Move it to the Other List

"I just wish I had time to . . . !!!"

I made a list of the things that I would like to be doing but am not because of caring for my two small children.  The list was full of things like "Wash dishes" ,  "Fold laundry",  "Catch up on tracking finances", and "Pull up that horrible weed growing around my Korean lilac".  The list was very long, and I felt daunted and overwhelmed.

I made a second list of the things that I am doing.  This list was full of things like "Snuggle with children", "Read to children", "Play with children", "Bake bread" and "Go for a morning run". 

Wow, the woman in the second list sounded like she had a much more joyful and worthwhile life than the woman in the first list.  My husband, an economist at heart, has high respect for the power of revealed preferences: the second list, by definition, lists my priorities.

But why does my life often feel so hard right now?  Then I realized that I had left one activity off of the second list.  One activity that takes up a lot of time. 

Worrying. 

And then I had a brilliant idea: why not move worrying to the other list?

So, I'm trying to not worry about the growing piles of dirty dishes and unfolded laundry and unweeded Korean lilacs and instead focus on how full my life is of snuggling, reading, and playing.

Who knows?  Maybe, if I can manage to move worrying to the other list (and while I'm at it, why not guilt and anger, too?), I'll free up five more minutes to do the dishes or - a truly indulgent luxury - to take a daily shower?

After two days away. . .

I miss you, my love.
Like a flower without roots,
I wilt without you.

Unschooling: Picking Tomatoes

Yesterday I was fretting to my husband that our two-year-old isn't learning "real-life skills" and "interacting with the real world" enough because he spends so much time in an artificial world of colorful, plastic toys. 

My husband and I decided years before having any children that we would homeschool them.  Our son is two years old now and a conviction is slowly growing in me that we will unschool him.  No unsolicited teaching!  On the one hand, that sounds reasonable and obvious.  On the other hand that sounds terrifying and opposite to everything I have done as a teacher and tutor for years, making me question my own value. 

Even as I grow more sure that unschooling is the right choice for our family, I become more aware that my position is extreme even among the homeschooling families in my area, let alone among families sending their children to school. 

So I mull over my own doubts and those of my community, friends and family, many of whom currently have no idea that we will be homeschooling and don't even know what "unschooling" means.

Hence my fretting to my husband.  Our son had just held out the cardboard tomato basket to me and then stood by the screen door out to the deck where our tomato plants are. 

"Tomorrow," I said to my toddler.  "Tomorrow we'll pick more tomatoes."  I continued washing dishes and called over to my husband, "Is he really interacting with real things in the world?  Is he learning any real skills?" 

Of course these were ridiculous questions considering that he is two and learning to speak and climb and figure out everything he can about his world.  But I was thinking of how he is learning to use his blue plastic wrench to pry up his orange plastic nail from his yellow plastic tool bench and I wondered if all of his toys (gifts from grandparents and friends, many free from the dump) are forming a bright, plastic barrier between him and the real world.

Just then our son walked to the middle of the rug and carefully set down the cardboard tomato basket, with six ripe, red cherry tomatoes, stems carefully removed, inside. 

I gaped at my two-year-old.  "Did he just open the screen door, go out on the deck, pick those tomatoes, remove their stems and carry them back inside?"

My husband grinned.  "Yes, he did."

My son beamed up at me with pride in his accomplishment and I smiled back at him, full of love.

"Are you still worried that he isn't interacting enough with the real world?"

Homeschooling: the key

I stumbled into the homeschooling community eight years ago when I applied for a job as a Shakespeare teacher at a homeschooling center on craigslist.  In my five years teaching in the Portland, Oregon homeschooling community, I was blown away by the enthusiasm, curiosity, and joy in learning my students had.  My husband and I, still several years away from having children of our own, realized that of course we would homeschool our children. 

Having made the decision to homeschool first, for us homeschooling has been the key to understanding the life we want to lead: an integrated, supportive, and encouraging family-centered life with every individual learning, growing, and following their passions. 

Attachment parenting, living a lower-income lower-cost lifestyle in a small town with more flexible working hours, extended (what a silly name!  I'll call it "exactly the right amount of. . .") breastfeeding, sleeping with our baby, not worrying that our almost-two-year-old is not yet speaking much, taking our baby to parties and on vacations with us. . . for us, knowing that we are going to homeschool makes all of these other decisions obvious.

We've read some inspiring and compelling books about homeschooling, but we've begun to notice that books that are not consciously about homeschooling sometimes give the very best arguments in its favor.

Just today I was rereading a section of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey and I came across this paragraph in the section on Organizational Mission Statements:

"Now, in the early stages - when a person is new to an organization or when a child in the family is young - you can pretty well give them a goal and they'll buy it, particularly if the relationship, orientation, and training are good.

But when people become more mature and their own lives take on a separate meaning, they want involvement, significant involvement.  And if they don't have that involvement, they don't buy it.  Then you have a significant motivational problem which cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created it."

Wow!  Isn't that a searing indictment of public schooling?  And notice that he is assuming that the "relationship, orientation, and training are good": this is a best-case scenario! 

People wonder why kids aren't more motivated at school, why they say "school is boring", or wonder "why do I need to learn this?".  It is because they are not allowed "significant involvement" in their education.  They don't get to choose what they are learning.  Their intrinsic motivation is stifled and curbed. 

If you could have dinner with a celebrity. . .

. . . who would it be?

My husband is a relatively serious open water distance swimmer.  He began training a year and a half ago.  He swam about a dozen events last summer, including the 10-mile Kingdom Swim in Newport, Vermont.  For non-swimmers like me, that's like a 40-mile run.  Today he swam 13.2 miles in the Hudson River (Stage 3 of the 8 Bridges Swim).

Every activity has its own celebrities, and open water distance swimming is no exception.  My husband keeps up with blogs and forums on the topic, so he knows the names of the top-notch athletes and some of their most impressive feats and records.

Today there were only three swimmers swimming the event, a kayaker for each, and a handful of support crew, including the event organizers (who are incredible and well-known open water swimmers) a true world-class celebrity of the sport.

I didn't realize who she was until after the event, and then said to my husband: "Oh, wow, she carried your box of gatorade and water to the boat!"  It was a heavy, unwieldy box, the dock to the boat was long, and it now seemed like that much more of a favor.

She also paced him for about ten minutes late in the swim, which gave him a huge morale boost.  She told us later that he sped way up while she was pacing him.

Eight of us - another swimmer and his wife, one organizer, and a few of the support staff including the celebrity - went out to dinner after the swim.  It was incredible to be able to ask the organizer about his English channel swim and the celebrity what her next challenge will be.  This really isn't my area of expertise so I made a few gaffes, like asking which direction he swam the English channel.  (Apparently the French have not allowed anyone to swim from France to England for decades.)  But mostly I felt like I was living out the answer to. . . "If you could have dinner with anyone in the world, who would it be?"

I used to always answer "Abraham Lincoln" (I think the question usually was posed to me as "any historical figure") and I sometimes tried to picture that dinner.  It was hard for me to imagine it being anything other than awkward.  I would be so shy and so unsure of what questions I should ask or what we should talk about.

But dinner tonight was a delight!  My husband can be socially shy, so I felt it my duty to find out as many things as he might want to know and engage the celebrity in as much conversation as I could.  It was quite easy, as she was charming and funny and quite happy to talk. 

What I love most is that to most of the world, she is not a celebrity.  No one in the restaurant knew who she was.  None of the waiters were lining up for autographs.  She is a world-class open water swimmer, holding a record for a channel swim among other impressive feats, yet outside of the tiny world of open water swimming she is unknown. 

Every activity has its own celebrities, special only to those in the know.  How perfect to be a normal person to most people and a celebrity only to those who understand and appreciate your talent.

Dining with our celebrity tonight, my husband and I were dazzled.

Picking Arugula in the Rain

My best friend has a huge backyard vegetable garden, with a tall fence to keep out deer and paths mulched down with damp cardboard.  Just before lunchtime today, we went out together with our two almost-two-year-old sons to pick arugula for our pear, walnut, cranberry, and blue cheese salad.

It was raining.  Perhaps you would say it was pouring.

Her son was decked out in a full rainsuit.  He grinned and laughed, stomping in mud puddles and dragging a pitchfork through the mud.

My son was daintier, wearing a beautiful borrowed felted jacket, trotting up and down the paths.

My best friend had a small basket.  She dropped arugula leaves in one by one as she picked them.

I kept an eye on the pitchfork and on my son's progress, occasionally scooping him up to whisk him away from trampling on plants and back onto one of the paths.

The rain soaked our faces and plastered down our hair.  The whole garden was full of rain.  The sky and the day were gray but the garden was swimming in greens.

My son ran stomping across the soaked cardboard, managing not to slip, his eyes shining and his smile bigger than his face.  Her son had managed to streak his face and clothes with mud; one particularly artistic streak of dark mud across his light hair made him look kind of punk rock, although his huge-toothed grin was pure sunshine.

When my son is happy, I am happy.

Perhaps if I didn't have a little son who loved to be outside in all weather, I might have stayed cozily inside, my hands wrapped around a mug of tea, watching the rain fall past the window.  But I do have such a little son, and so there I was, standing outside in the pouring rain. . .

I felt so present in that garden, in that rain, in that day, in that moment.  Wet and serene, I smiled and thought: Here's another gift of motherhood.

Slow Summer

I stand beside my son at the edge of the lake.  The sun is so low in the sky that even his shadow is long.  The sunlight is golden and our shadows flicker on the water.

"Do you see our shadows on the lake?" I ask.  I wave my arms wildly so that he can see that it is my shadow.

He looks at the shadows.  He looks at me.  I can see his mind coming to grips with the idea of shadows and people.  He looks at the water again.

"Oughh!" he says excitedly, pointing at a small white stone in the water.

"You can take that stone," I say encouragingly.

He reaches down for it, picks it up neatly, lifts it out of the water and drops it into the purple plastic turreted castle mold standing upright in the sand between us.  I had scooped the purple castle mold full of cold lake water a moment ago, so the stone falls through the water and hits the bottom with a plunk.

He looks again at the place where he had found the stone.  He squats down and presses his small baby hands into the shallow water.  They come up coated in wet sand.

"Uughh," he says expressively, showing his displeasure.

"If you want to wash off your hands, put them in gently, don't press them into the sand."

He puts his hands in the water again.  The water is so shallow that I am not sure he will be able to not touch the sandy bottom, but they come out clean and glistening, small and dimpled.

Motion catches my eye.  A bird is taking off from the surface of the lake.  As it rises higher and comes closer, the brilliant green of its head glistens in the light of the setting sun.

"Look!  A mallard!  A beautiful duck with a green head!"

My son's eyes go wide with excitement and he points at the flying duck, following its path with his finger until it vanishes from sight.

"Oh, look, I think that's Daddy coming back."  Far out across the little lake, by the little island, some orange dots are bobbing towards us: the life bouys my husband and the other open water masters swimmers are wearing while swimming their weekly Wednesday night swim. 

"You want to go back to the water wheels?"

"Yeh!"  The rough hummocks of sand cause his footing to falter and he reaches up with his little hand.  I take it, his fingers wrapping around and firmly grasping just one of my fingers.  I remind myself to stand up straight, as I have discovered that he is just tall enough for me to be able to do so.  We walk slowly holding hands a few feet up the steep beach to where we had gathered our treasure trove of sand toys around us.  Two water wheels stand center stage.

My son settles himself in his spot, in reach of every toy, the king of this domain.

"Where should I pour the water?" I ask.

He points to the blue water wheel, then changes his mind and points insistently at the red water wheel.  I pour some of the water out of the purple castle mold into the red water wheel, and we both watch the spinning wheel in fascination.

Something yellow catches my eye.

"A butterfly!"  Immediately he looks up, locks his eyes onto the butterfly, and watches it flutter with concentration and awe.  I wonder if he has seen a butterfly before and imagine that to him this butterfly, like so many other things in the world, might seem like an image from a picture book come to life.  How different a brightly-colored, simplified static picture of a butterfly is from the fragile, fluttering, vanishing live butterfly he is seeing now!

The sun is warm on my shoulders and the water deceptively inviting, but I know that the water temperature is only 64 degrees and small clouds keep sliding in front of the sun.  We have had a lot of rain and cold lately and my friends have been complaining about the slow start to summer.  But I love the anticipation of summer sometimes more than summer itself.  And I would like to take this slowly-starting summer slowly.  I want a slow summer.

I want a slow summer of quiet half hours at the shore of a lake.  I want a slow summer of duck and butterfly sightings.  I want a slow summer of sitting in wet sand with my son, experimenting with rocks and water and digging and pouring.  I want a slow summer of treasuring each miraculous and precious day spent with just my firstborn child.