Everything, All at Once

It was cold and rainy at Vasa Park this year.

Not terrible weather. Just the kind that makes you reconsider an outdoor festival for a minute before deciding to go anyway.

Scandinavian Day has been happening there for something like forty-seven years, and it has been part of my family’s life for that long.

This year, I almost immediately noticed something different.

My boys are five and seven now, and for the first time I didn’t feel like I had to be right next to them. I could let them wander a little. I still knew where they were. I still kept an eye on them. But there was space between us.

And I loved it.

I got to watch them without having to manage them.

They danced when there was music. They ran around in the cold and the rain. They explored. They seemed completely unconcerned with how they looked or whether anyone was watching them.

If they felt something, their bodies did it.

I found myself watching them from a distance.

They are so full of life.

I don’t mean energetic, although they certainly are. I mean that there seems to be almost no separation yet between whatever is happening inside of them and the way they meet the world.

Joy moves all the way through.

Wonder moves all the way through.

Music reaches their bodies and their bodies move.

Watching them, I wondered how long a person gets to move through the world this freely.

I don’t know when we begin to become conscious of ourselves being watched. When we start wondering how we look. When we start deciding whether to move instead of simply moving.

Maybe it doesn’t happen all at once.

Maybe it is a long accumulation of tiny corrections.

But standing there in the rain, I could see something in them that I wanted desperately not to disturb.

And at the same time, someone was missing.

My aunt had been the MC of Scandinavian Day for thirty-five years. She was always the person on the microphone.

This year there wasn’t anyone in her place.

Instead, different people picked up the microphone throughout the day to announce different things. The festival continued. Someone said what needed to be said, put the microphone down, and then someone else picked it up later.

Her absence wasn’t dramatic.

That’s what made it so noticeable.

There was simply no longer one person standing there doing what she had done for thirty-five years.

Life had continued around the space where she used to be.

I don’t remember feeling particularly sad at the festival. I noticed that she wasn’t there. I thought about her. But mostly I was having a wonderful day with my family.

It wasn’t until much later that everything seemed to arrive at once.

That night I was exhausted. I crawled into bed and finally stopped moving.

And then the day came over me.

I started crying.

Not hard. There wasn’t some great breakdown. Tears just started rolling down my cheeks.

I was thinking about my boys dancing.

I was thinking about my aunt.

I was thinking about how lucky I had been to spend that day with my family.

I was thinking about all the other years at Vasa Park that were already gone.

And I knew, suddenly and very clearly, that the day I had just experienced was already gone too.

There will never be another Scandinavian Day when my boys are exactly five and seven.

There will never be another afternoon when they are precisely these versions of themselves, running away from me just far enough that I can watch them become independent without yet feeling that they have left me.

And someday there will be other absences.

Mine included.

What surprised me was that none of it ruined anything else.

My aunt could be gone and the day could still be wonderful.

My boys could be completely alive in front of me and I could know that these versions of them were already disappearing.

I could miss what had passed and love what was still here.

The tears kept coming.

Eventually they stopped, and when they did, my pillow was so wet I had to change it.

I got back into bed.

My aunt was still gone. My boys were still getting older. The day was over.

I didn’t need the day back.

I didn’t need my boys to stay five and seven.

I didn’t need the sadness to go away in order to feel the joy.

There was room for all of it.

And I was okay.