One of the reasons that I have not blogged much lately is that it is hard to know what to write about that is not too personal and perhaps too obnoxious to make public. My inner struggles with having sent my boys to school, my concerns about Walter's health, and just general feelings of not succeeding as a parent are not exactly blog material. Tonight is one of the nights when I am feeling that pain fairly acutely. It causes me physical pain to see the F's my kids are getting in school--multiple of them. It is mentally draining trying to help them figure out what they need to be doing and what various assignments mean so that they do not get more bad grades--at least not ones for not completing work they should have known about. I suppose I would just say I feel a little helpless in the face of the edmodos, edlines, planners, acronyms, and "technology in the classroom." And I know that honestly, my own helplessness and confusion in the face of this is really not a problem that *I* should be having at all, because I should not exactly be micromanaging their school life. Why didn't anyone tell me how very no-guarantees being a parent would be? I often find myself wishing that I could resign from this particular job--if there was a boss over me, I think I would be fired by now!
This morning I went to a Bible study with a friend of mine. When I first walked in, especially when tarus wasn't there and I was not sure if she was going to be a no show, I had an overwhelming urge to run out the door and never come back. I looked around and saw mostly old people," and I thought they looked too "Baptist" (which they were), and I could not see myself fitting in. As the morning went on, while I am not sure I exactly fit in, I became more convinced that sometimes we are led somewhere out of our comfort zone for a reason--that whatever got us to the place where we want to escape may have had a plan after all. I think the big thing that I left with was a set of resolutions. Yeah, they were nothing hugely new and earth-shattering, but in a way the reiteration of them from yet another voice in my life was what woke me up a little.
The first of the resolutions is to create and use a blessings jar--or a "good things" jar. I have seen this posted on pinterest by a lot of people during the past few weeks, and I am going to do my best to be disciplined about making one and using it daily. Lord knows I could stand some help seeing the positive some days! But I really do look and see, even while I am in the midst of wondering what is going to happen with my family, that there are so many blessings. Like getting to go out with Tarus this morning. And her daughter going to lunch with us and helping Frances get excited about doing her latin. And Frances doing her math without any involvement from me and doing two lessons because her friend was doing two lessons--and taking the time to get the grade on the assignments that I know she can and should be getting. We finished one of my very favorite books of all time this morning--From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. This time around, and it is at least the third time for me, it was even more special because I am so crazy, fanatically in love with New York City and had a visual and personal attachment to all of the places mentioned in the book. What's even more cool is that there was the mention of the name "Clendennan" in the book, which pretty much blew Frances away. As if this was not enough, we read about 20 pages in "Listening For Lions" today, and that also is a book that I completely loved, and it is exactly the kind of book I love sharing with Frances because it has all of the elements that she finds in her favorite books--British orphans, influenza and infectious disease, a female protagonist who is strong-minded, and introspective heroism. I feel so fortunate to be able to share it with her and to get to share loving reading. Rutledge continues to motor along with his reading lessons. It is slow going, to be sure, but his progress is steady, and his fluency is gradually improving. I am thankful that I am finally coming to terms (at least partially!) with the truth that Rome was not built in a day. Especially if there is a glitch or issue underlying whatever is frustrating--slow and steady is still progress, and the tougher the problem, the less likely it will be solved in an instant. I am pleased with my follow-through and discipline. And I am proud of his work and persistence. Maybe the best part of my day was watching the dress rehearsal for Frances's dance competition pieces. Breathtaking is all I can say. The improvement and poise and growth I have seen in the past two years is beyond measure. I am amazed. I am so grateful to the teachers and friends who have pushed her to her potential and have given her the gift of something that she loves. She was born to do this, and I never get tired of watching her perform and see her use the gifts she has been given. I am crazy about her "We Can Do It" piece. She looks straight off a Rosie the Riveter poster. Her Audrey Hepburn piece also is stunning. I am so looking forward to being able to go with her and her friends and my friends to Pittsburgh next weekend. We are going to have an amazing time, and in many ways, this is what our dance year is all about. In short, I have so much to be thankful about and so much good that is going on in my life.
The second resolution is related to the rubberband scheme that a friend of mine has going on her arm. She is working on controlling negative thoughts and puts a rubberband on her arm whenever she thinks or says one of the targeted problem things, and this helps remind her of what she is trying to change. I had forgotten about this, but this morning the speaker at our study suggested putting ten pennies in our pocket and then moving one to the opposite pocket each time we show gratefulness to someone. I love this. And I especially like the positive spin.
Third is to challenge yourself to perform 27 acts of kindness or thankfulness in honor of those who died in Connecticut last month. Again, simple, but I intend to do it consciously.
As always, I suppose life is a mixture of both worry and gratitude. When I find myself slipping into perseverating on the things that are not working well or that I could blame myself for and then get sucked into the abyss of my thoughts, I am now trying to shift my attention to the happy jar and ideas for what could go inside today. Because every day has happy jar moments, however small. I guess you could say my biggest resolution now is to make that jar the full one.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Monday, December 31, 2012
So here's my attempt at a new year's resolution. I am doing my best to resurrect my blog. With appropriate recognition of reality, my real resolution is to be, well, realistic with my goals. For example, not saying I'm going to post in my blog every day. Because who am I kidding? But I could perhaps post in my blog, say, once a week. Because life goes by fast and it often leaves little real record of itself if we don't take the time to leave the record.
What's the purpose of the blog? same as always. Blah, blah, blah. The thoughts going through my head. The edited reality of my life. The ups and downs of having my hand in too many things at once. regular life. Something like that.
So here's to a new year. Heading out to a party with my bacon-wrapped pigs in blankets. Thinking maybe I should have some lofty resolutions. Like avoiding the wal-mart, for example, where the bacon and pigs were purchased just today (it's not January 1 yet!). Or attempting to only set foot in a grocery 3 times a week instead of 8. Or thinking I'm finally going to start running. Nope. My resolutions are pretty simple. Try to mess up my kids a little less this year than I did in the one before. Try to eat just a little better than I have been. Get back to ordering that quarter of a cow. stop buying meat at Wal-Mart. Try to move toward making my own laundry detergent. Little stuff like that. The big stuff? Probably not gonna happen. But one step at a time, one step at a time. Right?
What's the purpose of the blog? same as always. Blah, blah, blah. The thoughts going through my head. The edited reality of my life. The ups and downs of having my hand in too many things at once. regular life. Something like that.
So here's to a new year. Heading out to a party with my bacon-wrapped pigs in blankets. Thinking maybe I should have some lofty resolutions. Like avoiding the wal-mart, for example, where the bacon and pigs were purchased just today (it's not January 1 yet!). Or attempting to only set foot in a grocery 3 times a week instead of 8. Or thinking I'm finally going to start running. Nope. My resolutions are pretty simple. Try to mess up my kids a little less this year than I did in the one before. Try to eat just a little better than I have been. Get back to ordering that quarter of a cow. stop buying meat at Wal-Mart. Try to move toward making my own laundry detergent. Little stuff like that. The big stuff? Probably not gonna happen. But one step at a time, one step at a time. Right?
Monday, April 30, 2012
Moral Authority?
I've had it on my brain to get back to my blog (which I keep spelling "glob" because my hands are moving faster than my mind), and now I remember why I don't each time I think about doing it. The main reason is that I am technologically impaired. I think I have reached my lifetime quota of learning new systems, packages, and devices. When a sign-in page asks me a question I cannot answer, I am at an utter standstill. I cannot problem solve. When a Google-owned platform tells me that I cannot associate my account with a Gmail address, I'm stumped. Truly stumped.
I also don't like to be in a box. I was investigating BlogHer because, well, it's kind of a brand name, and I was confused and it raised my hackles a little. I'm not sure that I can say for sure I am "engaging community," and I even cringe a little at the thought of that. What if I go on, say, an unengaging binge? What if I find myself totally engaging, but the rest of the world finds me not so much so? Or the powers that be that accept my application to be part of the community don't find me communal enough. What if my material does not primarily appeal to women? I am not quite a rule-follower, and I get twitchy when things get sort of institutionalized. I would freak out if I felt I had to concoct contests or have giveaways of any kind. I don't really want to develop a brand or style identity. I like being inconsistent. I'm not a snappy subtitle with too many periods and no capital letters kind of person.
I could probably win a prize for attempting to set up blogs on the most hosting services. I am still in love with the old version of iLife, which required no brain cells from me to operate. But here I am again, back here instead of there, because I'm not even sure there still exists. And I kind of get this.
My thoughts today:
* I have no voice. Again. For 4 days, I had a scratchy throat. Then at 2:00 p.m. yesterday, my voice began to ebb away. To a place it will probably stay for the next two weeks. I don't really feel bad; I just feel angry about it. How dare it desert me when I have things to do!
* We are skipping school today. I had Older Kid writing this morning, but with no voice and a very disruptive contingent from my own family, it was hard. I want my kids to do things exactly the way I want them, with a minimum of whining. I want them to take the assignments as seriously as I do in my own head (yeah, I'm not actually writing them myself. But I would!). It's a pretty spring day, and I'm all for enjoying outside. But the real reason we are not doing school today is that we have a number of extra people over today for various reasons--family emergencies, errands to run.
* And here's the shocker. I started writing this particular post, in all caps (not sure why--can't get it to stop!), back in March. And it's going to be May in, oh, about 31 minutes. So clearly I cannot get my act together enough to accomplish much of anything.
* So I might as well write what's on my mind at this particular moment, and I will solemnly promise myself to press post and then set myself a goal of writing every single day for the month of may, kind of a nanoblomo personal event...or something like that.
* What's on my mind at the moment actually has something to do with the message at church this week, which is not really my style as a writing prompt. But there it is. The gist of the message is that it would be really nice if people who were in power--politicians, leaders of any kind, people we work for, etc.--had "moral authority"--defined in a non-partisan way. Moral authority means that your walk matches your talk...even if I don't agree with your talk. And the final thrust of the message was that if there is no duplicity, leaders, wherever they fall in specific beliefs, could work together to solve problems. My favorite line was: "I would much rather vote for people on the other side of the political equation if they had integrity and moral authority than someone who agreed with me who did not."
But because, as my family will gladly tell you, I'm a pretty selfish person and yes, it is all about me, I have been chewing on this particular message in a personal way. And I am bothered by the fact that I'm about as crooked, non-straightforward, and afraid to just be myself as any politician. I have a bad habit of trying to be what I think the people around me want me to be. And I also have a bad habit of being a severe shades of gray person, which means that most of the time I'm not sure where to even put myself, whether we're talking about a specific hot-button issue, whether we're talking about a generalized political party or persuasion, or whether I'm even talking about how I generally live my life. I'm a big believer in the idea that we are always making choices, the old "to choose not to choose is a choice," and that even if we think we are dodging pinning ourselves down much of the time, we're pinning. Oh, we're pinning away.
Personal topic #1on moral integrity: It bothers me when people make assumptions about where I stand on something. And it bothers me more when I am forced to acknowledge that I usually create that situation myself. The current manifestation: I have a child who will pretty much post the last thought in his head at any given moment right onto facebook. His filter is coarse. Well, actually he has no filter. So he posts a very right-leaning, rush limbaugh/glen beck kind of sentiment the other day. I make a snarky type comment, but my general rule is that I steer pretty far from politics when I post on facebook. So a family member replies in a direct address to me that I should maybe expose him to some more "progressive" viewpoints. facebook is not my media choice for family conversation, but the comment raises my hackles because...that is our everyday conversation at home. if my distracted, inattentive child does not listen to the discussions, if he has tuned them out because he does not understand them, have I neglected to beat him on the head with what I wish he would say? And then my next thought is to blame myself--well, I'm not a person who is constantly posting a clear alignment with a particular set of political or social beliefs in the public forum. Well, I don't strongly identify myself with a particular party or vocal special interest group. I tend to talk on and on at length about how I see situations as complex and how I think we need to be compassionate and nice and that being a follower of christ does not mean being "conservative" or republican to me...no wonder 13 year olds tune it out and start daydreaming about the ps3 or, well, pretty much anything else. And no wonder strong, even if stupid and mean, rhetoric can have some sway.
But I see myself as not very morally integrated or authoritative if you want to call it that. Because I am afraid. Afraid that if my liberal friends knew that I was not, maybe, as liberal as they are, that they would have no respect for me and not want to be with me any more. And that if my more conservative friends knew I was not conservative, at least not in the way that they view it, that I would be shunned there as well. Or lose my position. And I like the things I do. And I like the people I know. So I feel pretty disingenuous, and at the same time disinclined to just come all clean for everyone. Because for one, that would be weird and awkward out of the blue, and two, I still am conflict averse and my thoughts aren't entirely clear even to me, and I really don't enjoy stirring hornets' nests (though some would beg to differ), and I still adhere to the dictum that it's probably best to avoid politics and religion as topics of conversation and confession in mixed company. Nevertheless, I aspire to be more open and honest. And that's out of my comfort zone.
Personal topic #2: I do not want to draw any more attention to the article in the paper than it already has. It was a completely awkward process in so many ways. And I'll confess, it was most awkward because I was concerned I was going to piss off homeschoolers with it. The whole thing still leaves me feeling uneasy, and as I've been pondering the concept of moral authority/integrity, I'm realizing that once again, I'm trying to be everything to everyone (at least in my head). I'm so worried about raising the hackles or getting a snub from people who probably are not even deeply personally engaged with me and who I may not even know that I have trouble just being...myself.
first of all, I felt from the start that talking to a reporter is maybe like talking to the police--a dumb idea whether you are guilty or innocent. But once someone approached me at a conference, I was also in the dilemma of perhaps making a different impression if I did not respond or if I blew it off. Then I might be cast as the reclusive, secretive homeschooler who was anti-social, had something to hide, had some motive for not being open and clear. And I'm not ashamed. And I am legal. And I don't have anything to hide. Do I think everyone understands what I am doing and why I am doing it? Of course not. I don't really get everything everyone else does, either. But even talking at all or allowing someone to ask questions about what we do felt somehow risky to, if not me, then to someone, somewhere.
Second, I was anxious about the prospect of having something that we did portrayed as indicative of what homeschoolers do in general, and thus offending someone whose homeschool does not look as "schooly" as what was pictured. Or worse yet, that I would be damaging years of some homeschool advocates' (who I suppose I view as always being someone else) work. In the back of my head, I believe that there are people out there who have the "right" views or right words or safe things that can be said in public, and I should know what these are, but my intuition is screwy. What's kind of funny is that the article originally stemmed from questions about spelling bees--do we do them, why do homeschoolers do them (lots don't!), and if we aren't doing spelling bees, what kinds of things do we do. I'm again not very consistent. On the one hand, I can be ridiculously naive and trusting--and not in a good way. I usually think the best about people's motives and intentions and assume if they sound interested that they are, and that they are not plotting to stab me in the back or manipulate my words or whatever other malice is possible when it comes to, in this case, print. On the other, I can indulge paranoid fantasies in the middle of the night--they're going to talk about my dirty baseboards and the handprint smudges on my walls, or my first grader who was running around the yard like a maniac in the middle of a "school day" or my teens who currently do not want to identify themselves in the same sentence as the word "homeschool" and we would be painted in some nightmare image of parental and educational laziness and then mainstream folks would be fuming and fellow homeschoolers would be fuming because I talked to people who misinterpreted the entire ethos of what we do and we should not even be conversing with the world outside our culture of shared understanding.
But back to the moral authority walk-the-talk thing, I know I need to let some of this anxiety go. Of course being judicious and using common sense and protecting yourself is all good (and some of us are deficient in these areas, and my finger is pointing right at myself here). However, the pictures, the life I think I showed is the life that I think I live--even as I try to imagine the ways I could have shown everyone else's life so as not to 'misrepresent' anyone or draw negative attention. No events were fabricated. It was neither my "ideal" of what I wish homeschooling looked like for us nor a conscious attempt to show what some other people's life and education look like. We *DO* go to taekwondo and dance practices. We *DO* have friends over to do science experiments, and this is the second time in a month I have boiled red cabbage and pulled out my bottle of ammonia. And we *do* go to band every week and have concerts and run around in Mr. Robinson's driveway. And we did not begin homeschooling for religious reasons. And this was only what this particular Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday looked like, which is not necessarily what the next ones will be.
I'm not sure if the writer or the photographer "got it" because I'm not sure what it means to "get it." I don't even really know what "it" is, to be honest. I suppose what I do know is that I am compliant with Virginia law. and i know (except when I forget to check the calendar!) what we do with our days. And I know that I will always be second guessing how our days go, wondering if I should be doing more, less, different, like someone else, not like someone else. I don't want to be a spokesperson for anyone other than myself. And I don't know that anyone else ever really "gets" other people's lives, no matter what their lives are. It can still blow my mind, when I stop to think about it, that each of us lives a unique reality and has an entire history and experience and set of memories and the processing of those memories and experiences. When I do think about that, I feel it is a wonder that we are able to communicate and get along with other people as well as we do.
So my personal challenge to myself for this week is to continue to scrutinize and make a ruthless moral inventory or whatever you want to call it of the ways that I am not very genuine or consistent or morally authoritative--able to be relied upon so that what you see is what I really do and so that people can kind of know me and not some cobbled construct. This is not for others, it is for myself. It has been sobering to see how much fear governs how I let myself engage with other people, either through the personae I seek to create or the ways I try to appease and not rock a boat because I fear rejection. Who knows what awaits us if we really are genuinely ourselves.
I also don't like to be in a box. I was investigating BlogHer because, well, it's kind of a brand name, and I was confused and it raised my hackles a little. I'm not sure that I can say for sure I am "engaging community," and I even cringe a little at the thought of that. What if I go on, say, an unengaging binge? What if I find myself totally engaging, but the rest of the world finds me not so much so? Or the powers that be that accept my application to be part of the community don't find me communal enough. What if my material does not primarily appeal to women? I am not quite a rule-follower, and I get twitchy when things get sort of institutionalized. I would freak out if I felt I had to concoct contests or have giveaways of any kind. I don't really want to develop a brand or style identity. I like being inconsistent. I'm not a snappy subtitle with too many periods and no capital letters kind of person.
I could probably win a prize for attempting to set up blogs on the most hosting services. I am still in love with the old version of iLife, which required no brain cells from me to operate. But here I am again, back here instead of there, because I'm not even sure there still exists. And I kind of get this.
My thoughts today:
* I have no voice. Again. For 4 days, I had a scratchy throat. Then at 2:00 p.m. yesterday, my voice began to ebb away. To a place it will probably stay for the next two weeks. I don't really feel bad; I just feel angry about it. How dare it desert me when I have things to do!
* We are skipping school today. I had Older Kid writing this morning, but with no voice and a very disruptive contingent from my own family, it was hard. I want my kids to do things exactly the way I want them, with a minimum of whining. I want them to take the assignments as seriously as I do in my own head (yeah, I'm not actually writing them myself. But I would!). It's a pretty spring day, and I'm all for enjoying outside. But the real reason we are not doing school today is that we have a number of extra people over today for various reasons--family emergencies, errands to run.
* And here's the shocker. I started writing this particular post, in all caps (not sure why--can't get it to stop!), back in March. And it's going to be May in, oh, about 31 minutes. So clearly I cannot get my act together enough to accomplish much of anything.
* So I might as well write what's on my mind at this particular moment, and I will solemnly promise myself to press post and then set myself a goal of writing every single day for the month of may, kind of a nanoblomo personal event...or something like that.
* What's on my mind at the moment actually has something to do with the message at church this week, which is not really my style as a writing prompt. But there it is. The gist of the message is that it would be really nice if people who were in power--politicians, leaders of any kind, people we work for, etc.--had "moral authority"--defined in a non-partisan way. Moral authority means that your walk matches your talk...even if I don't agree with your talk. And the final thrust of the message was that if there is no duplicity, leaders, wherever they fall in specific beliefs, could work together to solve problems. My favorite line was: "I would much rather vote for people on the other side of the political equation if they had integrity and moral authority than someone who agreed with me who did not."
But because, as my family will gladly tell you, I'm a pretty selfish person and yes, it is all about me, I have been chewing on this particular message in a personal way. And I am bothered by the fact that I'm about as crooked, non-straightforward, and afraid to just be myself as any politician. I have a bad habit of trying to be what I think the people around me want me to be. And I also have a bad habit of being a severe shades of gray person, which means that most of the time I'm not sure where to even put myself, whether we're talking about a specific hot-button issue, whether we're talking about a generalized political party or persuasion, or whether I'm even talking about how I generally live my life. I'm a big believer in the idea that we are always making choices, the old "to choose not to choose is a choice," and that even if we think we are dodging pinning ourselves down much of the time, we're pinning. Oh, we're pinning away.
Personal topic #1on moral integrity: It bothers me when people make assumptions about where I stand on something. And it bothers me more when I am forced to acknowledge that I usually create that situation myself. The current manifestation: I have a child who will pretty much post the last thought in his head at any given moment right onto facebook. His filter is coarse. Well, actually he has no filter. So he posts a very right-leaning, rush limbaugh/glen beck kind of sentiment the other day. I make a snarky type comment, but my general rule is that I steer pretty far from politics when I post on facebook. So a family member replies in a direct address to me that I should maybe expose him to some more "progressive" viewpoints. facebook is not my media choice for family conversation, but the comment raises my hackles because...that is our everyday conversation at home. if my distracted, inattentive child does not listen to the discussions, if he has tuned them out because he does not understand them, have I neglected to beat him on the head with what I wish he would say? And then my next thought is to blame myself--well, I'm not a person who is constantly posting a clear alignment with a particular set of political or social beliefs in the public forum. Well, I don't strongly identify myself with a particular party or vocal special interest group. I tend to talk on and on at length about how I see situations as complex and how I think we need to be compassionate and nice and that being a follower of christ does not mean being "conservative" or republican to me...no wonder 13 year olds tune it out and start daydreaming about the ps3 or, well, pretty much anything else. And no wonder strong, even if stupid and mean, rhetoric can have some sway.
But I see myself as not very morally integrated or authoritative if you want to call it that. Because I am afraid. Afraid that if my liberal friends knew that I was not, maybe, as liberal as they are, that they would have no respect for me and not want to be with me any more. And that if my more conservative friends knew I was not conservative, at least not in the way that they view it, that I would be shunned there as well. Or lose my position. And I like the things I do. And I like the people I know. So I feel pretty disingenuous, and at the same time disinclined to just come all clean for everyone. Because for one, that would be weird and awkward out of the blue, and two, I still am conflict averse and my thoughts aren't entirely clear even to me, and I really don't enjoy stirring hornets' nests (though some would beg to differ), and I still adhere to the dictum that it's probably best to avoid politics and religion as topics of conversation and confession in mixed company. Nevertheless, I aspire to be more open and honest. And that's out of my comfort zone.
Personal topic #2: I do not want to draw any more attention to the article in the paper than it already has. It was a completely awkward process in so many ways. And I'll confess, it was most awkward because I was concerned I was going to piss off homeschoolers with it. The whole thing still leaves me feeling uneasy, and as I've been pondering the concept of moral authority/integrity, I'm realizing that once again, I'm trying to be everything to everyone (at least in my head). I'm so worried about raising the hackles or getting a snub from people who probably are not even deeply personally engaged with me and who I may not even know that I have trouble just being...myself.
first of all, I felt from the start that talking to a reporter is maybe like talking to the police--a dumb idea whether you are guilty or innocent. But once someone approached me at a conference, I was also in the dilemma of perhaps making a different impression if I did not respond or if I blew it off. Then I might be cast as the reclusive, secretive homeschooler who was anti-social, had something to hide, had some motive for not being open and clear. And I'm not ashamed. And I am legal. And I don't have anything to hide. Do I think everyone understands what I am doing and why I am doing it? Of course not. I don't really get everything everyone else does, either. But even talking at all or allowing someone to ask questions about what we do felt somehow risky to, if not me, then to someone, somewhere.
Second, I was anxious about the prospect of having something that we did portrayed as indicative of what homeschoolers do in general, and thus offending someone whose homeschool does not look as "schooly" as what was pictured. Or worse yet, that I would be damaging years of some homeschool advocates' (who I suppose I view as always being someone else) work. In the back of my head, I believe that there are people out there who have the "right" views or right words or safe things that can be said in public, and I should know what these are, but my intuition is screwy. What's kind of funny is that the article originally stemmed from questions about spelling bees--do we do them, why do homeschoolers do them (lots don't!), and if we aren't doing spelling bees, what kinds of things do we do. I'm again not very consistent. On the one hand, I can be ridiculously naive and trusting--and not in a good way. I usually think the best about people's motives and intentions and assume if they sound interested that they are, and that they are not plotting to stab me in the back or manipulate my words or whatever other malice is possible when it comes to, in this case, print. On the other, I can indulge paranoid fantasies in the middle of the night--they're going to talk about my dirty baseboards and the handprint smudges on my walls, or my first grader who was running around the yard like a maniac in the middle of a "school day" or my teens who currently do not want to identify themselves in the same sentence as the word "homeschool" and we would be painted in some nightmare image of parental and educational laziness and then mainstream folks would be fuming and fellow homeschoolers would be fuming because I talked to people who misinterpreted the entire ethos of what we do and we should not even be conversing with the world outside our culture of shared understanding.
But back to the moral authority walk-the-talk thing, I know I need to let some of this anxiety go. Of course being judicious and using common sense and protecting yourself is all good (and some of us are deficient in these areas, and my finger is pointing right at myself here). However, the pictures, the life I think I showed is the life that I think I live--even as I try to imagine the ways I could have shown everyone else's life so as not to 'misrepresent' anyone or draw negative attention. No events were fabricated. It was neither my "ideal" of what I wish homeschooling looked like for us nor a conscious attempt to show what some other people's life and education look like. We *DO* go to taekwondo and dance practices. We *DO* have friends over to do science experiments, and this is the second time in a month I have boiled red cabbage and pulled out my bottle of ammonia. And we *do* go to band every week and have concerts and run around in Mr. Robinson's driveway. And we did not begin homeschooling for religious reasons. And this was only what this particular Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday looked like, which is not necessarily what the next ones will be.
I'm not sure if the writer or the photographer "got it" because I'm not sure what it means to "get it." I don't even really know what "it" is, to be honest. I suppose what I do know is that I am compliant with Virginia law. and i know (except when I forget to check the calendar!) what we do with our days. And I know that I will always be second guessing how our days go, wondering if I should be doing more, less, different, like someone else, not like someone else. I don't want to be a spokesperson for anyone other than myself. And I don't know that anyone else ever really "gets" other people's lives, no matter what their lives are. It can still blow my mind, when I stop to think about it, that each of us lives a unique reality and has an entire history and experience and set of memories and the processing of those memories and experiences. When I do think about that, I feel it is a wonder that we are able to communicate and get along with other people as well as we do.
So my personal challenge to myself for this week is to continue to scrutinize and make a ruthless moral inventory or whatever you want to call it of the ways that I am not very genuine or consistent or morally authoritative--able to be relied upon so that what you see is what I really do and so that people can kind of know me and not some cobbled construct. This is not for others, it is for myself. It has been sobering to see how much fear governs how I let myself engage with other people, either through the personae I seek to create or the ways I try to appease and not rock a boat because I fear rejection. Who knows what awaits us if we really are genuinely ourselves.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Okay, I know know it has been something like four months since I have posted anything. And I'm not moonlighting over on Facebook, either. I'm AWOL there as well.
I'm lost in the land of homeschooling four children. Boy oh boy is it still crazy!
This is such a different year from our past ones, and there are great points and transition points. I'm finally in a place where I am not worrying that we are not covering what we should be covering or where I am solemnly swearing that this is the year that I will not neglect Frances. The pace of what we are doing has picked up tremendously, and our discipline is also at an all time high. Well, okay, the discipline of actually keeping up with an outside workload and staying on schedule. I am writing this while Jane Eyre sits by my bed with the bookmark only at page 101 when I need to get to 383 by Monday. I suppose in a way I'm procrastinating.
My own workload is what has gone through the roof. I am tutoring and directing a program for 10th grade students, and the philosophy of the program is that a single tutor who engages students in every subject can create an integration of topics and subjects in a way that separate classes taught by master teachers in their own individual subjects cannot. It's a fascinatingly different take on how to manage education in the upper grades, and sometimes there is a part of me that thinks, "Really? You think I ought to be tutoring Algebra II to anyone?" But there it is. I sub out my Algebra II tutoring to Kerry, who comes in and handles that hour of class, but then I work through Latin II, British Literature, Western Cultural History including art history and music history as well as an overview of philosophy and cultural periods and trends over the past 2000 years, traditional Aristotelian logic, and biology. It is a handful! Last week was the first time that my time management choices left me scrambling in the dust to complete what I needed to for the week. I won't do that again!
We tend to run in cycles of a heavy week with a lot of work and then a slightly lighter week. Actually, my weeks are lighter than those of my students because I do not have to write all of the papers they do (though I do research the topics and take pages and pages of notes on them so that I can effectively engage with what they do write) and I don't have to take and pass the tests they do (woe to me if I had to do the biology or logic exam!) and I don't have to do all of the math problems. But our workload is pretty intense. So far we have read Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selected Canterbury Tales, several books of Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels, Pride and Prejudice, and A Tale of Two Cities. There was a time when I had a lot more time to inhale a heavy reading load, but that time is...kind of past. Now I'm shoving it in after 11 p.m., trying to sneak away on campouts to get a chunk of pages down, and tucking my novels into my purse no matter where I am going, since you never know when you might have a spare three minutes, and three minutes might be three pages....
I am totally loving what I am doing, though. I have learned more than I ever thought I could in a short time, and I have to say that it is much more pleasurable to be doing school again when I don't have to worry about grades and a transcript. Now I'm just along for the ride and for the enrichment of my life. I can't wait until my own kids are doing this work because it is truly the good stuff.
Meanwhile, I do have to keep up with my own children and their work, which can be daunting for their level. In some ways it has been a rude awakening to them to have deadlines and a week's worth of work to accomplish in, well, a week. There's not a lot of self-pacing possible. There is enough work that it is hard to get ahead. And the expectations are very high. Two to three page essays when they aren't always quite ready for that. Interpretation of the passages they are reading before they are writing about them, rather than just reporting or expressing an opinion. Having to use multiple sources for almost everything that they write now. The IEW book we are using this year is, in my opinion, well beyond what they should be expected to do right now. It is better suited for high school students, and writing is not my children's precocious area. They are still struggling with basic structure and consistently having all of the parts of a sentence in place. So adding in Bible interpretation and an increasingly complex checklist of stylistic devices (dual adverbs, adjectival teeter-totters, invisible who/which clauses, rhetorical questions) has really pushed our limits. But during this time, I have seen them go from needing a hand held while writing to now being able to take their weekly science topic, research it themselves from several sources, and write a pretty respectable report to read aloud to their class. They have also come along in Latin and math, conquering some of their previous difficulties with poor handwriting and sloppy organizational skills. It's not that we don't have our challenge areas with it, but they are really starting to be more meticulous and to see the value of taking things step by step.
Probably the most growth has been with Frances. She is really astounding me with what she has managed to learn and retain this year. In 9 short weeks, she has learned all of the multiplication table through 14x12, has learned squares and cubes through 10, and can skip count any numbers 1 through 15. Constant repetition and some strategic songs have really made these things stick. She has also improved a great deal in writing, going from not knowing what a sentence is to writing one or two paragraph essays, with help of course. And she can do her chart with the four types of sentences, four purposes of sentences, five parts of a sentence, eight parts of speech, and seven sentence structures in under two minutes. She complains that she is still the slowest in her class, but I have seen her go from never having done any grammar at all to mastering concepts and memorizing information that probably most adults do not know. Each week she has material in six subject areas (history, math, science, Latin, English grammar, geography) as well as music theory information and Bible verses to memorize. In addition, we are learning a 200 point timeline 8 cards at a time. So now we are up to 64 points on the timeline, and even Rutledge can sing most of them, though there are some words that he either ignores or says as one droning syllable ("unification," "monotheism," "Phoenician"). In a perfect world I would be keeping up better with having her go deeper into what some of these things are, but right now, it feels most valuable just to get the exposure and have a sense of relative time. There is plenty of time for filling in the gaps later.
The beauty of all of it is that there isn't time to second guess whether one curriculum or another might be an improvement. We're just so darn busy with what we have there isn't room for much else. And yet they are all learning by leaps and bounds. In three more weeks we have a very big break--6 weeks. It is going to feel good, but we will also have enough work in there so that we don't get rusty.
I'll have to save our non-school life for another post. There is much to do and it is late, I have to read more Bronte, and tomorrow morning starts nice and early with Rutledge's speech therapy.
I'm lost in the land of homeschooling four children. Boy oh boy is it still crazy!
This is such a different year from our past ones, and there are great points and transition points. I'm finally in a place where I am not worrying that we are not covering what we should be covering or where I am solemnly swearing that this is the year that I will not neglect Frances. The pace of what we are doing has picked up tremendously, and our discipline is also at an all time high. Well, okay, the discipline of actually keeping up with an outside workload and staying on schedule. I am writing this while Jane Eyre sits by my bed with the bookmark only at page 101 when I need to get to 383 by Monday. I suppose in a way I'm procrastinating.
My own workload is what has gone through the roof. I am tutoring and directing a program for 10th grade students, and the philosophy of the program is that a single tutor who engages students in every subject can create an integration of topics and subjects in a way that separate classes taught by master teachers in their own individual subjects cannot. It's a fascinatingly different take on how to manage education in the upper grades, and sometimes there is a part of me that thinks, "Really? You think I ought to be tutoring Algebra II to anyone?" But there it is. I sub out my Algebra II tutoring to Kerry, who comes in and handles that hour of class, but then I work through Latin II, British Literature, Western Cultural History including art history and music history as well as an overview of philosophy and cultural periods and trends over the past 2000 years, traditional Aristotelian logic, and biology. It is a handful! Last week was the first time that my time management choices left me scrambling in the dust to complete what I needed to for the week. I won't do that again!
We tend to run in cycles of a heavy week with a lot of work and then a slightly lighter week. Actually, my weeks are lighter than those of my students because I do not have to write all of the papers they do (though I do research the topics and take pages and pages of notes on them so that I can effectively engage with what they do write) and I don't have to take and pass the tests they do (woe to me if I had to do the biology or logic exam!) and I don't have to do all of the math problems. But our workload is pretty intense. So far we have read Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selected Canterbury Tales, several books of Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels, Pride and Prejudice, and A Tale of Two Cities. There was a time when I had a lot more time to inhale a heavy reading load, but that time is...kind of past. Now I'm shoving it in after 11 p.m., trying to sneak away on campouts to get a chunk of pages down, and tucking my novels into my purse no matter where I am going, since you never know when you might have a spare three minutes, and three minutes might be three pages....
I am totally loving what I am doing, though. I have learned more than I ever thought I could in a short time, and I have to say that it is much more pleasurable to be doing school again when I don't have to worry about grades and a transcript. Now I'm just along for the ride and for the enrichment of my life. I can't wait until my own kids are doing this work because it is truly the good stuff.
Meanwhile, I do have to keep up with my own children and their work, which can be daunting for their level. In some ways it has been a rude awakening to them to have deadlines and a week's worth of work to accomplish in, well, a week. There's not a lot of self-pacing possible. There is enough work that it is hard to get ahead. And the expectations are very high. Two to three page essays when they aren't always quite ready for that. Interpretation of the passages they are reading before they are writing about them, rather than just reporting or expressing an opinion. Having to use multiple sources for almost everything that they write now. The IEW book we are using this year is, in my opinion, well beyond what they should be expected to do right now. It is better suited for high school students, and writing is not my children's precocious area. They are still struggling with basic structure and consistently having all of the parts of a sentence in place. So adding in Bible interpretation and an increasingly complex checklist of stylistic devices (dual adverbs, adjectival teeter-totters, invisible who/which clauses, rhetorical questions) has really pushed our limits. But during this time, I have seen them go from needing a hand held while writing to now being able to take their weekly science topic, research it themselves from several sources, and write a pretty respectable report to read aloud to their class. They have also come along in Latin and math, conquering some of their previous difficulties with poor handwriting and sloppy organizational skills. It's not that we don't have our challenge areas with it, but they are really starting to be more meticulous and to see the value of taking things step by step.
Probably the most growth has been with Frances. She is really astounding me with what she has managed to learn and retain this year. In 9 short weeks, she has learned all of the multiplication table through 14x12, has learned squares and cubes through 10, and can skip count any numbers 1 through 15. Constant repetition and some strategic songs have really made these things stick. She has also improved a great deal in writing, going from not knowing what a sentence is to writing one or two paragraph essays, with help of course. And she can do her chart with the four types of sentences, four purposes of sentences, five parts of a sentence, eight parts of speech, and seven sentence structures in under two minutes. She complains that she is still the slowest in her class, but I have seen her go from never having done any grammar at all to mastering concepts and memorizing information that probably most adults do not know. Each week she has material in six subject areas (history, math, science, Latin, English grammar, geography) as well as music theory information and Bible verses to memorize. In addition, we are learning a 200 point timeline 8 cards at a time. So now we are up to 64 points on the timeline, and even Rutledge can sing most of them, though there are some words that he either ignores or says as one droning syllable ("unification," "monotheism," "Phoenician"). In a perfect world I would be keeping up better with having her go deeper into what some of these things are, but right now, it feels most valuable just to get the exposure and have a sense of relative time. There is plenty of time for filling in the gaps later.
The beauty of all of it is that there isn't time to second guess whether one curriculum or another might be an improvement. We're just so darn busy with what we have there isn't room for much else. And yet they are all learning by leaps and bounds. In three more weeks we have a very big break--6 weeks. It is going to feel good, but we will also have enough work in there so that we don't get rusty.
I'll have to save our non-school life for another post. There is much to do and it is late, I have to read more Bronte, and tomorrow morning starts nice and early with Rutledge's speech therapy.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Isn't my cutie sweet? I'm so proud of him. He improved his time on freestyle by about 25 seconds last week. Alas, this week he was back to over a minute again because he had some kind of asthmatic fit on the way and he couldn't find his bathing suit and wore one of his brother's suits and it was falling off and he had to keep yanking it back up while he was going across the pool. But he's still a swimming superstar in my book!
And Frances qualified for Champs in another event this week. I've never had anyone qualify for Champs in swimming before, so this has been a fun surprise. She qualified in backstroke at the second meet and has continually improved her time since then, and now she has qualified in freestyle. She was lucky not to get DQ'd in butterfly this week, and her time went down by about a second and a half, but she is still fewer than two seconds from qualifying in that event as well. And she may be on a relay team, since her relay teams have done exceptionally well. Even last week, when she wasn't on the A team, her B team won second place. Considering the Blue times that several of the A team members have, it's a pretty good showing.
My boys are gone. I know they should be gone, and I'm excited they are gone, and I was the one who insisted that they should be gone. But I still miss them. It's just incredible how the dynamic of a place changes once you have even one fewer warm bodies.
I am continuing to do a bad job of my summer, and sadly there are only a few weeks left. I need a big, fat, honking vacation. Tropical island. No plans. Warm, sandy beach, hammock, gigantic frozen drink (or 12 of them), maybe a snorkel, just so I can say the word snorkel and laugh. Snorkel, snorkel, snorkel.
Instead, I'm still in my pajamas at 9:30 a.m., sitting in a very messy house with unpacked boxes from our carpet extravaganza, with a child in a dirty swimsuit playing Strawberry Shortcake on the Nintendo DS and with a dog who won't stop licking her foot.
Last night I spent most of the night playing cleanup from my computer disaster (inbox wiped out, anything left resorted into about fifteen different mini-mailboxes that had nothing to do with the sender) and trying to have a crash course in keeping up with my various commitments. I think the reason I'm not dressed right now is that I still have a zillion things to do to make right all the stuff I botched last week or should have done but didn't that I'm thinking if I just sit on my floor long enough with my computer I'll start to grow roots down into the subflooring and not have to actually face reality.
I also was supposed to break my Starbucks habit and I didn't. Heh.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Okay, I'm just such a sorry blogger lately. I have a whole pile of posts I started but never finished. I don't think I'm pushed "publish" in about two months.
So no matter how short or boring or pointless this is, I am going to upload it just so I can say I did it.
I just got back from the district championships with my tennis team. It was a fascinating experience. In many ways, I think I don't fit in especially well with my team, but I had a fun time nevertheless. We made it to the semi-finals, which is further than most Woodlake teams make it at these events, and we should be very proud. I lost my first singles match, and I lost it pretty badly (really bad first set, but almost a tiebreaker in the second), handily won my first doubles match, and then lost our final doubles match in tiebreakers for both the set and the match. It was heartbreaking, and I wish my record looked better. I should not care about these things, but I know that I am not going to be moved up to 3.5 this season, and the remaining bit of my friends will. Oh well. I am really into swimming these days, and I think I might just put my energy there and put tennis on a semi-permanent break.
This week I'm back to my overwhelmed self. I need to set up meetings for CC, I need to enter a bunch of stuff in the computer, and I need to handle a whole pile of dive and swim team things. If I'm honest, right not I want to waste away in Margaritaville about 800 miles from here. I'm just in a rough spot right now and doing a poor job of everything I do (except playing Yahtzee). I could be on the verge of the biggest change in my entire life, and I'm scared to death and also trying to just keep it on the DL. If I think about it too much, I'll both have no answers and will freak myself out. Game face is my phrase of the week. I'm just trying to perfect my game face while I quietly totally lose my mind ;)
So no matter how short or boring or pointless this is, I am going to upload it just so I can say I did it.
I just got back from the district championships with my tennis team. It was a fascinating experience. In many ways, I think I don't fit in especially well with my team, but I had a fun time nevertheless. We made it to the semi-finals, which is further than most Woodlake teams make it at these events, and we should be very proud. I lost my first singles match, and I lost it pretty badly (really bad first set, but almost a tiebreaker in the second), handily won my first doubles match, and then lost our final doubles match in tiebreakers for both the set and the match. It was heartbreaking, and I wish my record looked better. I should not care about these things, but I know that I am not going to be moved up to 3.5 this season, and the remaining bit of my friends will. Oh well. I am really into swimming these days, and I think I might just put my energy there and put tennis on a semi-permanent break.
This week I'm back to my overwhelmed self. I need to set up meetings for CC, I need to enter a bunch of stuff in the computer, and I need to handle a whole pile of dive and swim team things. If I'm honest, right not I want to waste away in Margaritaville about 800 miles from here. I'm just in a rough spot right now and doing a poor job of everything I do (except playing Yahtzee). I could be on the verge of the biggest change in my entire life, and I'm scared to death and also trying to just keep it on the DL. If I think about it too much, I'll both have no answers and will freak myself out. Game face is my phrase of the week. I'm just trying to perfect my game face while I quietly totally lose my mind ;)
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Once again, it has been so long since I have posted that Blogger has forgotten me. It's not that hard to do.
It has been one of the hardest months ever. Physically it has seemed, from the outside, a little exhausting because there are so many things wrapping up. Softball season is winding to a close on Saturday. The dance recital and all its rehearsals are now behind us. Preschool graduation is tomorrow. Tennis is going full force. Swim and dive team have already started before other things have managed to finish up. The overlap in these few weeks is always unwieldy, and this year was no different in that regard. Everything wants to have some capstone event--an end of the year party, a ceremony, a big show. In some ways, I am happy letting the end of the routine be a punctuation mark in itself.
But what is really different is the attitude. My attitude, which is inflected so heavily by the attitude of burden all around me. Doing these things is "bad" because I'm being told that they are bad and too much. And what has made it so difficult is the realization that my fundamental beliefs and motivations are, at their very root, so terribly flawed. And that I am the one who must change.
The first thing that I have been having to come to terms with is that although I desperately wanted each of my children, to the point I was willing to subject myself to physical pain, an emotional rollercoaster, financial stress, I suppose I just have too many and I needed to heed my partner's desire to stop. It is, as they say, water under the bridge at this point, but the fact is, I should be feeling remorse for my desire for children, and I do not. I honestly don't know what to do with this set of information. How can you want something so very much, love people so very much, and yet have to acknowledge that they were, in fact, a bad idea? How can something so bliss-inducing, so sweet to you, be wrong?
The second issue deep on me is how I have chosen to help them grow. So much of our own attitudes come from our own upbringing, and most especially our overcompensations. As a child, I was exposed to fairly little. I had a happy, comfortable life, but we were so simple, so narrow in what we did. I always felt different, somehow inferior to the other people around me in the gifted program or at camp or in my academic high school classes. I never had the opportunity to play a sport as a child. I took piano lessons, but I did not do any other activities. I did not travel much. I did not spend time outdoors other than in my own small, suburban neighborhood. I went to college having never seen an animal in the wild other than a squirrel. I had never even seen roadkill other than a duck that has been hit by a car near the small borrow pit near our house. I had never seen a deer cross the road, never seen a raccoon, never even seen a woodchuck. I had never been hiking. Never been camping. Had never been off the East Coast until I was 14 and my Dad had been given a comp ticket after giving up a seat on a plane on the only business trip I ever remember him taking in my entire life. Even though my grandparents lived in Myrtle Beach during my early years and my other grandparents had moved to Florida right after I was born, I seldom even got to play in the waves at the beach because my parents couldn't walk on sand.
So I have tended to overcorrect. I have wanted my children to have the chances and experiences I didn't have. People often ask me if I did gymnastics as a child. Nope. But I wish I had. I wish I had played softball. I wish I had been on a team. I wish I had taken art classes. I wish I had been more places. Wish people had recommended more good books.
Now what I'm having to come to terms with is this: we're just as poor as my parents. Maybe a little more able-bodied, but we're still poor. If we want to retire, if we want to have savings, if we want to be responsible, we must pull it all back. I made the painful decision to give notice to Frances' piano teacher this week. We also will not be renewing the various classes and activities we have just finished. The music lessons will be something that we can perhaps continue with me as a teacher at home. I get tears in my eyes when I think about how I must do this in order to appease the person who is supposed to be my partner. Sometimes I wish that I could expect as little out of life as he does. To treat it simply as something to be endured until the day you die (alone).
Kerry and I have been seeing a marriage counselor, and the one thing that has become clear from the experience is that everything about me is wrong. Unfortunately, so far there hasn't been much focus on how I am supposed to grow and change, so I am still stuck in my old ways and feel unrepentant. I'm just not sorry for who I am, only for the fact that I am likely losing my children and a warm roof over my head. What I have learned is that the things I stand for: family, time together, adventures, trying to live in the now, are not what work. At least not for me in this relationshp. My greatest wish in the world is to feel that I have a place to call home, a place where I feel safe and loved and know that I can return even when I'm not perfect. I'm terrified of being alone in the world with no friends and no family. Right now I feel very much like I'm in that place. I don't have any close friends. I had unrealistic expectations of what marriage would be like. I don't know what I've done to cause not only myself but my whole family to be rejected by our families of origin. So, well, I'm a little scared. And also rather defensive. I feel like I should wish that I would just die, but that's the last thing I want to do. What I really want to do is survive despite the contempt and indifference around me because there's a big part of me that feels like it isn't wrong to want to build a family where one is lacking. I want to be somewhere where people are not afraid of my children, where they aren't seen as a burden or a mere financial liability or something so out of control that no one would want them to be where they are.
I actually have had bags packed for several days to set out on a totally crazy adventure. It would be considered kidnapping or legal abandonment, and the responsible streak in me knows that I would risk losing my children forever if I acted on my desires, but I'd love to just get in the car and keep driving until I get to California or Canada. Alas, it's a little hard to do with no money at all in my pocket (to make matters worse, I lost my ATM card and my credit card this weekend).
In the midst of my contemplation of my future, in our present we have been doing a lot of reading:
* My Louisiana Sky, which is probably the best book I've read in the past several months
* Be the Pack Leader, which we listened to in the car
* The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
* Berries in the Scoop, a sweet story about a family from Cape Cod
* The Mystery in Old Quebec, which has me wanting to leave it all behind and run to a little piece of Europe in North America
* a book about a family that travels to see the Sphinx in 1898
* a book about two children who are trapped on an ice floe near Greenland
* The Breadwinner, a young adult book about a young girl in Kabul when the Taliban took over
* Milagros, the story written by local author Meg Medina, and the story behind this year's dance recital
* The Glass House, a book I unfortunately identified too much with right now in my life; I kept feeling horrified that I may not be very different than the mother and father in that book and that my children's lives are equally chaotic
* The Art of Racing in the Rain, very sad and also sweet in the way only dog books can be
* Ali and the Golden Eagle--just started today
* Katherine Paterson's Park's Quest, about a boy who searches out the truth about his father, who died in Vietnam
It has been one of the hardest months ever. Physically it has seemed, from the outside, a little exhausting because there are so many things wrapping up. Softball season is winding to a close on Saturday. The dance recital and all its rehearsals are now behind us. Preschool graduation is tomorrow. Tennis is going full force. Swim and dive team have already started before other things have managed to finish up. The overlap in these few weeks is always unwieldy, and this year was no different in that regard. Everything wants to have some capstone event--an end of the year party, a ceremony, a big show. In some ways, I am happy letting the end of the routine be a punctuation mark in itself.
But what is really different is the attitude. My attitude, which is inflected so heavily by the attitude of burden all around me. Doing these things is "bad" because I'm being told that they are bad and too much. And what has made it so difficult is the realization that my fundamental beliefs and motivations are, at their very root, so terribly flawed. And that I am the one who must change.
The first thing that I have been having to come to terms with is that although I desperately wanted each of my children, to the point I was willing to subject myself to physical pain, an emotional rollercoaster, financial stress, I suppose I just have too many and I needed to heed my partner's desire to stop. It is, as they say, water under the bridge at this point, but the fact is, I should be feeling remorse for my desire for children, and I do not. I honestly don't know what to do with this set of information. How can you want something so very much, love people so very much, and yet have to acknowledge that they were, in fact, a bad idea? How can something so bliss-inducing, so sweet to you, be wrong?
The second issue deep on me is how I have chosen to help them grow. So much of our own attitudes come from our own upbringing, and most especially our overcompensations. As a child, I was exposed to fairly little. I had a happy, comfortable life, but we were so simple, so narrow in what we did. I always felt different, somehow inferior to the other people around me in the gifted program or at camp or in my academic high school classes. I never had the opportunity to play a sport as a child. I took piano lessons, but I did not do any other activities. I did not travel much. I did not spend time outdoors other than in my own small, suburban neighborhood. I went to college having never seen an animal in the wild other than a squirrel. I had never even seen roadkill other than a duck that has been hit by a car near the small borrow pit near our house. I had never seen a deer cross the road, never seen a raccoon, never even seen a woodchuck. I had never been hiking. Never been camping. Had never been off the East Coast until I was 14 and my Dad had been given a comp ticket after giving up a seat on a plane on the only business trip I ever remember him taking in my entire life. Even though my grandparents lived in Myrtle Beach during my early years and my other grandparents had moved to Florida right after I was born, I seldom even got to play in the waves at the beach because my parents couldn't walk on sand.
So I have tended to overcorrect. I have wanted my children to have the chances and experiences I didn't have. People often ask me if I did gymnastics as a child. Nope. But I wish I had. I wish I had played softball. I wish I had been on a team. I wish I had taken art classes. I wish I had been more places. Wish people had recommended more good books.
Now what I'm having to come to terms with is this: we're just as poor as my parents. Maybe a little more able-bodied, but we're still poor. If we want to retire, if we want to have savings, if we want to be responsible, we must pull it all back. I made the painful decision to give notice to Frances' piano teacher this week. We also will not be renewing the various classes and activities we have just finished. The music lessons will be something that we can perhaps continue with me as a teacher at home. I get tears in my eyes when I think about how I must do this in order to appease the person who is supposed to be my partner. Sometimes I wish that I could expect as little out of life as he does. To treat it simply as something to be endured until the day you die (alone).
Kerry and I have been seeing a marriage counselor, and the one thing that has become clear from the experience is that everything about me is wrong. Unfortunately, so far there hasn't been much focus on how I am supposed to grow and change, so I am still stuck in my old ways and feel unrepentant. I'm just not sorry for who I am, only for the fact that I am likely losing my children and a warm roof over my head. What I have learned is that the things I stand for: family, time together, adventures, trying to live in the now, are not what work. At least not for me in this relationshp. My greatest wish in the world is to feel that I have a place to call home, a place where I feel safe and loved and know that I can return even when I'm not perfect. I'm terrified of being alone in the world with no friends and no family. Right now I feel very much like I'm in that place. I don't have any close friends. I had unrealistic expectations of what marriage would be like. I don't know what I've done to cause not only myself but my whole family to be rejected by our families of origin. So, well, I'm a little scared. And also rather defensive. I feel like I should wish that I would just die, but that's the last thing I want to do. What I really want to do is survive despite the contempt and indifference around me because there's a big part of me that feels like it isn't wrong to want to build a family where one is lacking. I want to be somewhere where people are not afraid of my children, where they aren't seen as a burden or a mere financial liability or something so out of control that no one would want them to be where they are.
I actually have had bags packed for several days to set out on a totally crazy adventure. It would be considered kidnapping or legal abandonment, and the responsible streak in me knows that I would risk losing my children forever if I acted on my desires, but I'd love to just get in the car and keep driving until I get to California or Canada. Alas, it's a little hard to do with no money at all in my pocket (to make matters worse, I lost my ATM card and my credit card this weekend).
In the midst of my contemplation of my future, in our present we have been doing a lot of reading:
* My Louisiana Sky, which is probably the best book I've read in the past several months
* Be the Pack Leader, which we listened to in the car
* The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
* Berries in the Scoop, a sweet story about a family from Cape Cod
* The Mystery in Old Quebec, which has me wanting to leave it all behind and run to a little piece of Europe in North America
* a book about a family that travels to see the Sphinx in 1898
* a book about two children who are trapped on an ice floe near Greenland
* The Breadwinner, a young adult book about a young girl in Kabul when the Taliban took over
* Milagros, the story written by local author Meg Medina, and the story behind this year's dance recital
* The Glass House, a book I unfortunately identified too much with right now in my life; I kept feeling horrified that I may not be very different than the mother and father in that book and that my children's lives are equally chaotic
* The Art of Racing in the Rain, very sad and also sweet in the way only dog books can be
* Ali and the Golden Eagle--just started today
* Katherine Paterson's Park's Quest, about a boy who searches out the truth about his father, who died in Vietnam
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