Broken Cameras and Invisible Words

My fancy shmancy digital camera has been broken for almost two months now and my boys are transforming before my eyes with nothing to capture their lives unfolding and forging ahead.

And, where I used to write weekly about their maddening hold on my world, the delightful and frustrating mini dramas that are my days and nights that blend together, I just realized that I haven't posted a blog in months, and the last one was careless and shallow at best.

The boys are growing up and I am failing them.

Like today, in the record breaking heat in the hotlands of suburbia, I followed the boys into the yard after spraying them down with sunscreen. Bobby in his Superman briefs that revealed a dark tanline across its tight waistband and his newly buzzed hair. Shane, with his thicker body and too tight Nemo swim diaper with the matching accentuated tanline. When they were just cackling and racing their trucks around the yard and pushing their slide up into the already too warm wading pool...and I was too exhausted to capture the moment. Too tired to really be in the moment. I just sat at the table with my fourth cup of coffee, in my torn Garlex Pizza shirt, a robot of a mom, chiming in with the occasional nags: Don't throw dirt at the fence. Give Shane the truck. Do you have to go potty, Bobby? Stop hurting my flowers. Are you sure you don't have to pee?

Blah blah blah.

And yet they were so vibrant and handsome, with their pre-Apollo body builds, Shane's hair white and wispy under the relentless sun. Bobby's running commentary about the airplanes flying overhead, sirens in the distance, cats and squirrels racing across the fence. Beautiful boys.

And then their was dull Mommy, downing gulps of caffeine and feeling guilty for not 'doing' anything, like beginning the edits on my latest writing project, or changing the laundry. When all I had to do was pull up a beach chair to the wading pool and just BE MOMMY instead of fretting about what a bad mommy I was.

I vow to be more of a zen-mommy, more grounded in the present and less of a nag. And to fix my broken camera. And to definitely start pounding at the keyboard once again.