Tan Lines, Marching Band, and the Return to Earth

In which everybody comes home sideways and the wine fridge earns its keep.

A week ago I was sitting at a pool bar in Mexico with a drink in my hand and thirty-six hours of zero obligations, and I have no memory of it whatsoever. I am told it happened. The scale, that bitch, reminds me every morning that something I did over the past two weeks made me fatter. There is even photographic evidence of Cash and me in dinner attire, looking happy and carefree.

Since we landed, we have processed, in no particular order: Lexi and Moose coming back from their dad’s completely sideways, Lulu turning twelve, Lulu’s birthday sleepover, two full days of company, and one trip to the emergency room for reasons that were, and I want to be extremely precise here, entirely avoidable.

Lulu’s sleepover with two of her best friends was Friday night, and I need to say something about these girls. They are lovely. They are polite. They say thank you without being prompted. They come from small, quiet houses with a normal number of children in them, and in both cases they are the oldest. I had the privilege of watching, in real time at my own dinner table, the moment they understood that this was not that. If you saw my note about the Highland cows, you already know what Romy contributed to dinner. My restraint in that moment was one of the greatest unwitnessed achievements of my adult life.

Moose was not at the table because he had already left for his marching band showcase without a single thing he needed, after being told repeatedly, in several formats, across several days, to have everything packed and ready to go. So Lexi spent dinner getting up and sitting back down and getting up again, hauling his things to the school twice while the rest of us ate and the two polite little girls took notes.

She got home the second time upset, because he had gotten shitty with her in the parking lot for not driving fast enough. He created the problem, she solved it twice, and then he took the whole thing out on her like she was the one who had forgotten. He sounded exactly like the person he had just spent ten days with.

After dinner, we loaded seven of the nine kids into cars and went and watched Moose perform. Despite Lexi’s best efforts, he went out there in a borrowed uniform and white socks, which in marching band is not an oversight, it is an announcement. And even still, I let him know how proud I was of him and how well they played.

But later that night, once the house was quiet and it was the two of us in the kitchen, I let him know exactly how I felt about the way he had treated his sister, and that I did not raise him that way.

None of this is about socks. Every one of these kids came back to me from somewhere else a few days ago, and what I have been calling a bad week is really just what reentry looks like. And while it has certainly kicked the crap out of Cash and me, it is hard on them too.

We run a tight ship. We have to with five teenagers and two tweens. Expectations are high, which means rooms are clean before school or TV remotes and video game controllers come to live on my dresser until the next day. There is a bedtime, there are chores, we expect good grades and for them to be kind, and there are consequences that actually show up when our expectations are not met, which is the part that makes them effective.

But the support is every bit as high. I know every grade, every missing assignment, every practice time, who their friends are, and how they need to be approached in various situations. Nobody in this house is out there managing themselves alone or guessing what we want from them. And above all else, we do everything we can to ensure that each child knows that they are loved and safe here.

Neither of the other two households operates like this. Not my ex’s, and not Cash’s ex’s. The cost of it is that every kid in this family has to make a hard landing every time they come back to us. They leave a place with almost no structure and reenter a place with a great deal of it, and if somebody relocated me between two countries with different laws, different currencies, and wildly different opinions about what really matters, I would also be an absolute nightmare at the border.

I do not have the answer for this because there is no version of this situation where we lower the bar in our home so the landing is gentler, because the bar matters. We do not have the issues with disrespect and disobedience in our home that the other households report. Lexi will straight up tell you that she would take Cash over her dad any day of the week because he at least cares enough to be honest with her about what she can do differently.

What I do have is a wine fridge and a phrase my people have been passing around for generations. This too shall pass. It does, reliably, though it always comes back around to bite us again depending on how long they have been away from us.

The Mexico picture is still on my phone. The two of us in dinner attire, tan, in possession of nothing that had to be driven anywhere. I look at it the way you look at a photo of a stranger. Good for her. She has no idea about the three-ring shitshow she is coming home to.