Seasons of Chaos

As every parent of school-aged children knows, each season has its own level of crazy. For my family, it is often the sport-du-saison that ramps up the chaos, especially when there is overlap between one and the next. Now, for instance, as ski season lingers, while spring soccer and tennis kick off at full speed. Three kids. Two sports. Five teams. Oof.

The logistics, even with two involved parents, plus grandparents living nearby to help with taxi-ing and other things, can range from daunting to seemingly impossible. Our spring calendar is a muddle of games and practices and who-needs-to-be-where-when. Some days, my head spins when I try to figure out how to get everyone – including myself – where they are supposed to be at the allotted times. 

Here’s the thing, though – I’m not sure I’d have it any other way. 

 

There was one spring, in 2020, when we had no place to be. That, of course, was the year Covid hit and much of our world shut down. Frenzied schedules of sports and school concerts and social outings suddenly shifted to a very long stretch of days spent almost entirely at home. Work was from home. School was from home. And our sporting endeavors became constrained to the backyard. 

 

That spring, we did lots of projects around the house and yard. We spent weekends normally reserved for games instead completely revamping the huge and unwieldy perennial bed at the front of the house. We walked in the woods and along normally quiet roads that had become even quieter, since most other people weren’t going anywhere either. We played nearly daily family games of soccer and disc golf in the yard, fashioning goals from tree trunks and targets from boulders and branches and old stumps. We hardly got in the car at all. 

 

In some ways, it was kind of nice to have all that downtime and so many fewer obligations. But we also longed to get back to teams and sports and friends and competition – with someone beyond immediate family members. 

 

Two years later, we have returned to full-fledged scheduling madness. And I am OK with that. Mostly because I realize it will not last forever. 

 

The other day, I was lamenting to my mom how wild and crazy the family logistics are becoming, with kids going all different directions, work obligations, and the task of feeding three teenagers on-the-fly. “Yes, it’ll be busy for a few more years,” she said. The conversation rolled on to the next topic, but that remark has stuck with me. A few more years. Then, these multiple-sports-a-season, driving-all-over-creation, mom-there’s-nothing-to-eat days will be another phase of raising kids that has passed. 

 

I won’t have to create spreadsheets and color-coded calendars to help manage our family schedule. I will have far fewer games to watch and none of my own children to coach. It will, perhaps, be weirdly quiet in my house.   

 

So, yeah, I’m jumping into the chaos of this season. If anyone needs me, I’m probably driving to practice. Or a game. Or to the grocery store – again – to restock. 

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's April 7, 2022 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record. 

Forward

Three more weeks. That’s how long my kids have to wait until they’re fully vaccinated. While most shots – to protect against such seemingly far-fetched ailments as tetanus and polio and diphtheria – are events to be dreaded at annual doctor’s office visits, the coronavirus vaccine was one all three of my children were eager to get.

This vaccine lifts a world of worry from their shoulders, one I hadn’t fully realized they’d been carrying these last long 14 months. Yes, getting the vaccine will mean less mask wearing and more hanging out with friends. But it is so much more than that.

When vaccination opened to the 12- to 16-year-old age group, I scheduled first shot appointments for early June, figuring the kids would be out of school by their second dose, and more easily able to handle any side effects. But when I happily announced this news, all three said they wanted their shots sooner. As soon as possible. They were tired of waiting. Tired of wondering when they’ll be able to hang out with friends – whenever and wherever they’d like – without masks.

They are done with pandemic worry. They are ready to move forward.

My kids have been lucky this past academic year to have spent almost all of it in school. Yes, they wore masks to class, for hours a day. Yes, they had to stick with their limited cohorts, which meant no mingling at lunch tables or in hallways – and, for my 6^th grader, missing out on many of the traditional last-year-of-elementary-school events, including the field trip to Boston, a series of outdoor education hikes in the mountains, and getting to be leaders for various activities of mixed age groups at school.

But they have not been isolated. Their human interaction has not been limited to seeing friends and classmates only through a screen. They played soccer in the fall and competed in ski races through winter, both activities that are as much about being with friends as they are about athletics and competition. When they had questions about schoolwork, they were able to ask their teachers in person. They’ve had the welcome routine of going to school each weekday morning.

Still, amid all of this not-quite-normal, there’s been an underlying fear. Fear of getting sick. Fear of getting someone else sick. Fear of being ostracized if they did contract Covid. Being vaccinated won’t eliminate this anxiety entirely, but it alleviates it in a huge way. One shot in, my kids are already feeling that Covid concern ease a bit. One down, one to go. Forward.

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's May 27, 2021 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.

Winter Worth the Wait

Winter was late in coming this year. The week after Christmas (when it rained), I was still walking through the snowless woods in low boots, and we were only skiing thanks to the wonder of manmade snow. We haven’t really had a big storm yet this season, but the woods – behind our house and on the mountain – have slowly filled with snow. Many days over the past two weeks, I’ve looked up from my desk to see it snowing on the other side of the window – sometimes big, fluffy flakes swirling casually toward the ground, sometimes a fast-falling wall of white.

To someone who loves skiing, all those snowflakes are really distracting.

Skiing on weekends is a given in our house. But twice in the past week or so, I’ve loaded skis into the car on weekday afternoons and chucked the kids’ boot bags in on top of the skis. One of these outings was pre-planned and involved springing the youngest from school a little early. (I’ve called family powder days on occasion in the past, and since we live in a place where lots of people – including the principals at both schools – are skiers, I just straight up tell them we’re going skiing. Or I say we’re working on “outdoor education,” but they know what that means. And we’ve never been scolded.)

Tuesday, every time I glanced up from the keyboard, it was snowing. I had planned to just take the dog for a ski through the woods between meetings and other work tasks, but when I went out to run an errand mid-day, I brushed a couple of inches of fluff off the car, and then it snowed a good bit more. My two 8^th graders were at the mountain that afternoon for ski team practice. A friend sent a photo of a glade filled with fluffy, untracked powder. My distraction level was high.

So, I did what any ski-loving girl with a little scheduling flexibility would do. I donned my ski bibs, tossed my skis and my daughter’s into the minivan, and we headed up Three Mile Hill to the Mittersill Double straight from school pickup. There was hardly anyone on the hill, and we found plenty of untracked snow, even late in the afternoon. It was a sweet hour and a half on the slopes. Just the right number of runs to adjust my attitude, the break I needed to focus back on the work left to do at home.

Winter was late in coming this year, but it was worth the wait. 

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's February 11, 2021 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record. 

Stolen Runs

Sunday afternoon, I snuck in a few ski runs with my teenaged daughter. She’d spent much of the day competing in a ski race and was tired from the hours on the hill, the earlier-than-usual race day wake-up call, and the emotional and mental exertion of competition. Add to that this winter’s weirdness of booting up and eating lunch in a cold car, and I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d opted to go home and curl up someplace warm and cozy with a good book.

 But I’m glad she chose to ski with her mom instead.

The older my children get, the more I find myself cherishing the stolen moments – an unexpected ski through the woods with my son, a quiet hour of piecing together a puzzle with my youngest, an afternoon on the mountain with my oldest girl. There are plenty of times where these growing children of mine retreat to their rooms as soon as they are home from school, or skate off to the lift with their friends without a backwards glance, or are aggravated by my very presence. And I’m (mostly) OK with that. It’s all part of the process of growing up.

There are also many moments of teenage angst, siblings annoying each other, the stress of making their way through middle school – on top of the constant curve balls of doing so during a pandemic – and a mother (me) who doesn’t always have the patience to gracefully dance through it all.

Somehow, Sunday afternoon, I convinced Ella to keep skiing. Decision made, we clicked into our skis and pushed away from the race day hubbub toward the lift. We headed to the summit of Cannon, passing through the mid-mountain snowmaking fog to rise into the cold sunshine of a world above the clouds.  

This late in the day, many skiers had gone home, so we had our choice of trails, without having to human-slalom our way around other skiers.

Not so long ago, I brought up the rear when skiing with the kids in case they fell and needed help, or to make sure they turned the right way at trail intersections. I hoped, in those days of snowplowing and pony slope runs, that there’d come a time when the skiing pace was a little bit faster. Now, I play caboose because I don’t have a prayer of keeping up. I love watching my kids race ahead of me, all fearless speed and nimble turns.

But Sunday afternoon wasn’t about keeping up so much as just hanging out. We chatted on the chairlift – about what, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t recall the specifics of our conversation, but I am holding tight to the feeling of just being with my daughter. No stress, no angst, no more race day nerves.

Just a mom and her girl, sunshine and snow, and a few stolen ski runs. 

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's January 14, 2021 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record. 

Snow Fix

A few inches of snow. That’s what it took to adjust my attitude toward winter this year. For as long as I can remember, I have loved this season of white – it’s filled with Christmas magic and snowy woods and skiing. But this December, I just wasn’t feeling it.

This year, I held tighter than ever to summer, lamenting its passing in a way I never had. Summer had provided a bit of a respite from the pandemic, as we spent the long days mostly outside and often with friends – hiking and splashing in the river or just sitting together. Here in the more northern realm of New England, it felt as if we were in a germ-free bubble of safety. Autumn arrived with colors as brilliant as ever, but also with the kids returning to school, less opportunity to gather (safely, outdoors) with friends, shorter days and continued uncertainty.

While visions of powder days and wintery wonderlands normally fill my head once the leaves drop from the trees, this winter took shape in my mind as an endless stretch of cold, dark days. Even the thought of skiing didn’t excite me. I couldn’t – and still can’t – picture a ski season without the banter of the coaches’ room in Ernie’s Haus, the young kids I coach sharing candy at snack time, my own kids goofing around with their friends and sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at lunchtime.

Rather than bemoaning the lack of snow, as I would normally do, I reveled in the warm weather that lingered into this strange December, in long walks through the woods, and in the extra time of unexpected free weekends due to a delayed start to the season. It didn’t feel like December or ski season or Christmastime. It felt like endless November, and despite my normal disdain for that month, this year I didn’t mind.

But Saturday afternoon, the steady drizzle turned to snow, and Sunday morning, we woke up to a landscape transformed to white. The tree limbs, long bare of leaves, were sheathed in snow. The mountains were covered. The plows once again prowled the back roads near home.

My son pulled the old toboggan out of the depths of the garage and we trudged through the snow to my folks’ house to visit (outside) and help with the shoveling. After lunch, we rallied some friends and a cousin, and the kids spent a couple of hours tramping up, then sliding down the long hill of my in-laws’ yard.

It was an afternoon of laughter and rosy cheeks and snowballs lobbed at passing sledders. It felt almost normal. It felt good.

Back home, the lights of the recently-trimmed Christmas tree twinkled against the early dusk outside. Our familiar hodgepodge of holiday decorations occupied their regular December spots along windowsills and across the mantle. The skis, hauled out of their summer storage place just the day before, were waxed and ready – for whatever this season will look like.

It still doesn’t feel like all is right in our little piece of the world, and maybe it won’t for some time. Our anticipation of the season is tinged, in this year of 2020, with anxiety. But a little bit of snow went a long way to remind me that I really do love this season – and had me embracing winter again, at last.

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's December 10, 2020 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record. 

Spring Swing

It’s that time of year when I turn the defroster on in the car in the morning and shift to the AC in the afternoon. The snowpack is receding to reveal green shoots of crocuses and daffodils pushing through half-frozen dirt. And the chickadees are singing longer and louder, with other birds adding their voices to the soundscape outside.

Ah, springtime. Just a friendly reminder, though, that we’re likely in for more winter before spring really sets in.

It’s a rare – maybe nonexistent – occurrence that one New England season simple ends and the next slides smoothly into place. I’m guessing there will be some more give and take between winter and spring – more cold wind, more blowing snow, more bundling up into layers – before the warmer, greener season really takes hold. But the transformation has begun.

Last week, the Connecticut River, where I cross over it from Thetford into Lyme on my way to the office, was a wide, smooth swath of silver-white. This week it’s melted out to a sleek ribbon of cold slate. Where snow covered the perennial bed just a few days ago, now the newly-exposed leaves are greening in the March sunshine, a first step toward summer blooms. Sap buckets hang from sugar maples, and the dog has taken her first dip of the year in an ice-free Bowen Brook.

The kids and I spent all of last weekend at ski races, where the spectators basked in the warm temperatures, and freckles sprouted on noses and cheeks. After school early this week, the kids changed into shorts and headed into the yard with a soccer ball. And so we find ourselves, again, in an in-between place, where mud and snow mingle in the yard, and ski boots and snow pants share space with flipflops and cleats near the front door.

This transitionary time is not always pretty. Tired snowbanks are melting away to reveal a winter’s worth of detritus. (And each year, I wonder who on earth drinks so many cans of bad beer before tossing the empties out the window.) Frost heaves mar the backroads I travel. People and pup track mud everywhere. Without a blanket of white, and before the pastel hues of spring paint the landscape, the most common color there could be considered “blah brown.”

But there is a hopeful sweetness to this shifting of seasons, too. I’m anticipating more days of sweet spring skiing peppering the earliest weeks of soccer practice. I’m starting to think about the garden and which vegetables to grow (or try to, at least) this year. And I wholeheartedly welcome the light of lengthening days.

There is still some snow to come, I’m sure, and cold. At some point, probably soon, I’ll have to don the extra layers again, at least for a while. But these sunny March days are a reminder that spring is on its way, meandering though it may be.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay was published in the Littleton Record as Meghan's Close to Home column on March 13, 2020.

April at Home

While many of our friends and family members fled south – or west, or across the Atlantic – during the week of April school vacation, my family stuck it out at home. We’ve taken this week to regroup and shift from the mostly-cold time of year to the mostly-warm one.

Gradually, we’ve worked our way through the piles that have accumulated over the long winter, from ski gear to a cumbersome stack of to-file papers to various assorted stuff we just didn’t keep up with over ski season.

Ski bags have been emptied, their contents washed and stored away until we dig it all out in the fall to see what (if anything) still fits the kids. I’ve waxed the skis one more time and am rearranging the storage space to accommodate those and the bulky winter gear. Each April, I try to label all of this so we can pull out what we need – and determine what we’ll need to replace – easily come ski season. And each November, it’s still a scramble.

Outside, the ground is still drying. But we’ve picked up most of the branches and sticks the winter winds strewed about the yard. We’ve raked the thatch out of the grass around the house and scraped as much of the gravel (displaced by the plow) as we could back into the driveway.

Inspired by the spring blooms of crocus and daffodil, I’ve pulled weeds from the small garden bed by the front window. I’ve started to turn the soil in the vegetable gardens and have considered the timing for planting the first peas. And I’ve mostly ignored the large perennial bed out front which more closely resembles an aspiring jungle than a flower garden.

The vacation week hasn’t been all work. The kids have had plenty of laze around time – reading in the sunshine on the porch, lingering long into the mornings in their jammies, playing soccer in the driest patch of greening grass they could find. We’ve also started planning some fun summer adventures, looking forward to that season of hot sun and cool rivers, hiking and biking and exploring new places close to home.

There is still much that needs doing – there always seems to be. Spring brings with it new chores, shifting endeavors, and an array of different activities. But we’ve made progress in this week at home. It feels good to have tucked winter away tidily as we make way for the next season.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the April 26, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.