The Summer Day

This has felt like the year without a summer, to me. It's been too cold and rainy to go swimming on each of the three days we had a long enough uninterrupted span of time to do it. Both my kids will be at the high school this fall, so they had to schedule a summer gym class and now we're on to band and soccer practice before school starts (way too early) on August 21.

Part of the reason our schedule has been so relentless is that Walker, who is 13, is having "growing pains," and it's affected his soccer game and therefore our lives. I took him to see a sports medicine doctor in June, who prescribed physical therapy. Yesterday the initial course was finished, but we had to schedule another, because his pain when he runs has persisted, despite exercises and stretching. The physical therapist thinks that his patellar tendonitis (bones grow first and then muscles, ligaments and tendons have to catch up, so the tendon that goes over the kneecap can get over-stretched and irritated) has improved, but now he has pain right where the ligaments and tendons attach to the kneecap, which means the growth plates can be affected. That sounds scary to me, but so does telling a 13-year-old boy that he can't play sports for the next few years.

Doctors and therapists say he can play, but that it would be good for him to rest the knee for "a month or so." He's done that for several months since the pain started to affect his ability to run last April, and it hasn't yet made the inflammation go away. Also he's not likely to stop growing anytime soon (we're a tall family, and he's at the very start of the typical male growth pattern). So what can we do? Last night he went to the first of daily 3-hour practices for the high school soccer team, of which he will be the youngest member. At the end, everyone had to run a mile, except for Walker, who was allowed to run only 1/4 of a mile "so he wouldn't tear anything in his knee," the team captain said to him. He came home in pain, had aspirin and three applications of ice, and got up limping stiffly this morning.

So you see why I'm scheduling hour-long therapy appointments for him until school starts, despite the way it makes the rest of the summer all about driving around town and showing up for appointments on time.

I'm paying attention to where everyone has to be when during the day and wondering what else I should have done during the night, like the speaker in Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day":

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Having no chance to be "idle and blessed," I'm still second-guessing "what I have been doing all day." Don't most mothers? Isn't it almost too much sometimes to have to plan not only what you're going to do with your own "wild and precious life," but also how much you can allow others to do with theirs and still keep them safe and whole to decide for themselves later?