Hard Questions

     As I look at the many titles strewn across the coffee table about slavery and civil rights, I wonder how far we have come. I try to explain to my children what it meant to be owned, to be told where to sit, where to eat, to be told you were not, by nature, good enough. I tell them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was preaching and marching and changing our world while their grandmothers were in high school. This is an impossibility to them, that this part of our history could be so recent. They ask questions, not understanding the word “black” as it is used in some of the books, ask why there is only “black” and “white” when they see so many different colors. Some of their questions I can answer, some I can’t. The hardest question: “do people still feel that way?” “Some, unfortunately,” is the truth I tell them with longing that I could give them a different answer. I know the answer they want would be a lie, and I cannot tell it.

     My favorite question, though, and the one that gives me the most hope for the future on this eve of celebrating a man who changed the world, “how did people know whether someone was black or white?”  I love that I have no answer.

Hard Questions

     As I look at the many titles strewn across the coffee table about slavery and civil rights, I wonder how far we have come. I try to explain to my children what it meant to be owned, to be told where to sit, where to eat, to be told you were not, by nature, good enough. I tell them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was preaching and marching and changing our world while their grandmothers were in high school. This is an impossibility to them, that this part of our history could be so recent. They ask questions, not understanding the word “black” as it is used in some of the books, ask why there is only “black” and “white” when they see so many different colors. Some of their questions I can answer, some I can’t. The hardest question: “do people still feel that way?” “Some, unfortunately,” is the truth I tell them with longing that I could give them a different answer. I know the answer they want would be a lie, and I cannot tell it.

     My favorite question, though, and the one that gives me the most hope for the future on this eve of celebrating a man who changed the world, “how did people know whether someone was black or white?”  I love that I have no answer.

The Waiting Place

     Anybody who has read, Oh the Places You’ll Go which, I know for sure, is everyone my mom has ever given a graduation present to, has probably come to fear The Waiting Place. That anomalous page of the book shows what looks like people from Soviet-era Moscow waiting in a breadline, depressingly aware that they will not get any again today. I have seen that place in my nightmares; me sitting around, projectlessly twiddling my thumbs. I have fought long and hard against the Waiting place, preferring always to push on, push through even when I know it might not be the smartest or safest idea. Alternately closing eyes on a road trip to push on for a few more miles, check. Not stopping to put the paint lid back on so I can finish painting a bureau, check. As Dr. Seuss made clear, the waiting place was not for me.

     I am starting down the road to a realization, though, that maybe the waiting place is for me, at least sometimes. Maybe ripping up the carpet a week before Christmas is a bad plan, and maybe pushing that denim through the sewing machine despite the smoke coming out was also a bad plan. Maybe, just maybe, waiting would have been a better choice for both of those projects. Maybe waiting isn’t quite as bad as the fantastical Seuss has made it out to be. Maybe waiting gives us time to think, to reflect, to figure out what it is we really want, who it is we are. Maybe we’re waiting because the universe has not devised a plan yet, or maybe we’re waiting because our own plan is lacking. Either way, I think, on my way to 40, it might be time to accept that sometimes the waiting place is not a dreadful departure from forging on, but a necessary part of life. Everything cannot be now; paths cannot be laid out unceasingly. So, here I wait, at the crossroads, hoping to accept that the crossroads, too, are part of the endless journey. Happy waiting…

Gift horses

     Today, I have been given three beaded bracelets, one picture of a rainbow, help with moving heavy furniture from small hands and a copy of a New Year’s poem written by an eight year old where “future” is spelled “fucher,” (go ahead and try; it defies any non-expletive pronunciation.) I count these gifts and wonder how, at the end of the day, I could feel so tired, push so hard for bedtime to happen quickly, read one less book than requested and feel myself being spread so thin, stretched to the point of breaking.  How could I feel so relieved at being able to get on pinterest for a few minutes without someone needing a snack, needing to get wiped; needing, really, a small piece of me.

     Today, I have not been given more hours in a day than yesterday, more mental and physical energy or less on my to-do list. In this wonderful thing I like to call semi-large family living, I don’t think those things will be given to me any time soon. However, where I put that energy and how I spend those hours is up to me, every day. I can choose to listen to a seemingly endless but clearly important diatribe on eleven year old relationships, I can choose to sit in wonder at our poet-in-resident and her capacity for expressing emotions, I can choose to throw snowballs at their fort walls, and sometimes, I can and do choose to organize that shelf that has been irritating me forever, or read the new National Geographic for ten minutes with the door closed.

     In the last few days, my oldest has been watching home videos. In one of them, my now five year old was not quite 3. She was sitting on the floor of her room playing with a toy cell phone and putting her baby in a basket. Her hair was almost non-existent and she was lost in her imaginary world. I’m so glad I took the time to capture that moment, because that little girl has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable in two years. I had almost forgotten those quiet times on the floor and the sound of her voice, so soft and malleable. I have read heartwrenching quotes about how quickly children grow since my oldest was a newborn, but there is nothing like the passage of time in your childrens' faces that will make you feel it in every inch of your being.  In addition to my much more practical and mundane resolutions at the start of this year, I have made another, more important one. I will not look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when those horses come bearing gifts they have made with their hands and hearts, because I am still, to them, their favorite person. I will still organize shelves and I will still have to clean the living room, but I will make sure I look in their eyes and accept what they give with love, because that is the spirit in which they were given.

Three weeks in and we need some new spoons...

    
     In the last three weeks, we have been to the library no less than 8 times. In the last three weeks, my two oldest children built a desk out of scrapwood for their younger sister by themselves. In the last three weeks, we picked apples on our break, made a giant color wheel out of magazine scraps under the trees in our yard and learned that mother octopuses take care of their eggs exclusively for six months, and then when those eggs hatch, crawl out of their holes and die.  In the last three weeks, we have rediscovered Bill Nye the science guy, wondered what exactly happened to the Neanderthals and made molecules out of marshmallows and toothpicks. Some of us learned how to spell archaeology, and some of us didn't. One of us even got told to stop checking work with "90's math." (That someone was me.) Two of us had a writing debate in a journal, three of us learned what abstract nouns are, five of us learned a fun rap about the continents that rhymed "Antarctica" with "back to the start-ica." (Thank you, youtube.) In addition to all of these things, one of us got slightly alarmed when we separated out carbon and hydrogen from a spoonful of sugar over a flame wondering if people might think our house was becoming a center of heroine production.
     These last three weeks have been the start of a new adventure in our lives endearingly entitled "homeschooling." So far, I have to say with all honesty, we love it. Since we made the decision, way back in January, so many people have asked why we were choosing this road and I have been hard pressed to answer them succinctly. And here is why...
     Firstly, we have a fantastic public school in our town, one which I have been happy to send my children to for the last five years. Not only were my children doing well academically, but I feel we were supported as a family and whenever we had an issue, it was addressed quickly and thoroughly. We did not choose homeschooling because of opposition to any current teaching standards.  I did not feel pressure to buy my kids the latest clothes or gadgets simply because some of their friends at school had them. I did not pull them out because of a lack of prayer in public schools, opposition to the flag salute or fanatical gym teachers. (Our school has two very lovely ones. )So, why then?
     Pace, time together, a little bit more freedom in our days, and the ability to focus on the amazing world around us as a family. I am looking at this year as a gift, one that we are giving to ourselves to see what we can achieve together. I do not know, yet, what will happen next year or how we will feel at the end of a full year of homeschooling, but I do know this. I will never regret trying something new, stepping back for a while and taking this time as a family. And maybe that, too, is one of the things our children will learn and come to value this year.

Marriage on and off the rocks

     In marriage, we are all geologists. We always know which stones are the heaviest, which are the ones which will shatter the most upon contact, break into a million tiny precedented bitternesses. We stand behind our fortresses, hurling with all our might and wonder at the destruction. Our partner in life and this slow war of attrition, hides down behind their bunker and we throw harder. Or, they come up standing, risking blow after blow to throw their own stones, the ones they know will hurt the most, have the longest history of damage done.

     But what if we could put down those stones? What if, when we empty our pockets and the deepest recesses of our lesser selves, we unburden not only our partner, but lighten our own load. What if we come out from behind our cairns and meet in the middle, leaving behind our past and step toward the future with empty pockets, hearts clean of scar tissue.

    The person on the other side of that bunker is your own personal geologist because they have seen the depths of you; they know the fires in which you were forged, the stuff of which you are made. And they’re still there, standing on the strata of previous battles. They’re still there. And what a beautiful thing to walk away from the carnage, hand in hand and pockets turned inside out with nothing left but hope.

A Day in the Life of Claire: A Biography in Real Time

     Today, as I was yelling up the stairs for my small people, once again, to come down and get bundled up, I started thinking about how my kids see our day from their side, especially our perennially turtle-ish older daughter. She is often wandering in the vastness of her own mind, writing songs and creating little worlds of her own on every available surface of her room. I think it would be absolutely fascinating to read her ongoing biography from an omniscient point of view, to delve deeply and at length into what she is thinking while the rest of our lives happen around her. Because I’m a writer (or trying to be) and no salient point or poignant vignette springs to mind for today, I have given myself license to begin her biography…

                                                  A Day in the Life of Claire; a biography in real time

                                                                      Chapter One

     Claire had a messy room but a very neat dream life. Her bedside table had a setup, (it always did), with folded tissues for beds, empty Altoids boxes for mini-rooms and books for risers, dividers and sometimes even for reading. She had plenty of Scotch tape in her desk, and many glue sticks as well (one never knew when things needed to be connected artificially after all.) She had a habit of shoving many different things under her bed at once and then announcing that it was clean, which it was, to anyone who didn’t bother looking under the long drape of her comforter.

     We find our protagonist on this particularly cold winter day lying on this same comforter, thumb in her mouth and two fingers tracing circles on her earlobe. She was, as usual, supposed to be doing something else. She stared up at the ceiling lost in thought as words floated by her; words like, “get dressed,” and “brush your teeth,” and “What are you doing up there?” Although she could hear these words, she wondered why someone would bother repeating anything so unnecessary. She did, after all, get dressed and brush her teeth every morning, eventually. Slowly, her mind shifted back to the epic story she was writing in her head that would be set to music, much like “Peter and the Wolf.” It didn’t bother our young hero that she did not know either how to write music or how to play any specific instrument yet. These minor inconveniences were easily overcome with some imagination, and that she had in spades.

     Much to her dismay and the interruption of her reverie, her mom showed up and insisted on her actually enacting some of the requests that had floated up the stairs to her. After brushing her teeth, she wandered back to her room and proceeded to stand with only undies on for a full five minutes in front of her closet door. Her thumb in her mouth and her head angled to the side so as to be able to get the perfect position for standing ear rub, she contemplated her epic, and then also wondered why the moon had been so bright last night. Questions swam through her mind; “was the moon that bright in China as well last night? Can my friend Hannah see the same moon where she is?” Her questions led her to her bookcase, where she pulled out a book she knew she would need at some point and so had rescued from Goodwill. Still clad only in undies, she sat on the floor of her room reading about the moon, pausing every couple of minutes to suck her thumb and rub her ear, or as she would later learn to call it “philosophizing.”

     She heard irritation in the footsteps on their way up the stairs to her so she quickly put the book back and opened a drawer in an earnest attempt to stick to the schedule, or at least look like she was sticking to the schedule. Her mom walked by and peered in with raised eyebrows for good measure and then wandered off to hurry some other dawdler along. Finally dressed, she headed down the stairs to confront the barely controlled chaos of packing lunches, assembly line style and the inevitable craze that comes with the last five minutes before heading to school.  This world was a loud one, much busier and less contemplative than the one she had just left in the comfort of her own room and mind. Nevertheless, our brave hero forged on, stepping into voluminous snow pants, a jacket, hat and mittens steadily but oh so slowly. The last one of all her siblings to the car, she heard an exasperated sigh from the front seat as she stepped over mountains of backpacks and legs to find a seat.

More to come…