Like every mom, I marvel at how fast my children are growing up and wonder frequently where the time could possibly have gone. Last weekend at the beach, I found myself in that increasingly familiar yet still oh so uncomfortable place of knowing Drew is old enough to have a little freedom but still young enough to make me worry if he is really ready. More importantly, am I?
Sunday morning of our beach week-end arrived warm, with a bit of a misty fog....a truly spectacular beach morning. Drew, his friend, and I walked (in the interest of full disclosure, we actually rode the golf cart) down to the beach....I with my beach chair and book, Drew with a different plan. The two boys kicked around at the edge of the ocean, scoped out a few seashells, then hit me with the million dollar question....could they walk to the Surfside Pier. I was sure we were at least a mile from the pier....I thought we may be two. Through the misty morning, I could see the pier, but only just barely.
In a weak moment, I said yes. There, I had done it. I allowed the boys to go. I hedged my bet that they might make it a couple hundred yards up the beach before they tired and gave up on the adventure. As he so often does these days, my son surprised me.
I fretted every moment they were gone. I couldn't read. I couldn't relax. I looked so hard and so often to my right (I suppose sitting on the beach, facing the ocean that would be to the south, right?) that I earned both a crick in my neck and a weird mild sunburn on the left side of my face and shoulder. I peered and squinted and squinted and peered. I find parenting so much easier when you can actually see the child, don't you agree? An hour passed. I became increasingly afraid that I had made a mistake. I prayed that I had not.
Every appropriately sized pair of human shapes I could make out down the beach gave me hope that the boys were approaching. Over and over, I was wrong. Now they had been gone almost an hour and a half.
I was just before hitting the beach on my dad's golf cart, not caring if that is legal or not, when the mist seemed to lift ever so slightly higher, the fog became just a little less thick and....could it be that mixing with the shore smells of salt and sea I also smelled.....now I was sure of it..... IT WAS AXE! I detest that scent. Many are my headaches one whiff of Drew's "smell good" has birthed. I long for the day Drew outgrows his Axe Stage, as all my friends and sisters with boys assure me he will. But at this particular moment, I was not sure I had ever smelled anything more glorious than Salt and Axe. I suppose the ocean breeze had blown just enough and from just the right direction, for there, bursting through the clearing pea soup, there they were.....my two tired yet excited Axe-coated explorer boys. They had conquered the beach. They had run/walked all the way to the pier and back. And one relieved mother had survived the conquest and lived to parent another day.
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