Spring Break

I have been saving chairs at the pool (guilty!) all morning, waiting for my boys to wake up and join me.  I use the house phone near the elevators to call their cabin again but get no answer.

I hear Mike, the cruise director, announce that the synchronized swimming competition is about to begin, and as long as I am out of my lounge chair, I walk over to check it out.  I’m expecting a group of 10-year-old girls who have worked up a “routine” while becoming new best friends this week on the cruise.  Instead I see my sons, aged 18 and 22, standing at the side of the pool with huge grins on their faces.

I’m trying to process this—didn’t he say synchronized swimming?  My sons are neither synchronized nor swimmers.  They’ve been here the whole time? I thought they were still sleeping.  I look carefully at these two impostors and wonder what they’ve done with my real sons.

Before I can get their attention, the Chariots of Fire theme song starts to play.   My boys raise their hands over their heads, and first Jesse, then Rob, do a sideways dive into the pool, followed in turn by three other college aged boys. The crowd starts to laugh and cheer.  The five boys form a circle and do a handstand with their unbelievably long legs sticking out of the water.  They emerge, put their hands on each other’s shoulders, and spit water in great arcs like the Buckingham Fountain.  Then they move clockwise and spin like ballerinas with their hands above their heads. 

For the grand finale, the boys lift Jesse high into the air and throw all 6’5” of him into the water with a huge splash.  They get out of the pool and take a big bow to the whistles and cheers of the crowd. 

They receive their medals while the crowd applauds, and I get in line behind a group of girls in bikinis waiting to talk to them.  I finally get to the front of the line and literally don’t know what question to ask first.

The story of how they joined the Pool Olympics Synchronized Swim Team sounds much like the story of how most of their “plans” get made: someone met someone somewhere who needed two more guys for a team, and my boys looked at each other and said, “Why not?”

Although there are over 3000 people on this ship, my boys have achieved some level of notoriety. They have already won the Guest vs. Crew Volleyball Tournament and 3 on 3 Basketball. Jesse was a finalist in Cruise Karaoke Idol while Rob danced in the Michael Jackson Dance Contest. An older couple riding handicapped scooters wheeled up to me when the ship docked in St. Maarten and told me how much fun they have had playing Texas Hold ‘Em with my sons in the Casino.

My boys are gamers.  It is a lot of fun being their mother.  Over the course of their lives my husband and I have logged thousands of proud hours watching them and cheering them on. But since they went away to college, these opportunities to stare at them and marvel that such beautiful, talented and confident people came out of my own body have been rare.

And for that reason and many others, this vacation has been, for me, one of our best.  I have treasured every day with them.  Looming ahead is the reality that Rob is graduating college in a few weeks, and starting a new job, and I don’t know when the four of us will be able to vacation together again.

Certainly my boys will tease me at dinner tonight, joking that even synchronized swimming can make me cry. I cry at the pure pleasure and relief that my children are happy.  I cry because even though they are not perfect children, they are the perfect children for me. And as they dry themselves with the towels that I can’t help but run to find for them, I cry because the hard work of raising them is nearly done.