Florida So Far

My children, who are like surly teenagers when I wake them up before school, both bounded out of bed on Wednesday morning at 6:00 without a single complaint.
“Is it today?” they both asked as I shook them awake. We were at the airport bright and early (I have a well-documented early problem, which might actually be an asset when traveling with children).
Our shoes at security. Both kids had to carry their own backpacks of books and toys. This resulted in some major complaining that they could not fit all of the assorted random stuff they wanted to bring to Florida in there. But I held firm. Sure, Grace had two doll heads sticking out of the top of her backpack. They carried their own stuff. Major victory.
It was raining on Wednesday, hard. And drizzling yesterday. But yesterday afternoon I took Grace and Whit to the pool, where the requisite shoe shot shows the change in climate. I sat and shivered, wrapped in towels, while they played for over an hour. Jumping, jumping, jumping. Splashing, splashing, splashing. Yelling, yelling, yelling. Despite being as scrawny as birds, both of them, they did not let the chilly day daunt them.
They alternated between being happy compatriots and ruthless enemies. For every hand-holding jump there was someone dunking the other for a few seconds too long. It interfered with my reading of my book, that is for sure.
After some “quiet time” that was lacking in all forms of quiet, we got dressed for dinner. Grace and Whit were totally wired by now, frantic with unexpended energy and running around shrieking as they beat each other over the head with plastic golf clubs. I dressed them in each others’ clothes which they thought was the absolute funniest thing in the entire world. What can I say? I’m hilarious.
After dinner, the children had sprinkled some heavy sugar onto their already frenetic exhaustion. It was a fabulous cocktail. They bounced out of bed, one after the other, refusing to go to sleep. But they were so tired they were whiny and tearful, each complaining that the other was keeping them up.

I felt that exasperation that may be familiar to some of you at the end of the day: Good GOD, children, why won’t you sleep? Their loud voices ricocheted off of the cavernous apartment, all wood walls, floors, and ceilings. I felt my thin-at-the-best-of-times patience fraying, my voice rising to compete with theirs, the gratitude I had managed to carry with me all day leaking away.

Finally I took Grace into my bed, where she told me she could not sleep with the light on (It was 8:02 and I was not quite ready to go to sleep). I pulled the lamp down onto the floor and she admitted that “Okay, if I shut my eyes, it gets dark.” I read and emailed on my iphone, watching her eyes flicker shut.

Within minutes she was sound asleep. Abruptly my mood turned, patience and calm flooding in to fill the hollows that had moments ago been overflowing with aggravation and frustration. I watched her sleep, thinking once again that I really do love my children most when they are asleep, wondering again if this is a bad thing. They just radiate a peace that I cannot help but absorb when they are sleeping.

And I thought about the fact that this might be the very definition of motherhood, this day: shivering in the gray drizzle while the children swim, finding the capacity for jokes and being richly rewarded by their delight, cutting chicken fingers and allowing M&Ms for dessert, chasing and shhhhh-ing overtired children and wrestling them to bed, feeling annoyed, strung tight and thin, close to snapping, and then leaning into a wave of emotion, love, and patience that floods in, like a tide, to wash away all the day’s frustrations.