Another Sound of Love

So we are on day three of Summer Vacation with Kennedy.  I finished the week before her and so I had a few days to unwind and get my bearings. I got to attend her Kindergarten Fun Day, which she loved, and her summer kickoff carnival (and by the way: being at both of these showed me my child is wildly different in school than she is at home; more reserved, a little standoffish, even somewhat clingy). It was so nice to be able to show up for my kid, though there was a fair amount of guilt attached to it as I realized that this is more of a regular thing for many of the other parents, and I made a silent vow to myself that I would do more of that next school year for her…and me.  We finished off the last day with a little get-together at our house for her friends and their parents that have become our good friends. It was a great entryway into the summer months I yearn for all year long.  

All of that carried me through until about two o’clock Monday afternoon.  We met two of my girlfriends and their kiddos at the park and the moment we got in the car to head home Kennedy started complaining that she was bored and ‘what were we doing next’.   I immediately started yelling at her that she was not going to bombard me with boredom declarations all summer long.   Part of the problem is I generally jam-pack our weekends and so when you are six and used to either school days or days filled with all of the things you are in this constant what’s next mindset.  The other part of the problem is my kid, God love her, can be a bit of a pain in the ass (if I’m being honest).  When I called my sister to whine about Kennedy’s pain-in-the-assery she countered with her own tales of annoyances.  Being that she has a brand new baby on top of my other two nephews, she wins, but we seem to be rowing in the same boat. 

A day later she sent me a text if she thought our grandma and grandpa were yellers. She went on to say how she feels terrible that she yells so much.  Here’s the thing:  my mom and dad were yellers.  They are two loud people; they talk loud normally and when they were angry with us they yelled loud.  None of us were afraid of it; in fact it became somewhat of white noise to us as we grew up.  You were able to recognize the varying degrees of anger in the yelling and so many times it was just another mode of communication.  Flash forward to today and my sister and I seemed to have inherited that lack of control in the volume of our voices. I thought about her text for a while, all the way into today.  I yell a lot, I do.  I too am a loud person with a strong inherent desire to be heard and I am learning that as a mother that is, often, hard to come by; sometimes inadvertently, often very intentionally.  And so I yell.  I yell to make sure she heard me, to make sure the message is delivered, to make sure she remembers my voice the next time.  I yell.  

I yell at her for being fresh or rude when she is speaking to me, her father or another adult.  I do this because I would hate for her precociousness to be a trait that overshadows her kindness.  It is a kindness that lights up the room and will make her the kind of kid that people want their children to have as a friend.  I don’t want anyone to hear the sarcasm that comes frighteningly easy to a six year old and decide she isn’t welcome at their dinner table before they get to know that she would do anything to see people laugh and smile and that’s what the intent is.  So I yell.

I yell when she isn’t nice to her baby brother (I’ve caught her twice this week being mean to him). I remind her no one treated her meanly as a baby because I would never allow it.  I yell because I need for her to learn that your siblings are your tribe. They will annoy you and steal your thunder, get you in trouble or blame you for things.  But they will also protect you on the school bus, lie for you to keep you out of trouble, and hold your hand through anything.  She had a late start in navigating the sibling waters and we have a lot of ground to cover.  My kids will be no different than anyone else’s: sometimes they will treat each other badly- I accept that but I will teach them that at the end of each day it is the two of them.  And so I yell.

I yell when she does something dangerous.  I yell when she rocks on a chair too close to a glass window after being told nicely, twice, to stop.  I yell because the thought of anything bad happening to these two babies literally makes me feel like I could vomit (no joke-I feel sick right this moment typing about it).  I have already seen the worst side of parenting and do no think I could survive anything else.  I hover by the playground, and freak out during near choking episodes, and bring my kids to the pediatrician and urgent care much more frequently than I need to. I shout be careful at least fifteen times a day.  I’m scared; there just isn’t any other way to explain it.  So I yell.

I yell when she says bad words or uses potty-talk.  I yell because there are millions of beautiful words to be spoken and she has to learn to use some of them before she mixes in the words that will bring her down to the level swear words come in.  I say this as someone that loves words.  I also say this as someone that loves the word shit. It’s about balance but she’s six and balance is not something she can manage yet.  And so I yell.

I yell when she doesn’t listen to her dad or me.  Not because I can’t tolerate disrespect (I work with middle school kids for crying out loud) but because I need her to understand that we are her parents.  We are not her friends.  We will laugh with her and joke with her and forgive her all of her imperfections but when it comes down to the line what we say goes. And so I yell.

Do I feel like shit about this at the end of the day?  Absolutely. I go to bed trying to count how many times I had to yell at her, often stopping after I get to ten because then I feel downright lousy.  But here’s my thought (and maybe its just be trying to rationalize my own bad behavior and parental shortcomings):  yelling can be just another sound of love. And so while sometimes I worry all I am doing is yelling I stop to remind myself of all of the moments where there wasn’t just no yelling, but instead honest-to-god awe that a child could be so amazing:  When I watch her mother her little friends so effortlessly, or hear her tell me how excited she is to have the special needs students in her class next year (“One of the boys has Down syndrome, Mama.  Like Jack. Isn’t that awesome?”), or plan to ambush her dad with Nerf darts as he comes through the front door from work and giggle because it worked.  There is no yelling there.  There is praise and telling her how proud I am of her, and laughter-so so so much laughter.   Love is the language I speak.  Every single syllable I speak to my kids is spoken in love. My goal in life is to make sure that even if I am yelling at them that they can translate it into love.

Bottling Summer

There is something about a summer vacation that is so magical you want to bottle up all of the feelings and sprinkle them as needed throughout the rest of the year.  There is a sense of relaxation of getting away from life for a bit and living solely for the week or two ahead of you.  The Doyles had that kind of week this past seven days on Martha’s Vineyard.  My best friend Jen and I had gone for a weekend three years ago for her bachelorette party.  I can remember taking an early morning walk and saying how great it would be to come back the next year together with our families.  By then I knew Sean and I were planning on our second baby, and I said I’d go with a little baby and Jen knew her and her new husband wanted to start a family and could possibly be expecting, but she said she’d go if she was pregnant.  It all sounded so perfect-we’d make a yearly thing out of it we’d said.  Well a lot of life happened and we hadn’t made it back there until last week and it looked a bit different than we’d planned on.  Jen and her husband Andrew were there with their first baby, Oliver, about to turn one, and Sean and I there with just Kennedy and expecting our third baby.  Things did not turn out as we’d thought but the result was still something I think we’d both pictured that morning. 

Sean and I had another vacation at the end of August booked- a beach house near Myrtle Beach with a bunch of my family and all of our kids.  We were trying to get pregnant for a while and we had said we’d just time it so it wouldn’t effect the trip- either we’d go with a new baby or we’d be expecting one in a few months.  Again, things did not turn out as we’d planned (you’d think I’d have learned by now).  A big, huge, gorgeous house, right on the beach.  Sean has been the one organizing it, making the plans, etc.  Then suddenly I’m pregnant and guess who can’t go?  Sean and Kennedy will still go down and spend a few days enjoying the place with everyone but this mama was benched and put on the no fly list.  So, I, being such a good sport, whined one night and said, “I need a vacation before this baby comes! We have to go somewhere I can go too!”  I talked to Jen, we made the plans, did our research and we booked a house back in February; scheduled our car on the ferry to cart all of the things that go with the children.  Then we waited.  As the year dragged on, and the stress of a baby after a loss piled on, I really couldn’t have waited to go much longer. 

We packed and planned, buying plenty of rainy day activities to keep Kennedy’s restless nature at bay should the weather not cooperate.  We had several jaunts down to Long Island the weekends prior for family parties, engagements and graduations, and so the suitcases had become a permanent fixture in our bedrooms.  After a quick strawberry pick and jam-fest with my mom, sister and nephews, we finally had arrived at our departure day.  Being that it was the weekend before the Fourth of July we were anticipating some pretty gruesome traffic, but the travel gods showed us some favor that day and we made it there in plenty of time.  We packed in Jen’s family’s belongings and made our way onto the ferry and, almost instantly, the stress melted away.  Well most of it anyway. 

The house was sweet.  Nothing fancy, but exactly what two families with kids needed for a week.  Well, aside from the fact that there was a lot of “natural light” in the bedrooms, which encouraged some very early wakeups from the kids every morning.  After that the days were filled with walks, beach trips (which even though requires a lot of effort on the parts of moms and dads are well worth it for the big smiles that were had), and a lot of delicious food. 

Our second or third day there we found ourselves at the beach one morning and after getting all set up another family came and set up near by.  I didn’t pay much attention until the kids came down by the water where I was parked in a chair watching Kennedy splash around and play.  I wasn’t really focused on anything in particular until something came into focus.  The little girl, probably around seven or eight that Kennedy was playing along side and then eventually with had Down syndrome.  She wasn’t very verbal, which was clear after Kennedy asked her what her name was and replied, “Huh??” every time she attempted to say, “Rebecca.”  I called Kennedy over and tried to simply explain in a way that wouldn’t illicit too many questions from my overly curious little girl that ‘she doesn’t have all of her words yet, so just have fun and play with her’.  And that’s what they did; they chased each other around, and shared Kennedy’s goggles, and splashed- not needing to say anything.  It was clear, they were speaking the same language to each other: Kid.  I sat there, unable to take my eyes off what was in front of me; a rare glimpse at what life could have looked like if Jack could have stayed with us.  I cried behind my sunglasses with a big smile on my face-all of the emotions coursing through my heart at once.  And when her mother came over to apologize in the event we were bothered, I said, “Oh no, she’s great, let her play!”

Oh and my husband decided to do a flip off the bridge there (because all the kids were doing it).  I wish he could have heard how impressed they were by him.  It didn't matter though-he was pretty impressed by himself.

The next day was an emotional one for me.  I was officially thirty weeks.  I had officially past the mark of where my pregnancy with Jack ended.  I delivered him at twenty-nine weeks and five days.  I had all the feels going on, but relief was again at the forefront.  My mind tried to again, for the umpteenth time, to remind my heart, “It’s different this time.  Everything is different.”  I gave myself the permission I needed to feel everything I was feeling and continue on with a gorgeous day in a little fishing village called Menemsha.  I snapped lots of pictures of Kennedy and Sean climbing around on the rocks as I reminded her to be careful at least fifty times and laughing to myself as I heard her say to Sean, thinking I was out of earshot, “Why is Mommy always worrying so much?”  As I listened to Sean give her what he thought, mistakenly, she would accept as an answer, I fell a little more in love with him.  I don’t know if it was the perfect background, or the way he talks to our little lady, or that seagull print shirt he was rocking, but I found myself thanking God that we made it through the other side of the storm together.

Jen and Andrew watched Kennedy for us later that night so we could grab a nice, quiet dinner in Edgartown together.  It was all perfect; from the views, to the fancied-up version of pigs-in-a-blanket that neither of us could resist, to the mocktail “Fassionola” the waitress brought over.

The rest of the week carried on with more beach and delicious lobster rolls than I could have asked for.  Kennedy gushed over baby Oliver all day, every day, so eager to help with everything except the dirty diapers; but who could blame her-he’s near-impossible to resist snuggling. 

Kennedy and Sean rode the oldest carousel in the United States in Oak Bluffs two separate days, grabbing the brass ring twice!  She thought she’d struck gold- but her genuine smiles were the real prize for me.

On the Fourth of July, we packed up a picnic dinner and made our way back to Edgartown in time to catch an adorable parade from the cutest little park and see the fireworks show down at the Harbor.  Kennedy loved everything about it and said more than ten times, no exaggeration, “I love it here, lets never leave!”

Of course, on our last full day, we went to the most perfect beach that ever was.  When we got there and asked the parking attendant which side we should go to with the kids he said, “Well, the pond is kid heaven so…”  he wasn’t kidding.  With the ocean on one side of us, separated only by some small dunes, was the gorgeous freshwater pond, clear, and shallow, and full of little fish Kennedy tried to catch with a bucket for the whole 3 hours we were there.  Next time, that’s the go–to spot for sure.

Like all good things, it had to come to and end, and as we packed, Kennedy voiced what the rest of us were feeling, “Can’t we just stay here forever?”  But we packed it up and made our way home, agreeing that this should become an annual trip.

And now to finish off the summer at home, waiting for another little boy that will undoubtedly change our lives.  Monday, we will pick up Kennedy’s first pair of glasses, which we learned she needs last week, and hopefully find out what school she will start in come September. 

If I could bottle all this up, folks, I would.