blueperiod.

things i didn't want to hear today

"Mama, what's for breakfast?"

"My armpits have kind of an odor. I'm starting to smell like Mama."

"Mama, what's for lunch?"

"Actually, Mama, I just remembered I don't like zucchini."

"Mama, why is the tube of toothpaste in the toilet?"

"Mama, what's for dinner?"

time

One afternoon Luna tells me, "When I'm a mama, I won't ever make my children wait. I'll come right when they call me. I'll stop using my computer or washing the dishes and play as soon as they ask." She speaks plainly, without a hint of accusation in her voice.

Good luck with that, I think to myself. I say, "Your children will be very lucky," and try not to take her comment personally. It isn't really a comment as much as a statement, anyhow. And five is a little young for the nuances of passive-aggressiveness, no?

I do think about how often I put them off. How frequently the later that I promised never actually comes. Some days are so full of doing for them that there isn't time left for being with them. Time. How can something so irrelevant have such prominence in our lives?

"When will it be soon?" Luna asks me. "Is it later yet?" She counts to ten when I tell her, ten minutes. Time makes little sense to her. Time makes little sense to me and I've spent most of my life hyper-aware of it—so focused on its comings and goings; its absence, its presence. I've had too much and and still not enough of something I can't even explain; something that barely exists.

For a long time I honestly believed that time was speeding up as I grew older. I could not explain how this was possible but I knew it to be true. I thought it must be the same phenomena that made a return trip significantly shorter than the journey out. Once when I was twenty, riding in a car on my way to a babysitting job, I made an off-hand remark to my charge's father about  time accelerating. He was a psychologist for whom English was a second or third language, and I was intimidated by even casual conversation with him.

"Ah," he said, suddenly animated. "But time is not changing; only your perception of it." He then happily went into a lecture that took us all the way home. Unfortunately, I never I got clear instructions on what to do with this information. Just knowing that it's all in my head hasn't helped me much.

What I'd really like to know is how to slip back into that mind that doesn't bother differentiating between seconds and minutes. A mind that has little use for soon or later. Maybe, if I pay attention, Luna can help me remember. Maybe, if she's lucky, she won't forget.

Bad day

Yesterday was a bad day. You know it is a bad day when you find yourself saying to the children, "I'm sorry for being so awful. I'm just having a hard day." And then your seven-year-old says, "Yeah, I'm having a hard day, too." Which comes first, the chicken or the tirading mother?

I was the perfect combination of cold and withholding and short-tempered and irrational mixed with high drama and self-pity. In other words, a little my mother, a little my father, and just a dash of Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest.

Now, to give myself some credit, and to put the impact of this bad day into perspective, let me say that a meltdown of this caliber had not been seen round these parts for some time. That is saying something for the melancholy likes of me. Normally I fall apart every four to six weeks, (some people get their hair done, I have mini nervous breakdowns,) but for two and a half months I resembled a fairly-centered, not so fragile human being.

I started meditating; I attended this incredible workshop; and for one glorious month I was writing every single day. Then December came, and I have been on a downward spiral since it showed itself. The timing couldn't be worse, what with Sol's birthday, all the winter celebrations and end of year festivities, not to mention the return of really cold weather. I just want to curl up in a warm cave, with a good book, and wait this thing out.

Of course, all of this is compounded by the fact that I'm one of those people who just isn't satisfied unless I'm making life just that much more difficult for myself. I am addicted to suffering—which makes me a lousy Buddhist. For instance, instead of approaching the gift-giving season methodically—let's make a list, decide on a budget, etc.—I say, sometime around mid-December, "let's make all of our gifts this year!"

Here's another one: "If we are going to celebrate Christmas, then in all fairness we should celebrate Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and the winter solstice, all while practicing non-attachment and riding a unicycle, balancing a stack of plates on our head." Or one of Adam's favorites: "Oh it's New Year's Eve! Let's take this opportunity to completely scour the house from top to bottom, yes, even behind the refrigerator, so that we start the new year off fresh and ensure that this year won't be spent in an unkempt house." As if.

My problem is that I'm really good at imagining what the world should look like, my world, at least, and really bad at dealing with the reality that the world could care less how I see it. This has always been true. So, what was it that caused my George Bailey pre-crisis moment when I threw up my hands and yelled, "Why do we have to live in this crappy little house? Why do we have all these kids? Why do we homeschool?"

Well, I can only guess at this point because today was actually a fine day, and it's always hard for me to see in hindsight just what was such an affront to my sensibilities that they had to jump out the window. I think it's because I haven't been sitting as much lately. I've fallen out of practice with my meditation practice, and this concerns me, but apparently not enough as of yet. There is also the fact that NANOWRIMO is over, and I am still in the midst of a novel I want desperately to finish. Though, now I am without the socially acceptable excuse for sequestering myself and being somewhat antisocial. It's one thing to live like that for a month, but how can I justify it every day for as long as it takes to finish it?

And we have the holidays. I always wondered about those people for whom the holidays are "tough." What does that mean, I'd ask myself, making up tragic Christmas stories in my head. Now, I think I have become one of them. Not that I really have any traumatic Christmas memories, except for that one Christmas that was so awful I tend to remember it as an Easter or a Valentine's Day. But let's face it, this is a very emotional time of year, and I am an emotionally turbulent person. I am bound to be a bit discombobulated.

I just hate those hard days. I could handle them before, but now that I am a mother... It's one thing for Adam to put up with my moods and breakdowns because he's known me for a long time. He is well-aware of how completely insane I can be. He chose me in spite of, or maybe a little because of, it. My children are another story. They are the innocent bystanders to my train-wreck moments.

To this Adam says, "You have to remember, they also chose you." And while this thought makes me feel a little better, it also makes me feel the slightest bit worse.

I can only hope they start aiming a little higher.

Question

Sol asks, "Where did the first flower come from? I know that all the other flowers came from seeds dropped by that flower, but where did the first one come from?"

I love when they ask these kinds of questions; the ones with no answers, at least not that I could give. They make me pause and breathe in all that is mysterious and beautiful about the world. Their minds are boundless, with room for infinite possibilities, and endless stories. I think partly because they aren't tethered to language; aren't limited by our rudimentary, albeit at times elegant, tools for understanding. They just do, and feel, and are, and we teach them that there is a word, worse yet, a running commentary for all of this. And we value it so much, and rely on it so heavily that it becomes such a desirable commodity. And we praise them for their efforts to become more like us, when really what we want is to become more like them.

Luna asks me over and over to tell her the story of her birth. She knows it now, and can tell it back to me almost verbatim, often jumping into my telling with the next scene or words said. It occured to me too late to ask her to tell the story of her birth, and whatever psychic memories of that night that stayed with her, have all been tangled up and mishapen by my words.

These days I'm thinking a lot about the power of words, the premium we put on language. Sol is devouring the written word, staying up reading to himself, some nights two to three hours after we've said good-night. And Luna is in the process of playing with the power imbued by a well-timed phrase or just the right intonation of a single word. I'm also, as always, fine-tuning my parenting; thinking about praise and criticism and all the unspoken ways that I do and don't relate to my children. It's heavy stuff.

I think we'll go outside for a while, let the chilled winds clear out some of the clutter.

Happy Solstice

This gardening column in the Washington Post today sums up our family's approach to this season. For the first time Sol is paying close attention to all of our ritualistic preparations and actions. He would have to in order to make some sense of it all. I certainly am trying to keep it straight. I wonder what it means as we unpack the Menorah, the Kinara, and the Christmas tree ornaments. I struggle with whether to send Hanukkah-themed holiday cards to Adam's family in Florida, and Christmas-themed cards to my family in South Carolina, or whether to send everyone the same Winter Solstice-themed card that we designed with a simple sun low in the sky next to a bare tree. We spend the morning mailing Christmas gifts, Sol and Luna singing about Santa Claus, the afternoon adding to our Solstice altar and deciding where to hang the pine cone bird feeder, while over dinner Adam and I are planning a Kwanzaa dinner with friends, the day finally culminating in a few rousing rounds of dreidel. The children take it all in stride, enjoying the lights, the fun, the excitement. I worry over the foundation we are laying. Is it sturdy with a few aesthically-pleasing touches or so lopsided and full of cracks that it won't make it to next December? We are not religious people. In fact, I was shocked to hear Sol announce, "Santa Claus must be Jesus' son." Where did he hear about Jesus, and when did the "Christmas Goblin" of his toddler years become Santa Claus? Christmas, for myself, has little to nothing to do with these two characters. It's nostalgia for me. Christmas was always a good time, even the year we had no furniture and slept on the floor. It just always felt "happy." So I hold onto that one. Hanukkah came with my husband, along with a penchant for big, baubly color lights. Kwanzaa I came to on my own in college, and the focus on community and family made it stick. Celebrating the Solstice, well, that just makes sense. That's how we've made sense of it all for ourselves and Luna and Sol. We explain that the sun is so important to so many cultures, so essential for survival, that people have come up with different ways to honor and show respect for this time of year when the days are so short, and we are waiting and hoping for the light to return. We talk about the cycles of nature, and how our own cycles mimic those. As a life-long gardener and nature-explorer, he gets it, and it makes him smile. This makes me smile. (Trivia tidbit: Sol's due date was Dec. 21, the day of the Winter Solstice for that year.) Tonight we'll burn a yule log (interestingly, Luna, my little psychic, has been begging for a fire for about a week), and light the Menorah, and probably watch "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," again, or maybe preview some of those Kwanzaa folktales we bought over at the iTunes store. Peace.

let's not even use the word school

I have heard two things nearly every day for the past two weeks: 1) "I'm really happy we're homeschooling" and 2) "My brain keeps tricking me and even though we're homeschooling I keep dreaming that I have to go to school."

It's amazing to me that after only a week my son is plagued with the same anxiety dreams that I have at least once a week after 12 years of traditional schooling. So, that's how that experiment went. A bit traumatizing for the whole family. Oh, not the same kind of trauma that comes with living through war or being severely abused, but in his five-year-old world, given what it looks like, it's trauma none the less. During that first week that just became progressively worse to the point of sleepless nights, tear-filled mornings, and quiet hunger strikes, everyone told me to just wait it out. "Give it two weeks, he'll come around." Come around? You mean, after two weeks, his spirit will be sufficiently broken to the point where he'll stop begging me not to send him, stop crying and reaching for me as I drop him off in the morning, and stop silently refusing to eat his lunch?

I guess I could have waited for that, if I had magically swapped minds with some other person who was in no way invested in my children, and/or had faith in the public school system. But, you know, I couldn't do it. All I could do was follow my instincts; my intuition. What countless people described to me as typical behavior for kindergartners in the first weeks of school, was in no way typical behavior for Sol, under any circumstances. I've spent a lot of time with my children and therefore have come to understand them pretty well. I know what his anxious looks like. I know what his fearful looks like. I know how he responds to new people, places, experiences. I know about how long it takes him to come around. I know that that place was not a good place for him. And he knew it, too. And the poor guy did everything he could to tell us.

On Friday of the first week, his last day of school, I went in to observe and to eat lunch. It was just as bad as I remembered and worse than I thought it could be. I was thinking Kindergarten would be all playing and songs and read-aloud time. But I guess with the majority of children in preschool these days, that by the time they are in the big leagues, play becomes obsolete, a concept relegated to a 20-minute block called recess. Kindergarten, which used to be about transitioning from the homeworld to the schoolworld, with an emphasis on social interaction (taking turns, being part of a larger group, not biting your neighbor,) is now about acclimation. The programming period.

From what I could see in my few hours there, everything from the extended day (over 6 hours!) to the limited opportunities for socializing ("No talking") to the countless transitions (lots of standing line and walking "Quietly, hands behind your back" from one room to the other), everything is about teaching children how to be good students. And a good student is a very different thing from a good learner. Good students don't ask too many questions. Good students keep their hands and their bodies still. Good students only speak when they are permitted to. Good students do what they are told and nothing else. If you think about it being a good student is quite antithetical to learning.

Most people don't know how to respond when they learn that we are homeschooling. I've gotten lots of "That's a big decision," as if I didn't already know that. As if we haven't been learning and thinking about it for the past 6 years. There also seems to be a good deal of concern over how we will be able to teach him what he needs to know. You know, since we don't have teaching degrees, and Adam never even finished college. I just say we're not worried about it. I don't go into how all that is expected of him academically by the County School System after completion of Kindergarten is being able to count to 30 and backwards from 10 and the ability to identify individual letters. The child is reading and doing multiplication. And all this on his own, without us "teaching" him anything.

We are taking it one day it time. Learning as we go. As Sol observed the other day, "If you think about it, really, the whole family is homeschooling."

initial thoughts on school

The weather was miserable on the first day of school. We had a rain plan, just not a monsoon plan. Barrels of water emptied on us as we waded through small ponds on the sidewalk. Our pants were wet nearly up to our knees and the umbrellas we carried provided little shelter from a rain intent on saturating anything in its path. We were drenched and anxious and scared. I think it was an omen.

Things I don't like about school so far:

the fact that even after a week of hassle-free "practice" mornings, I ended up having to poke and prod and nag Sol out the door because, as Sol plainly stated, "I liked getting ready for pretend school, but when it's real, it's no fun."

the televisions in the classrooms, permanent fixtures, as opposed to the occasional rolling-cart-bound treat that they were in my day

the fact that they watched a movie during the rainy recess today (whatever happened to indoor recess?)

the fact that he was given a time-out apparently for "scowling" at another child who hit him (curiously this occured during what would have been known as recess but was actually the sit-still-and-be-quiet-for-even-longer portion of the day)

the fact that I know very little about what happened in the six hours that my child spent away from me today, because I was able to get only bits and pieces from a weary Sol

the fact that when I went to pick him up someone gave me a hard time because the last name on my license was not the same as his, even though I made a point of clarifying the name thing on one of the many forms I filled out (she reluctantly released my son to me)

Things I like about school so far:

Sol singing a song in Spanish on the walk home (of course, when I asked if that was something he learned today, he said, "No. I heard it at home.")

We said we'd give it a few weeks, but I'm seriously contemplating not sending him back tomorrow. It certainly didn't help matters that I listened to this interview with Alfie Kohn on The Diane Rehm Show this morning about the pointlessness of homework.

school, school, don't be late

We actually ran a new experiment this week. We imagined ourselves a week into the future, tethered to the toll of an unheard bell. The schoolbell, that is. We rose early and readied ourselves for the day; packed the nutritious lunch, donned the helmet, and scooted down the sidewalk. I needed to determine just how much time we will need to get ready without rushing, and its counterpart, fighting.

I cannot believe that Kindergarten is actually a part of our collective vocabulary. Preschool for us was this warm and fuzzy house nestled in the woods, with tree forts and junglegyms that fit seamlessly into the natural surroundings, where everyone knew everyone and the children were the center of the universe. In a place like that I could pretend that I was still homeschooling, and this was just one of the many resources of which we took advantage. That was a nice little story and then it came time to decide something for real. To register for kindergarten or to write our homeschooling letter. We flirted with the idea of sending him to this wonderful private school that was so progressive and expensive that they called themselves a farm. That was a short-lived dream. So, it came down to the good old neighborhood school which we walked to weekly in order to use the playground, or homeschooling.

so, what do you do?

I'm running a little experiment here. I've decided that while the glowing box babysits, I will pretend, for that half an hour that I would normally spend doing dishes or laundry, that I am actually a writer. Dum-dee-dum... I am a writer, and I am doing very important work here at my desk. Really. If I do this everyday, and gradually increase the amount of time as circumstances allow, then I can continue to call myself a writer, even if I am never published again. Surely if I keep this up I will eventually produce something of note; something I can point to and say, "See, I told you I was a writer."

It is becoming clear that my problem is not so much that I don't have time to write, which is true, but more that I don't make time to write. I don't take that time out of my day because it isn't a priority. It isn't a priority because I don't take myself seriously as a writer. I don't take myself seriously as a writer because I do not write. I do not write because I do not have time to write. I don't have time to write because I don't make time to write. The whole thing, spellled out as it is here, is quite pathetic.

I've been thinking a lot about what Mike said, and I wonder if it really is about the urge, the necessity to write. What if that is the missing piece for me; the thing that makes me not really a writer, but simply someone who enjoys writing? And would that be so terrible a thing? I like to pretend I'm something I'm not, but I don't feel a need to call myself an actor. Why must it be tied to my identity?

Well, I think some of it has to do with how I'd like to see myself as opposed to how I really see myself. Like, I want to be a writer. I admire writers. I admire all artists, but I have a special affinity for the writer. I understand that type of artistry that is creative, but still too tied to the intellect to truly transcend this earth, and therein lies the torment that is necessary for any really good art. I can dig it. The other part of it must be tied to my sense of who I am in actuality. I think that the more entrenched in motherhood I became, the more desperately I clung to that other thing.

"So, what do you do?"
"Oh, I'm a writer," and then, as an afterthought, as if it were possible to be an afterthought, "and I stay at home with my kids."

What is it about being a— do I dare to say it? yes, I do— Stay-At-Home Mother that makes me feel ill at ease? I don't feel uncomfortable while I'm doing it, except for those times when there is a tiny finger up my nose, or thirty pounds on my back, or a seemingly interminable shrieking in my ear. And even those aren't as bad as they sound, well, at least, much more tolerable than they sound. It's just when I say it out loud, which I don't, ever. You see, normally, I find comfort in labels. What is not to love about a nice, neatly lettered sticker that tells me exactly where something fits in, like the files in my box or the cans in my cupboard. When everything is where it should be, then I can relax. Only, I don't really want to fit in. In actuality, I require a bit more freedom than that.

When people think I'm a writer, they want to talk to me. When they think I'm a stay-at-home mom, they assume I don't have anything to say. I am reminded of how little we value children. That is really what it comes down to. I remember this from working in childcare. There is very little pay, and very little respect. I was a college student, and was therefore treated a little better because I was going on to do more important things eventually. We think of this kind of work as not really working at all. It's not professional work; basically unskilled labor. In fact, can it really be called work if there is no money involved? And it's not like I'm saving the world. No, just shaping the new one. The thought that my life would have seemingly more value if I went to work everyday and sent my children to be cared for by someone else, is baffling to me. I might be more at ease with that label, but I wouldn't be comfortable.

I have to remind myself that I choose this life. Everyday, I, we, make sacrifices so that our children can have this. So that they can have this foundation, which I feel is essential to who they are. I'm lucky I get to choose. So, really, what's a little identity theft when all of that is taken into consideration?

Sol on Dr. King

a long time ago there were signs on the water fountains, and if it said "Whites" then only people with white-colored skin could use it. And because I have brown skin I wouldn't be able to use it if I was in that time. But Martin Luther King, Jr. talked to all those people and now it's not like that anymore. And also, did you know that only men with white-colored skin used to be able to vote? And that wasn't fair. And now, Mama, you voted, see?

This led into a discussion about how not too long ago it was against the law for "people with white-colored skin" and "people with brown skin" to get married. I could see his mind putting pieces together. That was about Mama, and Daddy.That was about him. His brow furrowed and he puffed out his chest a little.

Well, if I was in that time I would just stand up in front of a hundred people and tell them that is not fair! I would stand up there with Martin Luther King, Jr. and tell all those people that law is wrong!

I believe he would, too.

That may have been our first discussion about race. It was definitely the first time that Sol talked about himself in terms of race. He's talked about his skin coloring before, and how it more closely matches mine than that of his father, but he's never talked about it in terms of connecting him with a certain group of people, and/or differentiating himself from a group of people. I don't know if all that was going on in his head, but his words seemed to convey that on some level, a new way of thinking about himself in the context of the rest of the world is emerging.

Am I prepared for this? Right now, I'm doing what I tend to do with most things concerning Sol, and that is to stay close but give him room to do it for himself. He sees that I'm there, but standing back just far enough to allow him that feeling of independence and control that he so requires. I read in this book, I'm Chocolate, You're Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race Conscious World, (which I didn't finish in part because the title kept throwing me off) that it isn't until grade school that children even begin to have a concept of race. And even then it is a very rudimentary understanding. I think probably something like what Sol expressed. Hmm... After reading some reviews just now, I'm inspired to go back and give the book a serious read, if for no other reason than to be able to actually recommend it or not. I came across this book while searching and I think I'll check it out as well. (From my library or local independent bookseller, of course.)

What amazes me is how completely solid in his identity Sol is. How confident and secure and just together. Luna, too, although they express it in such different ways. It makes me wonder, are they somehow special, or do we all start out that way and then, as we grow, begin to fall apart?