Signing My Name

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. . .