Back to the real world...

Warning: the following post wanders into quasi-philosophical musings and contains absolutely no actual updates on the children. Feel free to skim and move on.

We're home again from Farley's and the real world is setting in. As we drove away from the lake I said goodbye to the water and goodbye to summer, too. School doesn't start, officially, til Monday and Nat isn't back til the week after that. But we were back in practice mode the morning after we got home, me off to tutor and work in my room, Nat off to Lakeland to write after a brief kid exchange in the afternoon.

There seems to be enough summer lingering in the air that these past few days haven't felt that hard. The mornings have been early but I've left school by 3 and that hour of difference makes a huge difference. There's time enough to walk tohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif the grocery store, make dinner AND play on the bed. Or to go to the splash park AND to Melinda's for dinner. I am left thinking, "I can do this."

I will hold on to that.

This teaching profession, it's big on creating transitions for you. The Great Divide of summer, breaking apart one year from the next. The way your life shifts for 2 months then has to swing back to a new center and everyone in your life has to swing along with it.

Melinda heads back to school next week, too, after just about two years off with her girls. Reading her post on her wonderful blog, about sending her girls to daycare for the first time, got me to thinking about my own shift in persona. Next week I officially turn back into a "working mom." Because I spend the larger part of the year thoroughly enmeshed in that role, it becomes the one that defines me as a parent. Even though I am coming off of a two month stretch of full-time mothering, I haven't once thought of myself as a full-time mom. I am just a working mom on break. And so I guess I take it for granted that I'll be leaving my kids, abandoning them really, stepping out of their lives for 10 hours a day 5 days a week, to go back to my job.

I suppose it makes it easier that I have the (absolute and amazing) luxury of leaving them, home snug in their beds, with their daddy. But also I have the (strange to call it this) luxury of never having know it any other way. Ten to fourteen weeks of maternity leave aside, I have never been home with my babes full time. Never, at least, on my own, the sole provider and helpmeet to the littles day in and day out. Never to the point at which it becomes who I am.

I'm a bit jealous of my friend, you know? She has gotten to be that person, really be her, for these two years. I think about what I've missed out on, as my babies have rocketed through their infancies in a series of evening walks and fleeting weekends. I wonder how it would have been, to be truly present for every bit of their babyhood. I wonder how that would have changed me.

And at the same time I bask in my luck that I do not have to go through what I imagine she is feeling right now: A change in self, a strange meshing of halves as she steps out of the role of "mom" and back into "teacher". The wondering, whether either one will truly fit again.

I know, of course, that they will fit, wonderfully. Because my friend is an amazing woman who is capable of all things. But (just like our pre-momma jeans) they won't feel the same. And it'll take some breaking in and stretching to get there.

We're used to that, though. Isn't that what's been happening for 4 years now, the constant adjustment to our new lives and selves? This transition back to work, its no more or less than all the moments of the days in between. A slide, a check, a change, questions and decisions and second-guessing and a healthy dose of sleep deprivation on the side.

And at the end of the day four soft arms wrapping around my legs and four shining eyes and two tiny voices that call me mommy and make my heart catch a little every time. And at the end of the day, wherever I've been all day, that's who I still am and who I will be when I leave again. At the end of the day, it's going to be fine.