So much miscellany (books, movies, speakers)

Unexpectedly I am watching the Caps in game 1 of the Stanley Cup. This is unexpected primarily because Washington teams forever seem to blow their wads too early, and so it's slightly surprising that they've made it to the league finals. Sorry, but that's an honest assessment. See RGIII times many, for example. Though I've been a DCer since 2005, I'm still a Cubs fan through and through, and to a lesser degree, a Seahawks and Bruins fan. I think this has to do with growing up in Louisiana which has/had, prior to the Saints, no such thing as a pro team, a father who much preferred college football, having zero athletic inclination myself, and being visual enough to appreciate the aesthetics of good (and bad) uniforms. 

In any case, I do love the physicality of hockey and the fact that hockey players do on skates, on ice, and in bulky gear, what some of us cannot even do on our feet, on land, and in no gear. It's really something at times- beautiful, graceful, and then POW! I love it. Go Caps!

This past week has been full. FULL, y'all! In so many ways I love living in DC- it is an embarrassment of riches culturally, and despite fatigue, I ate it up this week.

Monday: Cecile Richards (a heroine of mine) and Kate Germano (new to me but wow) in conversation with Michel Martin (one of my favorite radio personalities) at the Hirshhorn Museum. Cecile's new book is Make Trouble and Kate recently wrote Fight Like a Girl. I told Cecile how much I enjoyed last month's Planned Parenthood Metro DC gala and that I was a monthly donor to PP-IN on behalf of Wax Pence, and she said, "We all need to keep up the good fight. Tough to be a woman in the midwest in some ways, so thank you." PS- Cecile is stunningly beautiful. All three women are stunningly articulate. WOMEN!
After the event, I wandered into a side garden by the Hirsshorn. It's so lovely, and I am covetous of the bug hotel there.

Tuesday: T and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary. It was one of the nicest anniversaries in a while, and I made a great dinner. You should all try this fried asparagus with miso dressing from Nobu. and really, when is key lime pie ever bad?!

Wednesday: A dear friend and I met other friends and members of our school community at the National Portrait Gallery for a private showing of The Sweat of Their Face with my friend and the co-curator of the show and the head of our school whose area of study and dissertation was America's working class and the various representations of it. Also got to see the Obama portraits again and the new Henrietta Lacks portrait!

Friday: Tom and I took the boys and a friend each to the opening night of Solo, the newest Star Wars story/flick. We all loved it and found it delightful. (In fact, Oliver and I saw it again today.) A) Alden Ehrenreich is a perfect young Han, and B) Donald Glover (who is always good and also hot) is a magnificent Lando, and C) Ron Howard really did almost-perfect justice to this back-story. Lady Proxima is a "no" and why does Dryden Vos have the facial scarring but otherwise, A+!!

Sunday: Cirque du Soleil with the kids. Luzia is no Kurios, that's for sure. Dang. I didn't much care for the show. The kids didn't either. The bendable man who could rest his own head in his butt crack was disconcerting, and the women don't need to be nearly naked to be impressive.
Today (Monday): Solo again. It's fantastic.

Meanwhile: I finished The Complete Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn. I'd started reading them prior to the release of the 5-part Patrick Melrose series on Showtime staring, yes, my Benedict, and my god are they spectacular. INCREDIBLE prose, not least because the story itself is largely autobiographical. I've watched the first two PM episodes and while I do think Benedict is perfectly cast as Patrick, I found the first episode lacking. The second, while terrifically tough to watch, is excellent. The novels are magnificent. I couldn't put them down. 

Alright, y'all, it's 2-2 Caps-Golden Knights. More later. 

My children are safe at home tonight

One of my sons has been asleep for a couple hours now, tucked in after a fun family afternoon, a good dinner, and a warm bath. 

The other just got home from a school dance, sweaty and flushed and "so pumped up." He smelled a bit, but I couldn't help but hold him tight as he told me about the dance and the music and the ice cream. He's had a tough year, and I was so hopeful that tonight would be fun. It was. And now, he is safely in bed, here with us at home.

Worrying about your child having fun at a middle school dance is a typical, expected parental concern.

Worrying that your child will be shot to death at their school is not, should not be, cannot become an expected parental concern.

Today, again, more children were gunned down while simply trying to go to school. While most of us are counting down the few remaining days of this academic year, some parents tonight are instead planning shockingly unexpected funerals. With this, the 22nd school shooting of this year and the third just this week, "2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than service members."

If we as a nation are not mortified and ashamed into real action by that obvious disregard for our children (and the converse which is the obvious idolatrous obsession with firearms), then we are truly beyond repair. 

It's the guns, stupid.

And don't even get me started on the fact that the white murderer was taken into custody without a scratch. If he'd been black, he'd have been blown to smithereens in moments.

What the hell was I thinking?

People, as the end of school draws near, as homework and the elusive treasures that are matching socks have become familial albatrosses that make me want to run away at least once a day, I am both thankful and terrified. What were Tom and I thinking when we decided to let the kids go to sleepaway camp for six weeks? 

I know what we were thinking. Camp would be: an incredible opportunity for growth, independence, adventure, and the acquisition of new skills that I'd rather not teach (see: emergency shelter construction and axemanship, among others); a complete electronics detox as there is no electricity at camp save for the kitchen; a new context in all ways; a summer spent mucking around outside with eighty other boys. And lord, it was their idea!

And I still maintain that for Jack and Ol, camp will be a rare truffle.

"Six weeks?!" everyone exclaims.

"No visiting day?"
"No phone calls?"
"Wow- are you beyond excited? How will you spend that time? You and Tom must be THRILLED."

We are thrilled. We look forward to reacquainting ourselves as a couple with relatively little in the way of responsibility and schedule. We're going to take our first trip abroad together sans kids since before Jack was born nearly twelve years ago. All of that is fantastic.

But what is becoming abundantly clear is that I did NOT really consider what the boys going to camp meant for me. And as the time to head to Maine draws near, I feel a ludicrous push and pull of sorts: desperate to throw the undersized catch back out to sea and immediately desperate to reel it in again because honestly? It's adorable. 

In the ways families do at the end of a holiday or the last week of summer or, as it were, the last month of school. we're all fritzing out right now. I could literally not care one bit of one iota about anyone's homework anymore. So, while it incenses me that the kids aren't much motivated for it at this point (because that means I have to nag them to do it), I can hardly blame them. 

This afternoon, they were bordering on batshit nuts over rewriting a story in Mandarin and drafting an essay about colonial-era cooks. I excused Ol to go ride his bike, and an hour later after, admittedly, very calmly and capably completing his math homework, Jack went out to join. They teamed up with the girls next door to run a lemonade stand and came in for dinner, hot and sweaty, at twilight. Meanwhile, I cooked their dinner, enjoyed a glass of wine, and voraciously read some Patrick Melrose. It was divine. Reel in the adorable small fry.

And then, as dinner wrapped, it wasn't. OMG, cast the line as far as you can. All the way to Maine if possible! I'm telling y'all, I just quit. I most definitely yelled and I refused to get off the couch and away from my book. I refused to discuss colonial cooks for even one more second and for petes sakes, people, I DO NOT KNOW Mandarin. Not my wheelhouse. NOT.

I'm left, tonight, tired and vexed. Earlier, as I finalized our plans for bringing the kids to camp next month, my heart was pounding out of my chest. What if our beloved morning snuggle tradition ceases to happen after six weeks off? How will I tolerate not hearing my boys' voices for six weeks? (Apparently if your child celebrates a birthday during camp, you can talk briefly that day. Amen for Jack being July 4.) I mean, I don't go five days without talking to MY mom, and I'm 42 years old. 

What does it mean to have spent twelve years constellating around two bright starts and then have them go dark for a short while? In theory it sounds fantastic. But in practice? I'm starting to wonder. 

This evening, pissed to the nines and tired as get-out after a random bout of insomnia last night (stress anyone?), I thought about how very much I could use some real downtime. Not a night, not a weekend, not even a week. Some real, extended time to breathe and sleep and not be interrupted ad nauseum. To read a whole book in one sitting if I want. To garden without having to set an alarm to run carpool. To not for one spot of time think about colonial cooks or butts or feeding forever-starving little mouths, even if they're the most perfect mouths ever. 

I just checked on the boys. They are asleep, their foreheads sweaty, their lips rosy. They are finally quiet and still, and my eyes pricked with hot tears for how I will miss them and their silliness and their snuggles. I believe this summer will likely be a grand learning experience for all of us, one it seems I might need. For they aren't growing younger and sooner than the amount of time I've had them with me, they'll go. Off into the world, returning less and less as children who grow into adults tend to do. 

So I guess what I'm feeling is the first big break. The first tug that really pulls the line between us taut, straining at both ends, in opposite directions. It's harder than I expected.