Not so much sleeping happening last night, so I am greeting Monday a little gritty-eyed and not really feeling like living my best life today. Maybe tomorrow. :-) But let's give it the old College try. . .
I must being by saying thank you to sweet Susanne , who honored me with a Creative Blogger Award. Blogging has given me such a gift, by making a space for me, both in cyberspace and in my day, to unite my loves of writing, photography, cooking, homekeeping, and parenting into one form of expression. I receive so much inspiration from other women who dig deep every day for words, images and projects and put them out here for us, to enrich our lives.
I am also feeling grateful on a very practical level today: after rummaging around in freezer and fridge and cupboards, I have found raw materials enough for several meals to make over the next couple of days and store in the freezer. Today I put a chicken pot pie and a huge dish of homemade macaroni and cheese on ice, tomorrow I'll add meatballs, pizza Stromboli and whitefish cakes. (These are made like crab cakes, but with the whitefish I never seem to cook correctly.) I feel "paid double" by these dishes, in that they are being made with small, odd amounts of ingredients, and that they are my insurance policy, on weary evenings, against an unplanned meal out.
Finally the picture with this post is not just to torment all of us who are counting the days until autumn arrives, it ties into my latest favorite children's book: Pumpkins. Not a Halloween story, Pumpkins by Mary Lyn Ray is a delightful story of love for the land, hard work, self-sacrifice and conservation, told with wonderful language and humor. We had checked it out once before in the spring, and I enjoyed it even more the second time around as Joshua read it to us last night. I have requested her other books. And also in our stack: When I Was Young in the Mountains. Cynthia Rylant has become a perennial choice of mine, and this Caldecott Honor book has the Appalachian soul that appeals to this Blue Ridge girl.
Happy Monday, everyone!
There is something about ironing that takes me back to the days when we had first moved into this house. Really beyond memory, more an inhabiting of those first weeks here, every time I unfold my screechy board and set to work with spray and starch and steam.
The kitchen around me looked very different then. Dull and dark wood cabinets, brown carpet on the floor, and primed walls, it looked kind of like a whitewashed cave. But nothing made me feel so much at peace in our new home as being there, looking out the window, smoothing wrinkles and crisped creases.
There were more questions than answers, then as now. Then, I contemplated some relationships and wondered if they would survive our transitions of career path and geography. Some didn't. I dreamed over our new home and imagined the loving changes I wanted for it. As always with a family with small children, the pace of those changes has been slow, as we have resolved to be careful about laying aside too much living for the sake of improving. I reflected as I pressed business shirts for my husband on his love for his new job, and felt a profound gratitude that long-deserved professional success and satisfaction was finally his.
The kitchen looks different now. The room of the house where we have laid the heaviest hand has pale green walls, creamy cabinets, and the door and drawer pulls I set my heart on. I walk a cream and charcoal ceramic checkerboard floor laid by my husband. I wonder about different things, like our new church home, Joshua's school friends, Sam's last year full-time with me and what books I should use to tempt their vibrant minds.
But deeper than any conscious thought is this settled feeling of peace, that has been with me since the first morning I stumbled into this kitchen to make coffee. Like a quiet whisper-- here we are, we live here. These walls contain our truest selves, we make a good place for each other, a soft place to land at the end of the day.
This is one of those posts that maybe should be more like five posts. But the clock has been ticking on it, swirling around in my head with all the emotions and thoughts and anticipations and prayers of the new school year beginning.
Tonight we are headed to Meet the Teacher night at Joshua's school, and I am getting excited, almost in spite of myself, to be back in that pint-sized world, to meet the personality I'll loan my precious to for six and a half hours a day, for the next nine months. I think, despite my kicking and screaming, that we are all ready for the adventure to begin.
I have mommy friends who send their littles to public school, to private school, and who teach their children at home. (One dear mom I know, because of the different needs of her kids, does all three.) The blogs I read represent every sort of home education flavor I can imagine. And I would be so much poorer without my homeschool blogging buddies, in the richness of their pursuit of children's literature, nature study, and out-of-the-box learning, and their devoted hearts and spirits.
But I am a public school mom. Joshua will continue at our neighborhood school this year, and my expectation is that Sam will follow him there next year. It is not a lesser choice, an inferior choice, a sub-par choice. We believe it is our calling for our family. It is our choice.
It has been our experience with Joshua, and was his father's and my experience in our day, that the halls and classrooms are staffed with compassionate, skilled, and devoted professionals. They are overworked and underpaid, which only makes their performance more laudable.
We know. We know those places full of laughter and art also harbor too many days of standardized testing, bullies, lunches of questionable nutrition, worksheets and other busy work. . . on and on.
The kicker is, the kids themselves. The kids my boys would not meet on our street or on Sunday morning. Kids who give them a bigger sense of the world. Kids to love, kids to worry over, kids to stretch our hearts a little bigger. Redefining our notion perhaps, of who our kids are.
Of course, last year this led to some eye-opening dinner table conversations-- Joshua testing the limits of vocabulary on occasion, questioning entertainment guidelines, and sometimes giving us a peephole into a classmate's life that broke our hearts. Sometimes uncomfortable, always challenging. And some of the richest moments of parenting I've experienced. When I have come to the end of my "wisdom." And really need wisdom from Another.
So that is who we are on the educational landscape.
And here is where it gets messy. There are hard decisions we make, raising our kids. It isn't picking paint colors. It is growing little people. And we all make the decisions we make because of what we think is right. That only makes sense.
And we sometimes fall into a couple of pitfalls along the way. One is thinking there is only one right decision. (I remember weeping, post-mastitis and in the midst of post-partum depression, knowing deep down I could not face continuing nursing and sure I had already failed my little boy. )
The other is believing we must be in conflict over our differing choices. (A big thanks to the authors of any articles called "Mommy Wars" or using the term "versus" to apply to parenting.)
The problem is that it is easy to give lip service to the idea that we are all doing the best we can figure out, we are all aiming to raise great kids, that there are many paths to that goal. It is harder to keep our internal dialogue and how we view other, different parents compassionate and tolerant. It is easy to understand how we can fall victim to judging other parents, sometimes over the smallest issues. We are unpaid and largely un-praised. We don't get promotions or incentive-based raises. No one sits down with us for a performance review, and many of us are constantly evaluating our approach, because the stakes are so high, or seem to be. It is hard at times to maintain our perspective and our sense of humor, and all too easy to say to ourselves, "Well, I am not doing that great in this area, but at least I don't ____________ like ____________ does."
I'm not innocent of this, and neither are most of the parents I've met. The cocktail of self-doubt, conviction, sleeplessness, and pressure that parenting can be wears us down, in a sense, to this sort of one-upmanship. The problem is, left to grow, these attitudes isolate us from parents unlike ourselves, who have made different choices, and these may be the ones from whom we stand to learn the most.
I am all for passionate parenting, conviction, strong feelings and opinions. My husband would tell you I am composed almost entirely of those! So I am trying to learn the art of owning where I am in this journey, signing my name, not apologizing, and at the same time, retaining the humility and humor of just one mommy, knee-deep in the process. There is only one perfect Parent, and I am still growing in Him after all, still a Child myself.
Blessings to anyone who loves a child, educates a child, kisses a child as she gets on the bus, holds a baby to breast or bottle, potty trains and sings to sleep, reads aloud from Milne or Calvin and Hobbes. Company for the journey. . .
We are back from our adventures away, and sliding into a day at home, with the AC humming already and bread rising in the kitchen.
I love traveling, just the four of us. There is a subtle cementing of family identity that happens when we are on the road, not in route to see extended family, but just out for pleasure and to take pleasure in each other's company. We are always enlivened by the curiosity of the little guys, their eagerness and excitement and gratitude. We returned tired, but felt bathed in blessing.
What I found waiting for me was our beloved home, but also an ache, familiar after the last couple of years, but no less acute-- that in ten days or so Joshua will go back to school. Back to lunchbox and playground and worksheets and cubbies-- though perhaps not cubbies in first grade, perhaps a real desk. And from eight to two-thirty, he will be a citizen of the wider world, and Sam and I will hold down the smaller fort of home. Until Sam's turn, next year.
And I am faced with the question every mommy asks, nearly every day: Is this normal? This wrenching pain I feel at this little letting go? The tears that will flow at the slightest thought of the year beginning? Feeling fragile myself yet protective of these little hearts and minds? Greedy about hoarding these easy hours that drift by nearly unmarked by clock or bell?
I've searched my heart about homeschooling. I am not, at this season, called to it. I have not heard the deep YES that has marked every major decision John and I have made, and neither has he. Despite my mommy tears and our mutual trepidation, we know that this year, Joshua will be where he belongs, at our neighborhood elementary school. And we also fiercely know that we will not hand over our places as the biggest influences in his little life. We only loan him-- we do not give him away.
I used to see those back to school commercials, the ones where they played the song, "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year," as blissful parents filled their carts and contemplated their little darlings going back to school. I heard other moms, counting down the days until they joined car line and relinquished their summer role. Was this something that would just happen to me, that as August waned, I would spur my littles out the door with glee?
It didn't. It hasn't. I don't think it will.
Is this normal?
All I am left with is the resolve to savor these days and the trust that I am only me, only one mommy, called to love and pray for these two little guys, to feel deeply, to laugh loud, to shed my tears and dry theirs. To get to know his teacher, to love the boys and girls who will join him on his adventure, to ask for meetings and send e-mails and be really present, here and there. There is no getting away from it-- the need for focus and attention, balanced with the grace to let go.
A little.
It is ticking in the background you see-- the countdown to summer's end. For us it started July 21st, when there was officially less than one month left before school starts. But now it is August-- time to get serious about soaking up what is left.
So that is what we will be doing-- sights to see, books to read, maybe a couple of low-key projects, time with friends. . . Close your eyes. . . imagine your summer as a watercolor. . . does anything need to be added to the scene? A last minute feast under the trees, toes dug in the sand, a balloon set adrift on a breeze, a paperback and a hammock? Pick up your brush. . .
I'll be taking a little break from the blog for a bit, but I will return to share our adventures and the cooler crisper ones we have planned for the months to come.
More stitching fun this week from the still-amusing and inspiring Sublime Stitching. I found a couple of Tees for the boys on a clearance table at Old Navy-- heathered cream with chocolate brown trim. Rather unremarkable until they met our alien friend. A blue-eyed one for Sam and green-eyed for Joshua, whipped up on Wednesday, about to be hung out on the line, and likely worn tomorrow. We 'll be in T-shirts for three more months here, so this little buddy will have a lot of wear, even if the usual Mid-Winter Growth Spurt strikes both boys.
I think one of the main things I like about embroidery is that I am not great at it. My vision is really bad, and I am not very patient-- and I pretty much do one stitch over and over. And I am so good with that! I am a perfectionist in so many areas, and other hobbies in the past have ended up in the pursuit of everything other than fun. This is such a relief! I still strive for excellence in lots of areas, but in stitchery, I find the grace of good-enough.
The boys think it is a miracle that Mom can make an alien on a plain-Joe T-shirt, and no one will ever mistake it for anything other than it is-- the product of loving hands at home, a summer afternoon well-whiled away.
Not so much sleeping happening last night, so I am greeting Monday a little gritty-eyed and not really feeling like living my best life today. Maybe tomorrow. :-) But let's give it the old College try. . .
