Vacation Days
“Mom! Watch this!”
Pinching her nose, my daughter C, age 7, executes a leaping jump into the pool, legs and arms splayed outward at wacky angles.
The nearly empty pool is 25 feet long. Yet my kids insist on being right next to each other, bickering, fighting over toys, and generally preventing me from reading my book in peace.
“MO-O-O-OM! She took my ball!”
“Girls,” I intone in my best Mom-Voice-Laden-With-Meaning, “Do you need to go back inside?”
“SHE does!” declares M, age 10.
It’s our third day of vacation. Normally I would be in the pool with the girls. However, the pool is sunny, and I got sunburned at the beach this morning. Nothing terrible, just enough to be painful under my purse straps.
Burnt shoulders shrouded by a shirt, I sit on the pool deck in one of the ubiquitous white plastic chairs, occasionally managing to read a few words from Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life.
I wipe my brow. It’s 89 degrees Fahrenheit with a head index over 100, and humid too. I feel like a melting Popsicle.
M says, “I’m gonna scream as loud as I can under water!” She plunges. Through the blue, I can see her mouth open, bubbles flowing. Up above, it’s absolutely silent. It’s bizarre to see someone screaming and hear no sound.
She emerges, and the kids continue antagonizing one another.
Sometimes, when I see them treating each other with impatience and disdain, I wonder if I have done something wrong in raising them. My brother and I always fought as kids, so I figured it was inevitable. I hear other parents say (or at least assert in Facebook photo captions) that their children are best buddies, and I wonder, “How?” I have started suggesting ways that they can make an effort to co-exist without conflict. It is an actual effort, I realize, sometimes a huge effort, to get along with someone you’re stuck with. It’s difficult even for adults. So why should it come naturally to children, who haven’t yet developed social graces? Did I begin these lessons too late? When I see them occasionally doing kind things for one another, I breathe a massive sign of relief, like maybe I haven’t totally screwed up.
A thick cloud blocks the sun, dropping the temperature 25 degrees. If I weren’t already married, I would propose to that cloud.
“Mom! Throw my goggles!”
I hurl them into the water. C jumps in to dive for them. She can’t find them. They are one foot away from her, on the bottom of the pool. “MOM! I can’t see my goggles without my goggles!”
M fetches the goggles and hands them to C. We both tell M “Thank you,” but for totally different reasons.
I notice C has put her goggles on upside down. Should I tell her? Nah.
M dips under the water, stays there for several seconds, then uses the metal ladder to hoist herself back up. She repeats this process several times in a row. I ask her if she’s testing how long she can hold her breath. “No,” she says matter-of-factly, “I’m saying bad words underwater.”
Her sister ducks under to listen, then bobs back up, grinning. “I heard you say the A word!”
C invents a game called “Cookie Monster.” They play it together. They take turns doing show-off jumps into the pool.
And just like a summer squall, the storm of squabbling has passed.
For today, anyway.
I wondered the same thing all during my kids' childhood. They got along when they were little, fought in the middle, ignored each other for years, and are finally close again. It will come, but I'm not sure how the families do it where everyone loves to hang out with everyone else.
ReplyDeleteI am starting to think those families are myths!
DeleteI really enjoyed the way the pacing of this piece mimicked the events. You captured the languorousness of vacations so nicely; the easy calmness punctuated with children's bickering that so characterises summer.
ReplyDeleteInitially I thought you were sitting around the pool at your house, so when you wrote "The nearly empty pool" I was convinced the pool didn't have much water in it (lol)! It wasn't till I saw that the pool was 25 feet long that I figured it out. Locating the reader more specifically here could help avoid that confusion (for example: "The hotel pool is 25 feet long and nearly empty of people").
The asides about your sunburn, your book, the children screaming or swearing under water all added enjoyable depth, humour, and context, but they also made the thesis of your essay somewhat less clear. Sampling the micro stories in these asides was fun, but they didn't all advance the narrative or the main point of your essay. It'd be interesting to see how the shape of this changes if you cut some of those asides.
Having said that, I guffawed at M saying bad words under water. It was such a perfect moment of childhood and boundary testing.
A minor point about the book you were reading; it would have been nice to have a clickable link on the name that redirected either to a review of it, or to a bookseller (amazon/booktopia/the book depository/B&N/your favourite bookstore). It gives the reader the option to check the book out for themselves.
As far as bickering children goes, I'm quietly convinced that the families who say their kids are best friends are lying. Through their teeth. I have three siblings. We fought. I have two kids. They fought. Though, I will say that my siblings and I are now close, and my kids are close too (one's an adult, the other so very nearly is). Maybe all that bickering as kids let us get it out of our systems?
Thank you so much for these great comments!
DeleteHello! I liked the scene you set, and I related to all the little details (though I don't think I ever worried about my kids not being friends for various reasons, including not believing the bliss other parents post on Facebook, which you did hint at!). I think in the Coffeehouse you noted you didn't think this had a plot or a point-- I think you had some central conflict (the girls' antagonism and your self-doubt), which you get into starting with the Facebook observation, but the tension seems to be illustrated through telling rather than showing. Showing us the doubt, the attempts at helping the girls co-exist would be interesting! By the end the girls seem to have solved things themselves which could lead to the reader having a "So what?" moment (so was it in the mom's imagination? Was there something to worry about or not?). Still, really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThe thing without a plot was a separate, fiction piece that I abandoned, lol. Thanks for the comments!
Delete