Being Welcoming and Affirming is Always Age-Appropriate

Walking up a snowy hill today after a group sledding outing, I was talking with an Episcopalian friend about her church, and about why many former Catholics I know can no longer stomach the Catholic Church but find the Episcopal Church a welcoming alternative. Bridger was walking alongside us, listening, and he asked why some people were leaving the Catholic Church. I leaned down and told him the first thing that came into my head on the fly: "Well, historically the Catholic Church has hurt and mistreated a lot of people, like gays and lesbians."

"Oh," said Bridger. Temporarily satisfied with that answer, he moved on to the business of scooping up some snow to eat.

"Do your kids understand about gays and lesbians?" my friend asked me in an undertone.

"Well, I don't know how much they understand, but it's something we talk about. I mean, we have so many gay and lesbian and bi friends and relatives, it can't help but come up. It's just part of life," I told her.

My friend shared some of the struggle within her church over what being "open and affirming" means, and how far it should go. Some congregants question whether they should be openly affirming homosexuality in front of the children. Is it age-appropriate? Will it confuse the kids?

Here's what I believe, and what I told my friend today.

What I believe is that kids need to hear open and affirming messages about sexuality, hetero and homo, much earlier than we may realize. In the memoirs of writers like Paul Monette, Mark Doty, and my old teachers Barrie Jean Borich and Elizabeth J. Andrew, in the stories of my GLBT loved ones, I hear how our culture's pained, uncomfortable silences around sexual "difference" cause so much hurt and confusion. We shouldn't shove sexual subjects in kids' faces, obviously, or willfully expose them to images or words that are way too mature for them to handle. But I think there is a way to tactfully, appropriately set a tone of acceptance very early--before children start to form negative stereotypes about others or to draw conclusions about themselves that they're too embarrassed or afraid to talk about with their grown-ups.

The first time a friend of mine had "the talk" with her young daughter, she explained about sexual feelings, "Most of the time, men feel those kinds of feelings for women, and women feel those kinds of feelings for men. But sometimes men feel that way toward men, and women feel those feelings for other women, and that's OK and normal, too."

Nothing especially explicit. Nothing inappropriate for the curious five-year-old her daughter was.

Her daughter beamed. "Mom," she said, "you're the greatest."

It's never too early for that kind of conversation, as far as I'm concerned. It's the kind of message that I think could provide a girl who wonders why she's more crushed out on the girl next door than the boy a huge measure of reassurance and relief--a message that could help her get on with the business of fearlessly being herself. It's the kind of message that might help a kid stop and think before he calls a buddy "faggot" as an insult. What my friend said is just the right thing to say, no more, no less, and I think the more churches that get in the business of saying it, loud, often, and with great joy, the better.

In the car on the way home, Bridger, Cass, and I talked a little more about what my friend and I had been discussing on our way up the hill. I talked about how some religions have taught that it's bad to be gay, even though homosexuality is just a part of people that they're born with, like their skin tone, their eye color, their hair texture, their voice. I talked about how those sorts of teachings have led to people losing their jobs because they're gay, not being able to bring their loved ones home to family gatherings, just plain not being able to tell the truth about who they are.

There are people I know and love--and many others I don't know, of course--who live in a state of legal, civil, and cultural uncertainty and ambiguity when it comes to their families. They do not have the safety nets and rights that straight people take for granted. There are people who have been married for decades even if the state of Minnesota does not legally recognize those unions as marriage.

What's indecent isn't talking about homosexuality in church. Heavens, no. It's that people like me do so little about an injustice we can see so clearly right in front of us.

Time to Take It Easy on Documenting My Family's Every Move

Well, there's nothing like staying up too late writing blog posts that highlight my more gentle, kindly parenting moments to turn me into an under-rested grump by the end of the week. Makes me feel a wee bit fraudulent.

But today was mostly another good one. We went to a paper snowflake-making crafting day at a friend's house with about a half-dozen other families, and it was wild, good fun. Topped off with stone soup for lunch, brimming with vegetables and beans and noodles we'd all contributed, it was the kind of day that makes me feel a lot less lonely and a hell of a lot more connected. What a great group of women--so thoughtful, honest, and funny. I feel amazed at my good fortune to count them as my friends. The kids had a blast making snowflakes and jumping around like monkeys in the basement play room while I snatched at bits of adult conversation where I could grab them amidst the happy chaos.

Tonight, though, it's early to bed so there's a whole lot less tired mom eye-rolling, door-slamming, and teeth-gritting around here tomorrow. Because after all, tomorrow is my birthday, and dang it, I'm going to have fun.

What Do You DO All Day?

9:15 am Wake up later than I like to, with the kids cuddled up to me in my bed, Brian already off to work. I had insomnia last night, so I must have needed the sleep, I figure. Glad I have a lifestyle that allows me extra sleep when I need it, but I suspect sleeping late could throw off the whole day's rhythm if I let it. I decide I'll try to approach it as an opportunity for what Ann Lahrson-Fisher calls "joyful disruption" in her book Fundamentals of Homeschooling. Discover a wet spot on Cass's side of my bed. Wake everybody up and get vinegar on the wet spot to neutralize the pee smell.

9:30 B. tries to look at one of Cassidy's First Ladies library books. She protests that that book is HERS. After a fair amount of tussling, we negotiate and decide to look at the book together. Read about the first dozen or so first ladies while munching dry cereal in Cassidy's (dry) bed.

10:00 Breakfast. Bridger gives Cassidy a Lego alien villain he's made and a small gold bar to go with it as an early Christmas and late birthday present.

10:15 Bridger and Cass play a story with Legos figures while I drink my coffee and prepare materials for a paper Santa Lucia crown Cassidy wants to make.

11:45 Play Stratego with B. while simultaneously helping Cass glue together pieces of her Santa Lucia crown. Work to stay relaxed about doing very different tasks at once and try to help B. stay relaxed and patient when I have to take frequent breaks from the game to glue and cut.

12:15 Came from behind and beat B. at Stratego in a surprise upset, just when he thought he had it made. He is crushed and swears he'll never play a game of any kind with me ever again. I feel intensely glad I just started re-reading Naomi Aldort's Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves to fortify myself for my mom's upcoming visit, and consequently I don't feel AS strong a desire as usual to give Bridger a big unwanted pep talk about the value of losing as a learning experience--a sentiment I show a distinct inability to apply easily or painlessly in my own life. "I'll never be in such a good position again!" B. laments. "I had the most powerful person on the board and I should have been able to wipe you out." I can understand why he's crying. None of us wants to think we can get beaten like that, just when we believe we're guaranteed to win.

12:30 Leave Bridger in his room to grieve a little more in private. Play the game Hullabaloo with Cassidy in our sunny attic, just cleaned up yesterday by me. Feel a rush of gratitude for this sunny, open space with its view into the top branches of our boulevard ash tree. Feel another rush of gratitude when Bridger joins us in the game and even smiles and laughs.

12: 45 A finger-food lunch upstairs while the three of us try to play Earthopoly together. It's too nice up here to break the momentum to come down for lunch. The Earthopoly game goes surprisingly well, with Cass tracking with the gist of it with a lot of help from Bridger and me. Bridger plays banker to free me up to coach Cass.

2:00 Quiet time--so to speak. Bridger retreats to his room to listen to a book-on-CD for an hour or so. While I clean the living room, our top clutter zone, Cassidy pretends I'm Cinderella and she's a stepsister ordering me around while I sweep. Then, once I go to the ball, she says, "Now I want to be Cinderella," and I become a stepsister. At times I feel myself getting edgy and thinking longingly of what it would be like to clean house without a constant stream-of-consciousness monologue from Cass. Then I imagine how I'll probably look back nostalgically on this very kind of moment. Then Bridger comes down and things shift again.

3:00 Kids messing around with watching home videos of our family on the computer. I get a call from a fellow library advocate and neighbor, one of the people I respect most in the world. We strategize a little about the library, and she asks how I'm doing after a presentation I made to the library board, which I wrote about here. I decompress about my regrets about the presentation and the things I think I've learned from my missteps. She listens thoughtfully, then says slowly and with great care, "I think sometimes our egos get in our way at the very places we could have great power." I take what she says two ways: one, that my egotistic pleasure in having a soapbox about the library issue and fancying myself a "community leader" can get in the way of me seeing the truth and being as effective as I could be in serving the library, which I think is absolutely true; and two, that my insecurity and fixation on my own mistakes can block me from fully accessing my power to create, construct, and connect.

I feel as if a warm, slow-burning fire has been lit in my chest. I feel healed and at the same time challenged to get over myself and get to work.

3:30 Not wanting to slow down the big cleaning momentum I had going earlier (and because we're going to a friend's house tomorrow morning, making it impossible to do our usual Friday morning DVD routine), I ask the kids if they'd like to watch their movie o' the week today instead of tomorrow. Uh, duh. Of course they say yes. I pop some popcorn and they settle in with some Curious George. I hear lots of laughter as I clean, then finally run out of steam and join them for the last half-hour or so. Good stuff about metamorphosis, deductive reasoning, seeds, and genuinely endearing and funny. I'm impressed.

5:15 The witching hour. Bridger asks Cassidy where the gold Lego bar he gave her this morning is. She doesn't know. He wails and cries and moans and tells her he'll never trust her with anything important ever again. I almost succeed in refraining from lecturing him, but not quite--I do have to get in a little mini-lecture. "It's a little piece of plastic, and you didn't tell her, 'Make sure you keep track of this Lego at all times.' Next time you give someone something, make sure you are clear about what your expectations about the gift are and let them know, too." Uh-huh. Are most adults even capable of this kind of clarity around gift-giving? I'm sure as hell not.

Bridger and Cassidy work together to try to find the gold piece, a missing pair of Lego handcuffs, and a green laser. I start getting ready for dinner.

5:45 Bridger sets the table, belting out "I Will Work With Joy," a song I've been known to warble through chores, from the book Seven Times the Sun. One verse goes, "Persistence and pride, creation unfolds,/As I work hard to reach my goals." Bridger sings it, "As I work hard to reach Mom's goals." I have to laugh at how damn perceptive he is.

Then Bridger starts chanting, "Cassidy is on the fork side of me, Cassidy is on the fork side of me," his mnemonic device for remembering silverware placement. "That's mean!" Cassidy howls, apparently thinking he's making fun of her somehow. Bridger continues to sing the offending song. Cassidy continues to howl. Finally, I ask him, "If Cass was singing a song that really got on your nerves, and you asked her to stop, what would you want her to do?" He stops singing, and task done, darts into the living room without answering. At least not directly.

6:00 We sit down for an early dinner before Bri gets home, because I have a meeting tonight. The kids are chatty and silly and loud. Brian walks in the back door to the kitchen just as we're tucking into our lentil burgers and sweet potato fries. He sits down and does a mock (?) shell-shocked look at me across the table at the level of noise and incoherence at the table.

6:15 Finished with dinner, Bridger and Cass go in the living room and start fighting over the one blanket on the couch. "I'm cold!" "But I'm colder!" I suggest they go get another blanket from upstairs or figure out a deal for how to share it, then walk away, which is very hard for me to do. I always worry they'll come to blows. The next time I peek in, they're snuggling under the blanket together on the living room floor, laughing.

6:30 I walk to a meeting at our neighborhood library and sit around a table with eight awesome women, including the neighbor I talked to on the phone earlier who helped me so much. We laugh, kid around about our fundraising goals (we'd like to start with a country spa retreat for us, then go from there to make the world a better place). We dream about how to help our library stay open. This is my nerdy idea of a pretty dang good time.

8:30 I get home. The kids are in their jammies, having a bedtime snack at the kitchen table. Cassidy tells me, "I took a bath, and Daddy read Richard Scarry to me."

"What heaven!" I say. "Being read to in the bathtub!"

Cass agreed. "I have a lucky life," she agreed.

9ish The kids and I read part of a beautiful picture book by Diane Stanley about Michelangelo, then Brian tells them a "lights-out story" in the dark. Brian leaves, and I go in for the ceremonial bedtime cuddling in Cassidy's bed before they fall asleep together there. We say our modified, Zen-flavored version of St. Francis's "Instrument of Peace" prayer. One of the lines is "May I seek to understand, even more than I seek to be understood." Bridger mutters under his breath, "May I seek to understand, even more than I seek to annoy."

Here's my prayer, silently offered up as my children drift into sleep: May our luck hold a little longer. Or, may we learn to keep finding joy, even when an attack we didn't see coming takes us by surprise, just when we thought we were home free.

A Few of The Things We're Learning These Days

Well, the above moment surely warmed my heart and assuaged some of my Waldorf guilt, a malady beautifully described by fellow blogger Patricia Zaballos. Bridger wanted to make an ornament for our Christmas tree, and even though we were running late for an errand and I knew it was going to take us a good half-hour to get on the winter gear, how could I resist his sudden desire to be crafty, a desire he almost never evidences? I showed him how to make one of these nifty felted wool wreaths, and he went to town, his first-ever sewing experience. You could have knocked me over.

His creative pursuits usually skew more towards the Lego end of things. He took a Lego Dragsters and Monster Trucks class at the Science Museum with his dad last weekend and built some very cool vehicles and learned some physics along the way. And then when he came home, he immediately sat down and built. . . more things with Legos.



He's also teaching himself to read, slowly but surely. He started with a series of "Now I'm Reading" books that were very basic, but lately he's been picking out whole sentences in his Lego Club magazine and in picture books I'm reading to the kids. It's so fun to see his excitement and pride when the puzzle pieces come together to form a coherent, meaningful whole. He also finally whipped my butt good at Stratego, a board game we found at a thrift store that I'd beaten him at over and over again, to his great annoyance and frustration. Today he had me cornered so beautifully my heart was literally racing--and I don't think I could possibly have enjoyed a victory of my own more than I enjoyed his.

The other fun development is his increasing mathematical confidence. The other night after he'd gone to bed, I was taking a nice candle-lit bath. He knocked on the door, came in, and asked, "Does 150 X 20 equal 3000?" I had to think about it for a minute--it's hard for me to do equations like that without a pencil and paper--but I realized that, yes, 150 X 20 did equal 3000.

"How did you figure that out?" I asked him.

"Well, I know that 100 X 20=2000, and 50 X 20=1000, so I just put them together," he said.

I love that he is lying awake at night, doing math equations in his head, learning to juggle numbers in his own unique but effective way.

Cassidy learned to finger-knit this week (another strike against my own Waldorf guilt!) and sewed a felted ornament, too. Inspired by Ed Emberley's great drawing books, she and I have been working on a giant picture of a made-up faraway land, complete with a skeleton who wants to marry a serving maid, a circus wagon, a swirling storm, and a purple castle.

She is also showing a serious bent toward women's studies ("Are there any girls in this book?" and "Why aren't there more women?" are her constant questions), and is becoming an avid letter writer, with a lot of help from me as she learns to form the letters and numbers. Her interest in writing letters started after she wrote a lot of thank-you notes after her birthday and got back truly enthusiastic responses from her grandma and her aunt. Then, a few weeks ago, her interest in correspondence and feminism came together when she noticed that the author of the Magic Treehouse books almost always has the main characters, Jack and Annie, go back in time to help male historical figures, not women. So she decided to write a letter to Mary Pope Osborne, the author, asking her to please include more female historical figures. Wouldn't it be cool if she actually got a reply? If the writer actually wrote about some kick-ass historical women?

She's currently gotten interested in First Ladies, who not only had great wardrobes but also have some pretty compelling stories. Right now her favorite is Dolley Madison, who was so beloved for her kindness and generous personality that she actually got away with dipping snuff and wearing outlandish turbans bedecked with ostrich feathers. During the War of 1812, Dolley saved a famous portrait of George Washington and important government papers right before the British burned the President's Mansion--and right after the 100 soldiers assigned to guard the presidential residence had fled in terror.

After a steady diet of Barbie as Mariposa, I am happy to be reading about this kind of heroine, let me tell you.

So that's just a little of what we're learning right now. We putter through our days seemingly doing very little, yet when I write all this down, I'm reassured to see how much the kids and I are learning together.

Our Hybrid Holidays

It's snowing here today, we've had Christmas songs by Tony Bennett and Aretha Franklin and Sinatra on heavy rotation, and the tree's up, hung with ornaments that bring back so many memories--the striped stocking a childhood friend gave me 33 years ago (!); the craft foam dove and the jingle bells cut from old egg cartons from our next-door neighbors; the paper gingerbread men Bridger made at ECFE when he was three; the finger-knit garlands I learned to make last year after many, many failed tries. A good Christmas tree tells all kinds of stories, about where you've been, the people you've known, and how you've changed.

We practice a rather spotty, hit-and-miss Buddhist-Christian-pagan fusion spirituality around here, so putting up the Christmas tree coincides with the week-long celebration of Rohatsu, Buddha's enlightenment. Inspired by Katharine Krueger, the dynamically wonderful director of children's practice at our Zen center, we made a little scene of Buddha meditating under the bodhi tree at our house, with a clay Buddha sitting on a Lego meditation cushion, attended by Lego figures standing in for Svasti and Sujata, children who helped the Buddha while he sat under the bodhi tree by bringing him milk porridge to eat and grass for a soft place to sit.



Every day this week, the kids and I brought milk to the little Buddha figure, as the girl Sujata is said to have done (except for the morning or two we forgot--sorry, hungry little Buddha!). We talked about how people here in St. Paul and all around the world were sitting weeklong silent meditation retreats in Buddha's honor. One day we enacted the legend of the demonic Mara trying to sway the Buddha from his concentration. Cassidy draped herself in silk scarves and danced in front of the Buddha to try to distract him with her beauty, like the dancing girls Mara conjured up. Bridger built Lego cannons and fired them at the Buddha. And I pulled out the most powerful weapon of all--shame. "You think you can understand the truth? What an arrogant fool you are! You might as well give up! You'll never succeed!" But Buddha kept sitting.

Today, December 8, is traditionally celebrated as the day the Buddha became enlightened. He touched the earth with one hand and declared that together with all beings, he had found the truth and was free. That's the part I love--all of us are included.

The legend is that the Buddha's first "sermon" was to the children who had helped him and their friends, and what he taught was how to eat a tangerine mindfully. You can find a nice version of the story here. After telling a much-abbreviated version of this story, the kids and I got out a Satsuma mandarin, peeled it, divided it up, and ate our slices together in silence, an activity they've already been introduced to at the Zen center. We tried to pay attention to the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the look and feel of the mandarin. We noticed that we were much more aware of the weight and shape of the fruit on our tongue than we normally are. Usually we immediately bite the fruit, chew it up, and swallow before we've really even tasted what's in our mouths (a metaphor for how I often live my life, I have to say). Bridger, who isn't usually a fan of oranges, said he actually liked the orange when he ate it that way.

I am trying, this holiday season, to remember to slow down, do less, buy less, and find opportunities to express love in small but meaningful ways. To take time to show Cassidy how to use a big embroidery needle to sew together felt squares for a fabric wreath instead of trolling for one more gift we don't need online. To bake my traditional "so-you've-had-a-baby" veggie lasagne for a neighbor who's just had her third child. To stop myself before I give the kids "a horrible lecture" when I'm displeased with them, as Bridger put it yesterday, and find a way to communicate with more kindness and less criticism.

My father died when I was twelve, and for many years after his death, Christmas was a really hard time of year for me and my mom and sister. It didn't help that my birthday falls on December 12, so close to Christmas and finals week in school that I often felt deprived and gypped.

It's actually only in the last few years, spurred by my kids, that I'm finding joy and abundance in this time of year. I'm coming around to the idea that lighting candles and stringing up Christmas lights at this dark time is one of the oldest and most beautiful of human gestures.

Lately the kids have been asking for more stories about my father. I tell them about how he used to answer the door like Lurch on the Addams Family, intoning "You rang?" I tell them about how he once dreamed a burglar was climbing in his bedroom window and knocked himself out cold against the wall charging the intruder in his mind. I tell them about how he liked to click his heels in parking lots, how he cried when we had to give away our crazy cocker spaniel Honey when I was four.

"It's too bad your father never knew about Bridger and me," Cassidy said to me this morning.

I agreed. But maybe, I told her, he did know about them. After all, it's a big mystery what happens to us after we die. No one really knows for sure.

"Maybe God whispered about us in your dad's ear, and he saw an angel who looked like me," Cassidy said.

It's moments like this that make me so grateful, I could just about levitate.

Mistakes, Part 2

If you talk with me for very long, I will probably find a way to work my neighborhood library, the Hamline Midway Branch in St. Paul, into the conversation. As my friend Danna once explained to another friend who didn't know the extent of my library love, "She's totally obsessed with the Hamline Midway Library." I think she meant that affectionately.

If you've been reading this blog all along, you know that early this year, our mayor proposed closing our 80-year-old neighborhood branch in response to the city's budget crunch. Along with many of my neighbors, I found myself compelled to get involved in fighting for the library. The good part is that all the community effort led to the library being spared, at least for 2010--but the work of preserving the library is really just beginning.

A few days ago, I was part of a presentation to the library board, which is actually just the city council with a different name. We were reporting on a task force that met this summer to try to find partnerships that might help the city save or make money on the library. My part of the presentation was to try to give the community side of things. If you have ever tried to speak for "your community," you know this is a rather hard thing to do. And ever since my presentation, I have been agonizing about the things I didn't say, the things I said that I wished I hadn't, and on and on and on. As my fellow neighborhood activist Julie GebbenGreen kindly told me, "It's scary to tell the truth to people in power. We really have to overcome a lot of 'how dare you speak like that to your betters' voices inside of us." I think it's important to remember that. It's part of what makes it hard for ordinary people to get and stay involved in politics.

What I regret most about my library presentation is that I said that the crux of the problem this year was that our leaders didn't appear to be listening to us and that they met our heartfelt concerns with sound bites. That's true, but what I wish I'd focused on more was this: when you close a library that's been in a neighborhood for generations, the damage you do will far outweigh any cost savings. I think I thought I didn't have to say that, that it's obvious. But it's important enough to bear repeating. I wish I would have spent more of my very limited time telling stories that show how people depend on having a walkable library. I wish I would have told them about the woman I met this year who had a stroke after her daughter's premature birth. Her husband lost a lot of hours of work caring for her and their daughter, and money was tight. She told me that being able to walk to the library (she couldn't drive after her stroke) was a crucial lifeline for her as she recovered from her stroke. She learned to read again reading library books to her daughter. That's the kind of story I wish I would have spent my time on, and it twists my guts up that I didn't. What a missed opportunity to connect people's stories to our leaders! But I didn't remember her story until after I'd done my talk.

I also wish I'd done a better job of acknowledging that many of the city council members I was talking to were really supportive of our community. I think I ended up venting some of my rage at the mayor at the wrong people, and I regret that. All those times I told my old writing students how important audience awareness is--and still I forgot once I was standing at that podium in the big intimidating council chambers.

I wrote follow-up notes to the city council members saying I wish I'd acknowledged their help and support more in my talk. The only response I've gotten so far, other than from my own councilman, was from our sole female councilmember.

She finished her email, "Ah, women. We are always thinking about the one tiny little thing we forgot (completely unintentionally) and ignoring all the other great things we got done." Those words from an experienced woman leader were absolute balm for my soul. And again, it's a good reminder of why it might be even more challenging for women to get involved in public life and stay at it for the long haul: we are so damn good at picking ourselves apart, the burnout potential is extremely high.

"Try again. Fail better." Those were playwright Samuel Beckett's writing instructions. Zen master Dogen called Zen practice "one continuous mistake." As I move out of my safe, private home life into public life, I'm making mistakes all the time. I hope to learn how to learn from them, fail better next time, and not agonize so much about it all in the meantime.

Mistakes

A few days ago Bridger was doing some equations in a math workbook. We're not doing math in a systematic, now-we're-going-to-sit-down-and-do-math way, but he had expressed interest in doing more math, so I'd picked the book up for him, along with a preschool math book for Cass which she tore through with relish.

Bridger realized he'd made a mistake on one of the equations, and because he was using crayon, he couldn't obliterate the offending error.

"That's it. I've ruined the whole page. I might as well rip it out and throw it in the trash," he said.

When he is so hard on himself about mistakes, it's hard for me to stay calm and relaxed, in part because I can so relate to that kind of either-or, all-or-nothing, it's-either-perfect-or-it's-shit thinking. I can see from my own experience that life is so much easier and more productive, so much more fun, when I can see mistakes as a natural part of any learning process, any life experience, really. I wish I could wave a magic wand and give him the perspective on mistakes I'm beginning to have at 40 so that he doesn't have to suffer through mistakes so much.

But deep down, I'm realizing that he's going to have to come to his own reckoning with imperfection. All I can do is hold him as compassionately as possible through his struggles and successes and try to remember to model healthy ways of dealing with mistakes (I am, after all, the woman who said the other day, "I feel like a dummy" when I realized I'd made a scheduling mistake that was going to inconvenience another person. And I said it in earshot of Bridger. Oops.).

When Bridger was feeling frustrated about the math book, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "You know, the whole point of doing equations in a math book like you're doing is that it gives you opportunities to make mistakes, and that's how you can learn. If you don't ever try them, you don't get the chances to make mistakes."

He didn't have any "A-ha!" moment that freed him from perfectionism forevermore. At least, I don't know if he did. As I once remarked to him, he and Cassidy are sort of like icebergs for me--I see only a small fraction of who they are, and so much of who they are is a hidden mystery. He did close the book without ripping out the page and throwing it in the trash, though.

It struck me later that if there's any gift our homeschooling choice offers our kids, it's that attitude, or at least my heartfelt attempt at that attitude: that mistakes can be opportunities for learning and growth. At school, I suspect, many good teachers try to welcome mistakes, but the pressure to see mistakes as road blocks to learning, as obstacles to be gotten around, as faults to be corrected, is systemically so great. The pressure to correct mistakes within a certain time frame makes it hard, too, to relax when mistakes come up.

I don't think homeschooling is perfect. I can't offer my kids a foreign-language immersion experience, or state-of-the-art science and art materials, or daily contact with lots of other children from a variety of backgrounds, or a feeling of being part of a school community. What I can offer is lots of reassurances, repeated over many years, that mistakes are not something we have to fear, but something we can learn, if we let ourselves, to welcome.

Oldies

When you have the flu like I've had the last few days and are trying to sleep in spite of aches and chills, it's not exactly welcome to have a tape loop of Judy Garland singing, "Clang, clang, clang, went the trolley, ding, ding, ding went the bell" running through your head. But that's what I get for watching "Meet Me in St. Louis" with the kids twice in one week.

I have loved old movies since I was a little girl, so it's been absolute heaven for me to share old movies with my kids. So far we've watched "Singin' in the Rain," "The Sound of Music," Charles Chaplin's "The Gold Rush" and "The Circus." Oh, and don't let me forget the 1930s, Errol Flynn version of "The Adventures of Robin Hood." I did have to repeatedly identify which guy was which in that one, as they all had mustaches and British accents, bad guys and good alike.

These movies give rise to so much discussion and in some cases further investigation. Who knew, for instance, that it used to be a Halloween custom for trick-or-treaters to throw flour in their neighbors' faces when they answered the door? I didn't, until we saw that ritual enacted in "Meet Me in St. Louis" and felt compelled by the weirdness of it to find out more.

To help the kids understand "The Sound of Music," I had to talk a little about who Nazis were and what a swastika was and why Captain von Trapp was so upset when someone hung a Nazi flag on his house (though I kept my explanations simple and focused more on the Nazis taking over countries--I didn't feel ready to go into the Holocaust yet). We also learned more about the actual story of the von Trapps and found out some interesting contrasts with the movie: in real life, Captain von Trapp was somewhat tempted by the offer to command a submarine for the Germany Navy, but eventually decided he couldn't stomach supporting the Nazi cause, even if it meant getting to play with a really cool toy. We learned that in real life, if the von Trapps had tried to cross the mountains on foot, they would have ended up in the back yard of Hitler's country retreat.

I've also been fascinated to see how Bridger picks up on visual elements in the movies. In "The Circus," when Chaplin first meets the aerialist who captures his heart, her father has just pushed her through a circus tent covered with a pattern of stars. When Chaplin's character helps her up, she's still clutching a torn star. At the end of the movie, the aerialist has married a handsome high-wire walker and the circus has pulled up stakes and taken off for the next town. Chaplin is sitting on an old crate in the dust when he spots a torn paper star and picks it up. "That's his last trace of his love!" Bridger remarked. At first I didn't understand the connection he was making until he reminded me of the star in that early scene.

On the down side, some old movies do have sexist, racist, or homophobic stereotypes that need to be talked about, but even that's an opportunity. In "Meet Me in St. Louis," the Judy Garland character and her little sister sing a jokey song about "a maid of royal blood but dusky shade." I made sure to talk with the kids about how that kind of song wouldn't be included in a movie now, and why, and why people at the time thought a song like that was OK. There are occasionally moments that upset the kids--like the way a father slapped around his daughter in Chaplin's "The Circus. We talk about those moments, too, and get to share in a safe way how we feel about that kind of violence. But for the most part I've found old movies a safe haven from kids' entertainment that's either insultingly innocuous and dumbed-down on one hand or amped-up, sarcastic, and mean-spirited on the other.

For ideas about good old movies to watch with children, I've found Ty Burr's The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together a great resource.

It's Ba-ack!

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
-Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

I am calling on some pretty heavy hitters to justify why I am resurrecting this blog after killing it so decisively, uh, only seventeen days ago. But Emerson and Whitman have always been beloved spiritual uncles to me, as they understandably are to so many people. Tonight, their famously bad-ass words gave me the permission I needed when I thought, you know, I think I DO want to keep posting on my blog after all! I still have work to do to keep my Internet use under control, so that'll be a bit of a challenge. I also still need to figure out a way to make sure my essay-writing stays my number one writing priority. But I think the challenges are worth it to me, and here's why.

What I realized tonight is that this blog is the easiest way I know for me to preserve moments from my life with my children that I really do want to remember. I don't seem motivated to record memories in a hand-written journal the way I used to when they were babies and toddlers--perhaps I've changed too much, grown impatient with the slow speed of handwriting and the difficulty of retrieving memories quickly from piles of notebooks. But I do seem willing to commit moments that stand out to me to a blog.

In the last few days, my kids have said things I really don't want to forget. All of these utterances, perhaps not coincidentally, are related to bodily functions--my kids are 3 and 6, after all, and they live with a fairly uninhibited pair of parents. If gross-out humor isn't really your thing, you may just want to stop right here. Otherwise, brace yourself and proceed on.

Story Number One:
A few days ago I was showing the kids a cool, layperson-friendly version of the periodic table that my husband had found online. I was talking about the noble gases when Cassidy piped up, "Noble gases? Is that what royal people toot?"

Her pun-loving physicist daddy was so proud.

Story Number Two:

The kids like me to tell them stories about when I was a kid. "Eight!" they say, or "Twelve!" or "Three!" and I come up with something I remember from whatever age they've asked for. I've told them so many memories at this point that I really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel sometimes to come up with something new. Tonight, I told them about a boy in my third-grade class who used to collect his boogers in little piles on a paper towel on his desk.

Cassidy responded thoughtfully, "When I pick my nose, I just wipe the snot on my clothes, and then a fairy takes it away. She's brown, and she's not very fancy."

And last but not least, Story Number Three:

At bedtime tonight, we were talking about what it means to "let go," because we say a bedtime prayer that ends "It is only in letting go that we find real peace." To try to explain what I personally mean by "let go," I told the kids about Byron Katie, creator of The Work and seemingly one of the most enlightened beings around right now. According to my understanding of Byron Katie's ideas, "letting go" means accepting and loving exactly what's happening, no matter what. It doesn't necessarily mean passivity; think of Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, or Mother Teresa, working to make the world better while accepting their utter lack of control.

Bridger was especially riveted to hear the way Byron Katie experienced some truly terrifying situations: a possible cancer diagnosis, near-blindness, and an encounter with a gunman intent on taking her life. In each case, she faced what was happening with curiosity, fearless openness, and love for her life and the people in it--even the gunman. (At least that's how she tells it, and I happen to believe her.)

I told the kids about how Katie says, "I'm a lover of reality. When I argue with what is, I lose, but only 100% of the time."

"But what is 'reality'?" Bridger asked.

"'Reality' is what's actually happening, not just what we wish was happening," I told him.

He was quiet for a while, and then he said gleefully, "I'm reality!"

Yes, I agreed, you are definitely reality. But now, I said, it's time to get ready to sleep so you can stay healthy and well-rested.

"The floor is reality," I heard Bridger muttering beside me in the bed. "The universe is reality. The floor is reality. The bed is reality. The window is reality."

"Yep. Good night, sweetie," I said, patting him, wondering why I'd gotten a conversation this big going at bedtime in the first place, grateful at the same time that we'd had the conversation at all.

"A TOILET PLUNGER is reality!" he declared. And then, he was silent. He had said what needed to be said, and he was now ready to accept the reality that it really was bedtime.



"I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me
is a miracle."
-Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Over and Out

A friend of mine asked me today what I'd decided to do about this blog, since I'd said back in July that I would make a decision about it by the end of August.

Well. As I've mentioned previously on this blog, I have trouble finishing things (hence, my annoying-to-my-husband habit of keeping our cupboard shelves well-stocked with cracker boxes containing one or two stale crackers and keeping our fridge rattling with nearly empty salad dressing bottles and jam jars). And clearly, I have had some trouble finishing off this blog and admitting that I don't want to do it any more. But I don't. I have really enjoyed writing the posts. But being as addicted to external validation as I am and keeping a blog just didn't go together well. I didn't need yet another reason for checking the Internet to see if I still exist. I continue to find it challenging enough just remembering to check in with my own flesh-and-blood, real-time existence every once in a while.

Thanks to everyone who ever stopped by to read this blog, to people who commented, and to the fabulous bloggers whose work I've discovered this past year. I am happy to have shared the past year with all of you, and to have had the pleasure and honor of hearing some of your stories, too.

Takin' A Breather

I'm going to put this blog on hiatus at least until the end of the summer, and possibly stop doing it all together or change it a bit--as in, making it less about me and more of a true family collaboration, with more posts from my kids and husband (it is, after all, subtitled "Adventures in Family Learning.") I've so enjoyed and appreciated the give-and-take with people who have commented here and with other bloggers whose work I've gotten to know in the last few months of exploring the blogosphere. It has meant so much to me and been a huge source of encouragement and connection.

But.

My yard is so full of weeds I feel too embarrassed to have a bunch of awesome women from the neighborhood over for wine and beer around the firepit.

My husband all too often goes to bed by himself while I prowl around online so late that I'm tired and grouchy the next day.

I'm way behind on returning calls and letters to old friends and my own mom--yet I seem to find time for blog posts. Seems like a discrepancy that needs correcting.

The thought, "I wonder if anyone has commented yet on my last post?" has taken on depressingly compulsive dimensions.

My book project needs attention. When it comes to writing ideas, I find myself devoting more of my mental space to blog posts than I am to book revision. Something's gotta give.

I made a vow to start meditating every day again. Has it happened yet? Nope.

I've realized I really like the blog-type form as I've been doing it--taking small, everyday moments and trying to pull out larger meaning from them--and I'd like to find a way to do it in a less ephemeral, nebulous form, like finding a place to have a regular column with a set deadline. I'm thinking that way, I could "compartmentalize" it a little more rather than having it take over my brain so much on a day to day basis, the way blogging seems to do.

And finally--when I thought about stopping the blog, I felt a sense of relief and possibility.

That's reason enough, wouldn't you say?

This is not to say that I'm not going to miss doing it, and miss the miniature "conversations" it has sparked with you.

I'll check in at the end of August and let you know how the blog hiatus has gone, then take it from there.

Unusually Rich Days

The last few days of being back from our trip have felt so good--a chance to reconnect with the kids and our home and our lives here in St. Paul. And the kids and I have been doing so many lovely things together, mostly either at home or in the neighborhood. There are many, many days when I feel awash in self-doubt and uncertainty about unschooling the kids. Days like the ones we've had lately, when it's so clear how much they're learning and so beautiful to see the way they're learning through play and living, are the kinds of days that keep me going.

Yesterday we started off by reading some Greek myths in Cassidy's bed right after we woke up. The kids have really been enjoying D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths, a book I've been holding on to for a while, waiting for the right time to introduce it, and the right time appears to be now. I'd warmed 'em up by telling an oral version of the Persephone story as a bedtime story, and then I pulled out the book to show them the pictures for that story.

After breakfast, we made little miniature clay mountain scenes, with tiny lakes, rivers, snowcapped ranges, waterfalls. At first Bridger didn't want to do it, but pretty soon he drifted over, checked out what we were up to, and said, "Oh, I'll do one, too." It was a lovely way to remember some of what we'd seen in Montana and shape our memories with our hands in a small, kid-scaled way.

We played at home for a while, then took a late-morning bike ride to lovely Newell Park. The hills and trees there made a perfectly fine Sherwood Forest for us to play Robin Hood until we were ready for lunch. On the way home, we stopped to admire our neighbors' gardens and identify some of the vegetables and flowers we saw growing. We spent the afternoon acting out a story with craft stick puppets and paper dinosaurs. In the evening Bridger went to martial arts, and I attended a task force meeting to help save our neighborhood library from closing, so we even got a little time out in the neighborhood with other people--a really nice balance.

Today, more Greek myths in the morning, then we picked up where we left off with the craft stick puppet/dinosaur story. The story even involved some spontaneous, kid-initiated math (i.e., calculating how many steaks each carnivorous dinosaur needed to be fed so they wouldn't eat the human characters).

At lunch, Cass mentioned her current aspiration to be a ballerina/speech therapist when she grows up. I said there would probably be a lot of work available for a speech therapist in the future. We ended up talking about the rise in autism and some of the theories about what causes it, which led to talking about Temple Grandin and her innovations in how cattle are treated, discoveries made possible in part by her autism and the unique insights it gave her into animals.

"So maybe having autism isn't necessarily all a problem," Bridger pointed out.

Bridger listened to a "Hank the Cow Dog" book on CD while Cassidy and I hauled out the wooden train set for the first time in a long time and played trains, which morphed into "bad giant" when Cassidy decided to play a bad giant kidnapping trains. When Bridger finished his CD, he joined in and brought "Lego Pest Controllers" on to the scene to shoot her with a goodness missile that made her into a fairy who loved art instead of a bad giant. He went on to build three different pest controller vehicles along with various unusual pests. For instance, one vehicle used special saws to surgically alter a rampaging lion into a docile kitty cat; another captured yetis and hauled them to zoos.

Meanwhile, Cassidy's good fairy was set up at an easel happily painting picture after picture.

Finally, to top things off, when we went to Target this afternoon, Bridger had two small but exhilarating reading breakthroughs: He sounded out the word "large" in "Large Grade A Eggs" on a carton (though he said it "larg-eh," spurring a little reminder about silent "e"). Then, in the checkout line, he pointed out the princess in the Starbuck logo to Cassidy, knowing how much she loves princesses. Then he asked, "Does that say 'coffee'?"

I was kind of flabbergasted. We don't frequent Starbucks, so I don't think he has associations with the logo--I guess maybe he inferred the name based on context, but hey, isn't that how a lot of reading works?

"How did you figure that out?" I asked him as I loaded bags in our cart.

"Well, I know that "c-o-f" says 'cof,' and 'e-e' says "ee," so I know 'c-o-f-f-e-e' spells 'coffee'!"

It reminded me of how I felt the day he was sitting at the kitchen table, a chubby baby of 10 months or so, when he pointed at the whirling ceiling fan and said, "Fa, fa, fa" with a big, sassy grin.

When things are going well for us, it's easy to look back at the tougher times, the times when not much learning seemed to be happening, and say, well of course--that was just the fallow period that makes growth possible. That was the period of disequilibrium that always seems to come before a time of grace and ease. It's a lot harder to remember that when I'm in the middle of a hard slog of days. That's part of why I wrote all this down today--to help me remember, and to help me appreciate, and to help me relax.

Perhaps some day I'll even get to the point of not evaluating times in our lives so much as good or bad, hard or easy--when I'll simply attend to what's happening with a greater, more open-hearted curiosity and fewer value judgments. We'll see!

Spawning Wrigglers

Some of our friends are currently raising monarch butterflies from egg to caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly; others are raising tadpoles. Us? We're spawning mosquito larvae.

We'd often warned Bridger about leaving standing water in some of the big buckets in our back yard and told him that mosquitoes might lay eggs in it. I wasn't really sure I believed they actually would, but it was a good parents' cautionary tale. Apparently, he left some water in a big bucket while we were in Montana. When we got back, Brian and Bridger noticed that there were some wiggly little creatures using the water for a swimming hole. They put one under our microscope, and lo and behold, we realized we had spawned our very own mosquito larvae!

I was both fascinated and repelled when I got a good look at the critters, both under magnification and with the naked eye. When we looked them up online, we found out that mosquito larvae are commonly called wigglers or wrigglers, and I could see why, watching them scootch around their makeshift pond, with their hindquarters wagging back and forth to make little L shapes as they moved. (If I'm remembering correctly, they weren't much bigger than the L right here on this post.)

I thought we should get rid of most of them, but scoop out a few for further observation--we probably would have mosquito pupae within a few days! Oh the joy! But Brian opted to up-end the whole bucket on the lawn, thus ending our wriggler-spawning adventure. We did learn some interesting things from the whole experience, like the fact that only female mosquitoes suck blood; males sip nectar from flowers. It may have been some comfort to Cassidy to know that the many Montana mosquitoes who left her with red welts all over her body were girls just like her, though then again, maybe not.

I have to admit it was seriously gratifying to have one of my parental prognostications come so vividly, accurately true. Gratifying, too, to find out that leaving stagnant water out in the yard could lead to such a memorable learning experience.

The Big Issues

A friend commented on my last post that I was lucky to have a child who says "Wow" to nature. I agree that I am lucky. However, I must add a slight codicil (I think that's the right word).

This week Bridger and I were debating about whether we should camp on the way home or take the lazier, more expensive way and stay at motels.

"Well, motels are nice because you sleep better in a real bed," Bridger said, using an argument he's heard me spout out before. "And there's not so much packing and unpacking from the van that way, so it's faster." (That's Brian's gripe about camping on road trips.)

"But when you camp, you get to spend more time in nature," I said.

"I hate nature!" Bridger said. "I LOVE plastic!"

He elaborated a bit: "Matchbox Pop-Up Play Sets and Legos are made of plastic, so that's why I love it."

This made me laugh, but it also gave me even more motivation to try to get that boy out into nature a bit more.

A few days ago, the kids and I rode bikes out to the town cemetery. I find the Conrad graveyard wonderfully, festively Day of the Dead-ish, and I thought Bridger and Cass would appreciate it, too. Many of the gravestones are carved with images that represent important things in the dead person's life: a sheaf of wheat, cattle, mountains, tractors, RVs, a blackboard with the ABCs written on it and a desk with an apple, and in one woman's case, a steamin' cup o' joe.

One boy who'd died in high school had a grave that had turned into a sort of ofrenda, with rifle cartridges, an unopened can of Mountain Dew, a "Stay Alive, Don't Drink and Drive" key chain, a pair of aviator sunglasses, and laminated photos of the boy himself posing shirtless and in his football jersey.

Just as I expected, the kids loved speculating about the people buried there and what their stories were. They loved the colorful pinwheels and artificial flowers on almost every grave.

"When I die, will you decorate my grave with lots of flowers?" Cassidy asked me.

The thought of it left me breathless.

"Sweetie," I said, "I hope I'll be gone long before you have a grave."

I explained that most of the time, children outlived their parents, so she'd probably end up decorating my grave, but likely not for a long, long time.

"But if you die, I won't have a mother!" Cassidy declared.

I felt my heart catch--as my husband put it later, she found it easier to conceive of herself being in a grave than she did conceiving of having no mother. Another way of putting it: she found it as hard to conceive of living on this earth without me as I find it to conceive of living on earth without her.

"Yeah, but by the time Mom dies, you'll be an adult so you won't need a mother so much," Bridger explained to her.

I indeed do hope that I live long enough to ferry my kids safely into adulthood, but I don't take that possibility for granted. My father died accidentally and suddenly when he was only 33 and I was twelve years old, so I've seen that parents can die young, and that children can die long before their mothers and fathers die. It is a sobering thought, and one that I try to use as a kind of steadying ballast. No guarantees, right?

A few weeks ago, sitting at the picnic table in our back yard with Cassidy, I looked at her and thought, if my dad hadn't died when he had, I wouldn't have had the life that led me to the family I have now. Gazing at Cass, the thought flashed through my mind--before guilt or propriety could stop it--well, it's a fair trade.

I think my Dad would understand, and be glad, that I am able to feel that way.

Montana Update

After Fairmont Hot Springs, we camped at Holland Lake, a beautiful little spot nestled up against the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in the Seeley-Swan Valley. When the kids and I walked down to the lake and took in the view of mountains and a waterfall, I started to cry. "Happy tears!" I explained. Happy tears, indeed. I'll try to post photos soon. Cass and I hiked to the waterfall and we all got thoroughly nibbled by mosquitoes. A wedding reception at a nearby lodge provided a soundtrack of Stevie Wonder and Sly and the Family Stone covers for a few hours, but it didn't really detract from the overall experience--and Cassidy and I actually got a glimpse of the bride and her retinue of bridesmaids. Fancy heaven for Cass!

From there, we drove up to Glacier. I'd told Brian I wouldn't be satisfied with just driving through and stopping at overlooks, but that's what we ended up doing--we just ran out of time for more on this trip. And I ended up feeling fine about it. It was definitely better than not going at all, even if it was far less satisfying than being able to get out and hike and soak up the smaller sights you can't see from the car--the glacier lilies and Indian paintbrush along a trail, a hoary marmot sunning itself on a rock. When we first arrived at the West Glacier entry gate (after waiting in a line of cars for 25 minutes, something I'd never experienced at Glacier), Bridger said, "You said this place was so pretty. But it doesn't look any more beautiful than places we've already been."

"Just wait," I told him. "I'll stop talking it up and let you draw your own conclusions."

I was quietly overjoyed when I heard him breathe an awed, "Wow," once we got up high into the mountains on Going to the Sun Road. At the Logan Pass Visitor Center, he got a huge kick out of slipping and sliding on patches of snow and getting glimpses of pikas, rare little rodents acclimated to high alpine meadows who make a cute squeaking noise as they poke in and out of their hidey-holes. He snapped photos like mad of the mountains, waterfalls, and I don't know what all else.

Before we had kids, Brian and I used to go on motorcycle trips to Glacier with a good friend of ours just about every summer (I was on the back of Bri's bike--I learned to ride in a weekend course but decided I wasn't aggressive enough to be a good biker--I'd be the one who'd jump off my bike screaming when I should have had the guts to accelerate). Our memories of Glacier are full of road dust and the smell of hot leather jackets and chaps and clothes we wore until they were crusty because we could only carry so many clothes on the motorcycle side bags, of singing and keeping up a steady chatter of dumb jokes while we hiked so we'd scare away any bears in the vicinity, of downing cold bottles of Moose Drool beer after days of hiking that left us weary and sore but deeply, profoundly happy.

A friend of mine wondered if Glacier would seem different to me after seven years away--diminished, perhaps--with global warming melting the glaciers into oblivion. Signs at the park did warn that the glaciers would likely be gone by 2020. "So the kids will be teenagers then," Brian commented. Certainly there were many threats there that I didn't even notice--invasive animal and plant species crowding out the natives, I'm sure. I did notice some differences: notably, there were vast swathes of trees scorched by forest fire on the east side of the park and more brown, dry trees in the midst of the green valleys and mountainsides. The park was definitely more crowded than I remembered, too. But the waterfalls and rivers fed by the mountain snowcaps and glaciers were still flowing and churning, at least for now. The mountains themselves were still there.

Now we're at my mother and father-in-law's place in Conrad, a small ranch and farm town on the plains, just east of the Rocky Mountain Front. Well, here come the kids from the basement, where they've been playing that the bed where Brian and I have been sleeping is a boat, the mattress on the floor is the ocean, and the blankets are sharks--that is when they're not pretending to be secret agents. On this vacation, they have really discovered each other as playmates, and after playing the mediator role between them for the last three-plus years, I couldn't be happier about that.

From Fairmont Hot Springs Near Butte, MT

We're at the Fairmont Hot Springs Resort, a place we last visited almost two years ago for my mother-in-law's 80th birthday celebration. Our original plan was to be in Glacier Park by now, but after two long days of driving across North Dakota and Eastern Montana, we were all ready for a break from the car. We planned on stopping here for only one night last night, but as soon as we got into the heated-by-thermal-springs pool, with its backdrop of mountains and its canopy of cloudless blue Montana sky, well, I felt rather motivated to stay a spell. So we signed on for a second night.

It's been fun to mark the ways the kids have grown since our last visit. Cassidy can touch the bottom in the shallow end now, where before I had to hold her in the pool the whole time. Bridger was wearing a life jacket last time, but now he swims and dives and cannonballs all over the place. They're also playing together and enjoying each other so much more than they were two years ago.

A few other memorable (to me, at least) moments of the trip so far:

-Driving through North Dakota, I perkily suggested playing the "Categories" game--one person picks a category, like Billboards or Semi-Trucks, and then counts out loud every time they see something in that category. The other players try to guess their category. I chose "Pick-Up Trucks." And then several long, loaded minutes went by on that flat plains highway. No vehicles from either direction. No billboards. No buildings. Just grass, grass, and more wind-blown grass. The kids basically declared "This game totally sucks" in their three-year-old and six-year-old ways, and the van exploded into a chaos of backseat bickering when they realized their only hope for entertainment was to pick on one another. Brian thought it was hilarious that I'd thought there would be enough different categories of anything on a North Dakota interstate. I admitted defeat and resigned my position as van entertainment director and took the driver's seat for the rest of the day.

-Bridger, Cass, and I came up with a pool game in which Cassidy was a catfish, Bridger was her friend the killer whale, and I was a shark trying to eat Cassidy's kittenfish. At one point Cassidy described to Brian her predatory kittenfish's favorite dessert: "Raspberry pie with human teeth, a baby calf, and chocolate ice cream on top."

Tomorrow we head to Glacier National Park for one night of camping before we go to my in-laws' place to spend 4th of July with them. It'll be our first time at Glacier with the kids, and I wish we could stay longer, but between camping with friends in Minnesota last weekend and trying to get to Conrad for the 4th, there just wasn't much time left. I hope to be grateful for the time I get in Glacier rather than greedy for more, trusting that there will be longer visits in our future. It almost seems silly to subject us all to several more hours of driving for only a few hours in Glacier. But I think once I'm there I'll remember why I feel so determined to get back there, even for just a day.

Shakespeare in the Park

I've been feeling pretty down on city living lately. I think it started with my trip to my mom's through some of the prettiest river road scenery Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota have to offer. While I was at my mom's place, I was struck by how quiet her street was, and how freely the kids could wander without worrying about being hit by a speeding car--a real concern on our street here in St. Paul.

My yearning for quiet continued as the neighbors next door got more and more raucous (though things have calmed down for now since one of the neighbors was ushered out by three of St. Paul's Finest, as I wrote about in a previous post). My yearning for security sharpened as my kids and I walked to the corner store the other day to get milk and candy, and fumes of pot smoke wafted out of a car parked in front of the store, right near where Bridger was locking up his bike.

My reading material lately has not exactly inspired calm or peace of mind. First, I was reading a book called Distracted, which posited that our reliance on electronic media was going to lead to another dark age. Then I read the new book about Columbine. And because I wasn't depressed and jittery enough after that, I picked the book Beautiful Boy off the library shelf, a heart-rending memoir by the father of a young man addicted to crystal meth.

"It's terrifying," I told my husband.

"Then why are you reading it?" he asked.

"Because," I said. "I want to know the parameters of how bad things can get. I want to know if there's anything I can do to help prevent that kind of thing now."

Then some friends of ours sent me a link with pictures of the house they just bought in rural Wisconsin, after years of hard work and struggle and living in a teeny rental place with their young daughters. I looked at the photos, the picture windows framing forest in every direction, the big deck, the garden. I sighed. I was happy for them. Overjoyed, even. But I also felt a deep, jealous yearning. I want that, too, I thought. But for now and probably a long time to come, we are very much anchored here--in this old 1912 Late Victorian four-square, this neighborhood.

Today, though, something shifted for me. A weight lifted. The kids and I went to Newell Park, a lovely neighborhood park with a shady canopy of mature oak trees, to see a free outdoor performance of The Tempest (Brian opted to stay home, enjoy the silence, and read the paper on the couch). We'd gotten ready ahead of time by reading a picture book version of the play by Bruce Coville, so the kids were familiar enough with the story to identify the characters milling around before the show. I'd told them that if the actors were good enough, they'd be able to understand the emotions and action of the play by the body language and facial expressions, even if the language wasn't always familiar.

I expected they'd watch a scene or two and then start whining to go to the playground. Uh-uh. They sat there entranced the whole hour-and-a-half (it was a skillfullly abridged version of the play). Cassidy was so riveted, when I told her I needed to go to the bathroom and asked if she wanted to go with me, she said no, that she'd stay on the blanket with Bridger and keep watching. This is the girl who often howls if I go from one floor of the house to another without taking her with me.

But after all, what's not to like for a kid? You have a dancing, singing monster, an enchanted island, a magician with a fancy purple cape, an airy spirit painted the colors of the sky, guys wielding swords, a beautiful and noble young girl falling in love with a prince. After all our fairy tale-spinning, the world of The Tempest was utterly familiar ground to them.

Up at the park building, a big multigenerational party was in full swing. Picnickers hung out at shady tables. A group of kids and adults was playing pick-up softball at the park diamond, a few dozen yards away from the Shakespeare performance. Suddenly, living in the city wasn't feeling so bad. It had its rewards, just as living in the woods would have its own set of rewards.

Near the very end of the play came Miranda's famous speech, delivered upon seeing a group of men other than her father for the first time in her adult life (she's been stranded on an island with her magician father and assorted spirits since she was two).

"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!"

Her father tersely replies, "'Tis new to thee."

I got tears in my eyes--such a lovely, perfect distillation of innocence and experience, wonder and gimlet-eyed realism--and deeply, darkly funny as delivered by the actors.

When I told my husband about it later, he said, "I can imagine saying exactly the same kind of thing to Cassidy when she's a teenager."

Four hundred years ago, a man in England wrote a play. A group of people performed it in a shady natural amphitheater of oaks and grass today, in a land still referred to in Europe as the New World when the playwright was alive. It's still new in many ways, this world of ours. New and old, both--fresh and weary, all at once. Today my children got their first taste of Shakespeare, the best possible experience I could have imagined for them, and my heart feels lighter and more grateful than it has in weeks.

There are a few more performances of The Tempest left in the Twin Cities if you're interested. You can find a schedule here.

Honest Scrap

Kate Hopper, the writer, teacher, and community builder behind the blog Mother Words:  Mothers Who Write, recently tagged this blog with an Honest Scrap Award--ironically, right as I was beginning to question if I should even keep doing a blog.  (Insert Homer Simpson-style headsmack here--Dope!)  All it took was that li'l' bit of acknowledgement, and the blogging bug has bitten me anew. 

The Honest Scrap Award is a sort of blogging chain letter that lets bloggers recognize blogs they find brilliant in content or design.  (Thank you so much, Kate, for the kind acknowledgment.)  Kate also awarded another blog I'd already found through Mother Words, Lynne Marie Wanamaker's Mind Body Mama, and two others, The Blue Suitcase and Maggie World, that I was happy to discover, as well).

I hereby bestow the Honest Scrap Award on the three blogs that I turn to most often for inspiration, provocation, insight, and electronic companionship:

Unschooling is Dreamy

A friend of mine's funny, energizing chronicle of her family's unschooling life, including one son obsessed with rockets and the Wicked Witch of the West, and a younger son with a penchant for impish destruction and mayhem. 

Just Enough, and Nothing More

An exhaustive, beautifully organized compendium of parenting and homeschooling information--not so much a blog as a treasure chest, in my opinion.  

Wonder Farm

Patricia Zaballos's blog chronicles her family's pursuit of creativity, which takes a wonderful variety of forms, from her daughter's miniature Indian kitchen diorama to Patricia's year-long study of excellent personal essayists. I found her blog via her dead-on "Waldorf guilt" posts, and I've been hooked ever since.

Wear your Honest Scrap with pride, ladies, and do share the love!

I am supposed to list ten honest things about myself as part of the whole Honest Scrap protocol.  If you are one of the bloggers listed above, feel free to skip this step if it doesn't appeal to you.  It did appeal to me, however, so here goes:

1.  I actually really do like being forty, and like my friend Katrina, I think my friends look more beautiful as they get older, not less, because, as Katrina put it, you can see more of their lives in their faces now.

2.  I tend to think that the secret to happiness is the right schedule.

3.  I had an obsessive crush on Heath Ledger's Joker character last summer, at the height of The Dark Knight hype.

4.  As a kid, I forced my friends to act in basement theatrical versions of the books I'd read recently, and I always gave myself the leading role, because after all, I was the one who'd read the book.  Jane Eyre and Gone With the Wind were two long-running productions. When I told my friends about the plot of Wuthering Heights, two of my ensemble's players rolled their eyes at each other and asked snarkily, "I wonder who's going to play Cathy?"

5.  I am utterly fixated on the idea of self-improvement, perhaps to the exclusion of actual peace and happiness.

6.  I'm good at beginning things, but I have a hard time finishing things.  My husband laughs (when he's not cringing) at the way I put jars of jelly that have the faintest smear of jelly back in the fridge for someone else to finish off, or how I'll leave a box of crackers with one cracker in it on the shelf for months.  Endings make me deeply uneasy.

7.  I dream of living deep in the woods in northern Minnesota, Oregon, or Montana when I am an old lady.  I would love to be doing that right now, actually, but can't because A) My husband and I have sunk way too much money into this house to try to move now, B) I could never in a million years "stage" this house for buyers without completely losing my mind at this point in my life, and C) I would miss the friends I have here too much and all the things I've grown used to here in St. Paul.  

8.  I set out as a mother determined to be more patient and understanding than my mother was with me, but I think I am actually more consistently crabby than she was.

9.  I am very good at noticing what my children are interested in and finding them more information and resources to explore those interests.  I'm also extremely generous when it comes to playing make-believe games and stories with them, though not as generous as they'd probably like me to be.

10.  It has been over seven years since my husband and I have gone out on a nighttime, stay-out-dancing-til-the-bars close kind of date, or even a go-see-a-movie-in-a-theater-that-isn't-a-matinee date.  The last time my husband and I went on a date, we took a walk along the Mississippi, had lunch, then spent the last half-hour or so of our date at the LIBRARY.  That's the kind of unrepentant dorks WE are.

All right, that's enough honesty for one post.  Over and out.

Current Interests

A short post for a change--I just wanted an excuse to share some photos, basically.  Cassidy has been pretty interested in pregnancy and birth ever since we participated in a Blessingway for a pregnant friend of ours a few weeks ago.  If you're not familiar with that ceremony, it's a celebration for a woman about to give birth, a chance to revel in community support and her own strength, as opposed to the standard baby shower, which as I understand it celebrates a woman's ability to accumulate a lot of crap from Babies R Us.  The first time I attended a Blessingway, I thought, I hope Cass gets to have one of these some day, and I hope that she and I will have the kind of relationship that she'll want me to be there with her if she does.  

At the Blessingway, we all tossed a ball of red yarn back and forth across the circle until we were all woven together in a giant web, and then we snipped off the yarn to make bracelets for ourselves, bracelets we wore until we heard our friend had had her baby, a tradition Cassidy found fascinating and one that kept our friend very much in our minds and hearts.  

The day Cass found out our friend's baby had been born, she put a balloon under her dress and enacted her own "baby's" birth again and again.  Again, I found myself thinking about my daughter as a potential future mother.  And what I thought was, please let me be the kind of mother she would want to have with her when she gives birth.  But if she doesn't want me there for her own good reasons, let me understand and give her room to have the birth she wants to have.

As for Bridger, well, he is just all about taking photos of Legos scenes lately, as I've alluded to.  We've been having really fun conversations about the emotional impact of close-ups, when long shots are most effective, and so on.  He's always been very observant and visually oriented, noticing details and patterns in picture books and movies that sail right past me; for instance, after we watched Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus," he picked out that the tattered bit of star from a circus tent that Chaplin is holding at the very end of the film, after the circus has picked up and left him behind, is the same star that was featured earlier in the movie when he first met the girl he loved and lost.  I was flabbergasted that he'd picked up on that and remembered it.

It is fascinating to me to see the ways Bridger's visual and storytelling orientation are expressing themselves right now, and to watch his joy and concentration as he sets up his intricate, endlessly unspooling stories all over the house.

Overwhelming, or Just a Good Challenge?

I knew I wanted to marry my husband Brian the day I misread a plane itinerary and we missed our flight home from Thanksgiving with his family, the first major holiday he and I spent together. I burst into tears when I realized what had happened.  My husband paused, thought things over, and said calmly, "I've always wondered what would happen if I missed a flight.  Now I'll get to find out."  

This man, I thought, would be good to have around in a crisis.  This one's a keeper.

It strikes me that one of the main things I would love for my children (and myself) to learn is that setbacks and obstacles are simply part of life, part of the waves we have to surf, part of the weather we have to dress for.  Obstacles and setbacks and mistakes are not something we have to rail against and tear our hair out about and wildly beat our breasts over or expend gobs of energy regretting.  They are simply a condition of learning and being human and being part of a world that is imperfect and uncontrollable.  And as my husband says, the only way to avoid making mistakes is to do nothing, and that would be a mistake.  I have such a hard time remembering that, though, I sometimes wonder how I'll ever be able to convey to my kids that making a mistake really doesn't mean you're a big worthless screw-up--it just means you're trying something difficult or that there's something additional you need to learn or do in order to succeed.  

I thought about all that last week when something happened that I didn't expect.  I had organized an information table for our neighborhood library at a local festival.  I'd arranged to pick up the table we were going to borrow for the event the morning of the festival.  "If I'm not there, I'll leave it on the side of the house for you," the woman had told me.  

Brian was out of town, so I had to haul the kids along to the festival along with the chairs, the informational pamphlets, the postcards to the mayor, and all the other assorted info table swag.  I stopped to pick up the table.  No one home.  No table anywhere to be found outside the house.  I had no phone number for the table's owner.  I got back in the car and started talking out loud, trying to figure out what my Plan B was.  I decided to stop by two other neighbors' houses who'd also offered tables, but neither was home.

By this time, I was starting to get a little weepy and self-pitying.  I tried to stay calm, knowing that this was an opportunity to model a productive response to a setback for the kids.  I tried to be honest about my frustrations:  "She probably just spaced it out.  But this is why it's important for people to follow through on something they commit to doing, because when they don't, it can cause trouble for the people who were relying on them."  I let them hear me think out loud about how to solve the problem:  "Well, I guess I'll just go home and get our card table for now, and I'll stop by her house later on when I get a chance to see if I can get the bigger table from her."

I am not going to pretend that there weren't a few "shit, shit, shits," muttered darkly under my breath in the midst of all my more reasonable utterances.  But in the end, it all worked out.  We made do for a while with a much-too-small table and eventually were able to borrow a bigger one from another non-profit group at the festival.  My kids got to see that things can indeed work out even when there's a glitch or two in the original plan.  My next aspiration is to learn to greet setbacks with actual joy!  Like, oh, goodie, I get to practice my problem-solving skills.  Or, oh, won't this be interesting to see how this plays out?  Perhaps when I'm 80 or so, I'll get there. . .  

Years ago, I remember talking to a friend's husband who was opening his own recording studio in Uptown Minneapolis.  He was in his early twenties, and he'd inherited his start-up capital due to a tragic circumstance:  both his parents had died.  Knowing he wanted to start a band and run a recording studio, he'd quit college and instead rented an apartment down in New Orleans, all by myself, so he could be alone to study up independently on sound engineering and equipment and write a lot of good songs to get his band off on the right foot.  He chose New Orleans, he said, because he could be alone and therefore not distracted by his social life at home, but when he wanted a social atmosphere, it would be easy to find.  The rich musical inspiration didn't hurt, either.

Now, after his self-imposed course of study, he was building a recording studio, all by himself.  Things were still in a state of chaos when I was talking to him.  He pointed to various areas of the construction site and explained where he'd put the recording booth, where he'd put the mixing board, and so on.  

"It seems so overwhelming!" I said, seeing all the obstacles between him and completion.

He looked genuinely surprised.  "Nah," he said with a relaxed shrug.  "It's just a really great challenge."

That was 1995.  He is now a successful recording engineer and musician, making his living doing what he likes, facing setbacks with a cool confidence in his own ability to figure things out--at least as far as I can tell.  

So is my life overwhelming, or is it just a really good challenge?  How I answer that question really shapes the whole process, don't you think?

Slow Learner

So much is changing lately.  Spring is turning to summer (though you wouldn't know it, with our temperatures in the 40s and 50s this weekend, it feels downright autumnal).  We have all sorts of new neighbors in the four-plex next door, one of whom was escorted out of the building today by three St. Paul police officers while carrying his worldly possessions in a garbage bag. 

I have to say it was a little unnerving for me to arrive home from a four-year-old friend's birthday party to three squad cars next door.  Cassidy didn't even seem to really notice--she was too busy making sure her pink balloon from the party didn't blow away--but Bridger was very curious and wanted to know if we could find out why the police were there.   After the police were gone, I talked to a few neighbors and they said it appeared to be a domestic situation and probable eviction of a boyfriend who'd been staying with a woman who lives in the building.  In any case, I sincerely hope that all involved will be safe.  All I know for sure is that warmer weather has brought louder parties next door, louder, sometimes angry voices in the fourplex's back yard, and new challenges to my feelings of security in my home.  I'm trying to work on staying in the present without letting fears run away with me, and trying to find little ways to connect with the people on the other side of the chain-link fence. 

For me, the biggest change lately is that our beloved homeschooling play group looks as if it might be breaking off into some smaller splinter groups.  It's probably a healthy development, but it leaves me feeling up in the air and a little scared about what our routine is going to look like and which friends we might not see as frequently and easily.  For the last two years, we've met most Tuesdays and it's been amazingly idyllic as far as I'm concerned.  But the group has experienced a rapid spike in growth this spring, and for my family and a few others, it's just gotten too big and crazy to be fun any more.  I'm hopeful that we can all handle the changes in a way that leaves friendships intact.

Another change is that I'm going to be serving on a task force to look for ways to keep our neighborhood library open.  The city wants the library to "partner" with an unnamed non-profit to reduce costs and/or bring in revenue.  I just want to make sure that partnership doesn't equal "we turn the library into a non-profit organization's office space and you can come pick up books you've reserved online at a little kiosk."  Uh-uh.  That ain't gonna fly.  I'm nervous about getting involved in the political process in a way I never have before, but excited to learn from the experience and hopefully strengthen my ability to stay clear about what I think is right while listening to others' opinions.

As far as the kids are concerned, play continues begetting learning around here.  Bridger's obsessed with Power Miners Legos and setting up sequential scenes with them, a sort of stop-motion animation without the animation.  He really enjoys taking pictures of his scenes, too, leading him to learn all sorts of things about close-ups, background, foreground, angles of shots, and so on.  My husband Brian got a slew of kids' books about mining from the library, so he and Bridger have been reading together about the gold rush and the working conditions of 19th-century British miners and learning intriguing new words like "gangue," (pronounced "gang," it means the sludge and mud surrounding the desired mineral you're mining for).  Who knows where it will all lead?

Cassidy is looking forward to starting a preschool music and movement class at a new Celtic cultural center in our neighborhood.  It'll feature Irish music and some Irish-dance style steps.  She's been bouncy since she was tiny--as a baby, she got around not so much by crawling but by bouncing from place to place on her rear end, and as a toddler, she didn't walk, she hopped.  Everywhere.  She still hops and bounces so much that she already has the calves of an athlete, firm, meaty little wedges like the ones you see on hard-core bicycling enthusiasts.  I think Irish dance might just be the dance for her.

So, as I said--many changes.  I keep trying to remember something a mama friend of mine said last week.  We were talking about how much longer it takes to get things done and how much you have to resign yourself to slowing down after you have kids.

"I have to slow down three times as much as I think I do just to be able to listen to them," she said with a laugh.

Her words have been reinforced for me all the more by a book I'm reading now called Distracted:  The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, by Maggie Jackson.  Like the title, the book's a little melodramatic at times, but her central premise rings true to me:  that we are so busy juggling multiple tasks, connecting with multiple people via the Internet, and racing around at breakneck pace, we are losing our capacity for extended reflection and concentration.  She tells the story of a psychology professor who helped a chronic overeater overcome his addiction to drive-thru food.  The professor simply asked the man to pull over to the side of the road to eat, instead of eating while he drove.  My God, this food tastes awful, the man realized.  I imagine him shaking his head and laughing.  I imagine him throwing his crappy foil-wrapped burger out the window.  I imagine the combination of sadness and liberation he must have felt, and I feel a kind of release, too.

How many times am I just like that man, scarfing down the moments of my life without really tasting them, rushing to get to the next moment?  It's only when I slow down that I notice the ways that my life tastes awful, and the ways it tastes really, really sweet.