That Season of June
Children and teachers everywhere are counting down the days for school to end for the summer. Maybe yours has already wrapped up, you are one of those places that go all year-round or maybe you’ve been out for a month or two already by the time this is actually published. This is June. I have 15 days left including the weekends. And it’s not like schools are prisons; they aren’t. I love my career as a teacher, at least for the first 165 days of school. The last 20 are tough, and anyone who says otherwise might be lying. Last week, it was 95 degrees in my classroom, and many of my teenagers filled the hot air with the stank of sweaty adolescence, and there was not enough deodorant for the universe.
June is the end of school, sports banquets, concerts, Flag Day, Fathers’ Day, Pride Month, Summer Solstice, graduations, and weddings. June is also our daughter’s 12th birthday; our parents’ anniversaries (mine celebrated 54 years May 31 and Geoff’s celebrate 55 years June 15); our siblings’ anniversaries (Geoff’s sister and brother-in-law June 6 and my brother and sister in law’s June 17), and our own on June 23. Sixteen years for Geoff and me.
June is a lot. June is also beautiful here in NH, the first month of real summer, and we only get three of them, so we try to squeeze in as much sunshine as possible.
Our son asked if he could meet his friends at the river; this would be the first time going without his parents. We said no. We let him ride his bike there with his friends, and I sat among the trees reading my book. Our river is still super cold due to snow melting and mountains, and teenage boys, especially, don’t always make good choices.
Ours is especially impulsive, so Geoff sat him down and went over all the recent stats about diving and spinal cord injuries. He reviewed the rules about knowing where to jump and never flipping off rocks, cliffs, or train trestles without an experienced adult who can verify the depth of water, etc. Yet, as I sat there watching him swim, while his buddies sat on the shore claiming the water was too cold, he yelled out, “Help me, I’ve been caught in a rip current,” when he was simply floating, trying to be funny, not caught in a riptide at all.
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I sighed and thought we had really covered the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” life lessons already. Apparently, not well enough. And that was the reason that later explained why he wasn’t mature enough to just head to the river with his friends.
But, our friends who grew up around rivers say they were swimming freely much earlier. While both our kids are good swimmers, this won’t be their first summer being freed to swim without parents. Maybe next year.
Our son also plans to get a job next summer because he will be 14. Maybe then he won’t be yelling that he is caught in a riptide.
While we’ve never said these words: "If we could just go back to when they were babies, or toddlers, or little kids...” because those are all extra hard periods of parenting especially when one has a spinal cord injury (or one’s partner parent does); we are now worried for entirely different reasons about keeping them alive.
Whether swimming in the river, hurling their bodies downhill on skis, bikes at match speeds, or driving cars shortly- all of it is scary if we think about it for too long. All we can do is remind them to be safe, to make a plan, to never do any of these things alone, and to call when and if they need help. And then, remind ourselves that we will survive too.