The water is cold as penguin ass, but your kids still insist they want to go to the beach. And a cold beach for a solo parent is a special kind of Hell. Because there are all the usual headaches of the beach: sunscreen, towels, wet bathing suits, snacks, a change of clothes for every kid, bottled water, and all the various other crap you have to take to any beach. Not to mention the sand, which gets everywhere, everywhere, EVERYWHERE! But a cold beach also produces the shivering, and the bluish-purple lips, and the blubbering that comes on suddenly and uncontrollably the minute they’ve decided they’ve had enough and want to go home NOW! And when that happens, you have to break into frenetic action from a full stop, like waking to your house on fire. And it never matters that they did this to themselves – that they begged for this – you’ve got to make it better. You’ve got to dry them, and warm them, and banish the sand that has caked itself to them in horrifying ways. And you have to do it for all three of them at once, like some idiot juggler who is also a snake charmer, and is juggling the snakes he is trying to charm.
And of course, there’s the freezing your ass off on the shore as the wind blows the pages of your book and you wonder if the kids should even be out here, and/or why this year’s Honor Choir couldn’t have been hosted in Turks and Caicos.
But they want to go. And it’s their spring break, but half of it has been spent dropping their sister off, or picking her up, or waiting around for her, or bringing her stuff that she forgot, or avoiding activities that might prevent you from doing any of the above. So, with the resolve of the self-sacrificing Sydney Carton as he approached the guillotine, you take them to the beach. The cold, bleak, deserted tundra of a beach.
And they freaking love it.
Of course, you can’t relax or read very much, because there is only your watchful eye between your children and drowning. Or worse, murder hoboes.
And the little meerkats keep running down the beach to chase “better waves” – waves which are utterly indistinguishable from the waves which appear right in front of your towel. And before you know it, they have moved beyond earshot. Damnit. Now you have to grab all the shit you brought that’s worth stealing and trudge all the way down the beach to fetch them and bring them back to where you can bark at them more easily.
Or do you?
When you were a kid, you ran barefoot and unsupervised all over creation. Your parents never knew where you were until you showed up again, and nobody even asked what you’d been doing all day. Indeed, during summers at your grandma’s place, your uncle would lock you and your cousins out of the house and tell you to “go get lost for a while.” You jumped around in other people’s haylofts, climbed trees to impossible heights, slipped through barbed wire fences to traverse unknown fields, and dared each other to touch or (gasp!) enter the collapsed house haunted by the ghost of the crazy widow “Old Floatie”. You even caught a copperhead once with your bare hands. Well, your cousin did – what are you, a moron? The point is, like Tom Sawyer, you had *adventures* as a kid, and you did so utterly outside the awareness of your parents. And now you’re a parent, and you’re afraid to let your kids walk even a little ways down the beach (but within eyesight) without scurrying after them?
To Hell with that.
You force yourself to sit exactly where you are, and reflect. Maybe they’re not down there for the supposedly better waves, which they’ve now abandoned anyway for the building of some kind of castle. Maybe the whole reason they’re down there is to be outside the protective bubble of your presence. To experience adventure, or at least the illusion thereof.
And isn’t that what you want? To raise confident, independent kids instead of ones who cling to your side?
Yes. But . . . the clinging was nice while it lasted.
And so you resolve to let them play. But you’re not stupid, and you abandon your reading so you can keep your eyes trained on them. And they’re so far away that you can’t even make out what they’re doing, only the color of their swimsuits. But no creepy old men appear to bother them. Nor do any killer clowns, or rabid dogs, or orcas riding waves onto the shore to snatch them like unwary sea lions.
And the kids have a large time. At least until one of them throws mud at another one. And a castle is kicked over. And one decides she’s freezing. And then they run back to you, and they want to go home now, now, NOW!
And now they need you again.
And you’ve got this.