A Moment of Glory, and a Handful of Failures, All Mixed up in a Pretty Sunset

I was sitting on a porch swing not on a porch, watching the sky turn paler and paler. Thunderstorm clouds piled up on the western horizon, blocking out all those beautiful last-minute sunset rays. Instead, there were just pale colors along the parts of sky that were the remains of a beautiful summer day: Faded blue, dappled clouds smeared here and there, and a small crescent moon that looked just a tinge pink. But enough about that—I have a love affair with the blue glow of dusk, and I could talk about him all night long.

“We went to the public pool,” the tot said to me, standing on the swing next to me, her blue eyes wide and intense as she considered our day. She likes to give a re-cap periodically. “We swimmed and we swimmed and we swimmed.” (I don’t know the proper way to spell “swimmed”, but I prefer two m’s.)

“Yes,” I said, my mind wondering back to my moment of teaching glory at the public pool. A lifeguard sauntered up to me—a by-the-book older lady with that sort of southern charm sound to her voice that has a unique way of irking me when it is patronizing—and held out one of those two-arm floaties. “I’m going to have to ask your kids to wear these.”

The Not Public Pool, where your instructor and lifeguard are also your mom, and a Big Dog sniffs everyone's butt.

I’ve always been a submissive personality, but I find myself growing crotchety in my third decade of life. I held my tongue in regard to how if you want a child to learn to swim and float, you don’t put them in a flotation device. Instead, I felt my brow furrowing as I explained to her that they can swim and float. She didn’t believe me. It was such pleasure proving her wrong. A two-year-old can swim, albeit not across the pool, but she makes up for that with her floating. She looks like a mermaid, blond hair swirling around her face as she smiles upward toward the sky, like a leaf bobbing on the surface. The lifeguard backed off.

I should have tossed the words “they are homeschooled” over my shoulder, like the ultimate come-back as we strutted out of there. You just can’t underestimate what a homeschooled kid knows.

Tot School: Being tricked into learning via playing with toys.

“Wh-wh-wh-wh-what is making that noise?” The boy pointed to the creaking metal at the top of the swing. My mind drifted back to the day's failures. I feel so guilty for all the things I rush; all the things that I miss—all the times I was stupidly focusing on my glory moments, missing the actual important stuff. And all the stuttered out questions that deserved a very patient answer, that were just blown by instead. That is the heartbreaking part about parenting: It’s impossible to do it right. The mind can’t accommodate all the roles—mother, teacher, story-teller, wife, dog-walker, housecleaner, stressed-out-wreck—so we just stumble onward. Someday, we will look back and reminisce about times past, but then it won’t matter anyway. The distant past is just a sunset that was pretty, but gone.

Silhouettes.

The kids chased each other around the driveway in plastic cars that have been handed down through so many different families now that they are nothing more than sun-bleached brittle bits of plastic. I love to watch silly children as the pine tree branches turn to silhouettes against the pale blue sky.

There is always something beautiful to be found, even when feeling dreary.