A Liminal Summer

One foot in and one foot out.

My oldest son, Leon, is starting to understand that we’re leaving soon. Mostly because every day, another toy he’s looking for turns out to be encased in bubble wrap, placed in a box, and sealed with moving tape. It’s a liminal summer. That’s what I’m calling it, anyway. One foot still in Chicago, the other not yet in San Francisco.

I’ve been waxing poetic about my life here. The tree with the beautiful bark I pass on my walk each day. Juliana, the cashier at my grocery store, whose lane I always wait for because I want to hear about her weekend plans. The way the light hits my sister’s face when she appears in the window of my front door. Moving, ugh. The pits.

There’s an exercise I do on the Pilates reformer: one foot on the platform, one foot on the carriage. The instructor tells me to push the carriage away while keeping the other foot planted. I loathe this exercise. It looks deceptively easy, possibly even fun, and yet it feels like my inner thighs are being ripped apart. That’s what this summer feels like.

The boys have been sleeping in my bed when their dad travels for work. It’s awful and also delicious. (We are overhauling bedtime the moment we move, if only so they aren’t still sleeping with me when they’re sixty.) When I wake in the middle of the night, I stare at their heads and imagine our new life: what our walks will look like, where we’ll buy our groceries, how their little feet will push their scooters up the big steep hills. Anxiety wells up in my chest, and I hear my husband’s reminder, the one he offers whenever I get nervous, which is everyday: anxiety can feel a lot like excitement. The body doesn’t always know the difference. He’s right.

This week, about a month before his sixth birthday, Leon announced he wanted to stop sucking his two fingers his preffered method of soothing since he was 6 months old. “You can absolutely try,” I told him, tears forming immediately. I worried about him giving up his comfort in the middle of such a big transition. We don’t get that many creature comforts, kid. If you need it, use it. But that’s probably more for me. I need the creature comforts more than he does.

If anyone wants a space tent or an indoor pirate ship, let me know.