back to the UK which felt good.  The children and I had our fill of rope swings and tree houses, dog-walking, egg-collecting, lifeboat love, splashing through streams, boat trips and beaches, bellies in the surf and feet in the rock pools.
Damn it, though, if it's not unsettling when you do come home, to your real home, the one you actually live in. I was a dark cloud for weeks.  I thought I had on some pretty tough armour - an exciting house project here in the States, a preschool we love for Oli, a new school full of possibilities for Max. It did feel different, this year, being back in the UK. I didn't have the wistfulness I've had before, the 'what if's or 'maybe's. I wasn't looking in the local paper for derelict stone cottages on windswept clifftops.
But being homesick is such a waste of energy. And being in the midst of young children, for me, tinges my homesickness with a cloying nostalgia.  The word 'nostalgia' was coined back in the fifteenth century when Swiss mercenaries fighting on the lowland French plains would pine for their native mountains. They were so afflicted that doctors considered 'nostalgia' a disease.  I don't need medication but it does feel like a condition I can't shake. Even as I consciously idealise the place of my birth, I long for it.  I know it is an ideal - but I remember my childhood in happy glimpses - making dens in the tall grass before the farmers cut it for hay, cupping newly-hatched chicks in my hand before school, scouring the hedges for wild strawberries, transported to the Swiss alps reading Heidi in the bow of my father's fishing boat.  I realize now I cannot offer my children the same thing. Did I ever think I could replicate a childhood? Somehow I thought that giving them the same geographical backdrop would be the least I could do.  Not so. I offer something else. A different family, a different country. Who is to say it is not equally as valid. We are discovering new things together rather than replicating what has gone before. The arrow of time is the first principle of physics. So I discovered, on our return flight from London when I watched - or snatched, as you do, when flying with children - a documentary about entrophy and the eventual chaos of the solar system. Happy stuff.  Especially at 35,000 ft.  But one thing that becomes hard to deny is that this planet of ours, with it's constant movement forward and the unique way it can support life, is just perfect. Stay present, stay present.
As for the summer holidays? Is entrophy the natural conclusion for this three month break? With yet more weeks to go before kindergarten starts, a friend tells me her five year old is getting up in his school uniform - a sure sign that it is not just parents who are searching for sense in the chaos.

Thoughts

It's been a tricky adjustment back to life in the States after a whole month in the UK. I've been grumpy for a week. I can admit this, but don't even think about nodding in agreement.  Any of you boys, that is.  Anyway, I'm getting better.  It was a holiday after all. It had to end. And it will always be there.
Indulge me a little. Let me wallow in the smell of rotting seaweed, brought in by the ground sea of that stormy spring tide.  It's not to everyone's taste.  The sway of the boat as the rainbow feathers bring in a black, green, glistening mackerel from the dark sea.  Not like it was decades ago, of course, when they were hauled in by the dozen. And never a storm in July back then. That's what I'm told.  In those days, (forty years ago was it?) the boats spent months tied to the moorings and came in only to have seaweed scraped from their hulls like fat sheep ready for shearing.  Who can blame me for a little nostalgia when the past is something everyone there refers to, relishes in, even outsmarts one another over.  The way it was, the way it's always been.  The lie of the rocks, the lie of the land. And so I watch Max catch his first mackerel, his first rock-cod and I try to capture it with a photo, but really I'm hoping it is the smell he falls for, the sway of the boat, the scales on his hands, the sea salt starching his hat; not just a first memory but a whole topography to tread through.

What else? Buckets, spades, a treasured cowrie, lollipops on the beach, crickets on the green, grasshoppers and caterpillars to observe, paths through the maize, the potato harvest in full swing, crabs at low tide, boats in the river, feet in the ford, wet shoes again...

A Proper Fug

It is fug season.  Even in California.  The rain has kept us inside, doors closed, and the cold has reintroduced me to chilblains.  And so the weekend fug forms.  In our house the word 'fug' has broken out of it's dictionary definition.  It still hints of Collins' Concise 'hot stale air' but has also attracted other nuances unique to our family.  For us, a fug generally includes a light floor covering of newspapers; strewn supplements, discarded driving sections and the news pages folded in upon themselves like a fortune telling cahootie. Likewise, cushions and pillows must obey the laws of gravity and find themselves suitably muddled into the mess.  To create a real fug, there must be jumble of toys and bedding liberally applied to the sitting room floor.  One thing that works very well and is the current favourite in our house, is a rocket ship made with duvets dragged from bedrooms, blankets pulled from boxes and the contents of the saucepan cupboard.  A fug can be enhanced when an elaborately engineered train set, built with such care, is then bulldozed and lies abandoned in the chaos.  A Christmas tree dropping needles will help in establishing a proper fug and a warm fire, if you have one, will do wonders.  At that point Dom will be reveling in it, he will sigh contentedly saying 'Ahh, now this is a proper fug, all we need is a dog.'
Some of you will have spotted that a fug isn't that different from a tip. A stuffy tip (thankfully without the dog). In the absence of an open fire, we have a thermostat. And, here is the biggest contention; let's call this, the battle of the fug. 
Our thermostat is on the wall near the kitchen, we walk past it to do just about everything. Dom sets it to 72, I turn it down to 60. Dom raises my 60 to 76, I see his 76 and turn it back to 62. Dom then ratchets it up to 80 and I switch it off. And so it goes on. Saturday. Sunday.
I am by no means obsessively tidy.  But, I generally keep cushions on chairs and bedding in bedrooms.  When I'm down on the floor, playing inside with the boys, I find I group the toys, putting the cars together, or the farm animals in the farmyard. I can't help but search out the missing shape for the sorter, or find a way to make the geometric bricks fit neatly in their cart.  I confess to picking apart playdoh to try and separate the colours.  I dream of having an organised craft cupboard.  And so I fight the fug here too.
By Monday I have majority control over the house again and most importantly, the thermostat. But it's hard not to like a fug, it denotes the weekend, and the season, and I can take solace in the fact that we don't yet have a dog.