Category: Homeschool

“Children and Art”

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August 30, 2021

My Dear Ones,

Now we are six. And what a six! Maya has burst onto our scene in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a move. She’s changed the game for sure. It’s your first day of school for the fall (and I expect it’s our last first day of homeschool for several years) and I’ve arrived in a state of complete disarray. I want to feel excited. I want to care enough to make it magical. But I have no energy left.

Energy is something I’ve got in spades, isn’t it? Energy and grit and capacity and good ideas. Behind us are ten years as a family full-to-bursting of beauty and growth. They’re full of folly too, and when I came here to write I found the Christmas letter from 2017. It’s the same tale I was coming to tell you here: I love you, I want to lay it all down, I can’t make it all perfect, Please forgive me for trying.

These four years have been worse than puppet theaters, vespers recitals, and generational anxiety. Sweet babies, these four years have made me crave those simpler challenges. It’s all been quite literally too much. But this is the mercy I’ve needed, because I can no longer haul my way through current demands to arrive at moments of crafted happiness with you. The current demands aren’t going away. They haven’t, no matter how I’ve tried to shoulder them, to lift them off of us like a boulder.

Instead it’s time to choose to stop. To sit. To rest. To love. This is what I’m learning in the school of sheer exhaustion. As I’m coming to understand Seurat’s problem as my own–“Look, I made a hat, where there never was a hat”–coming to recognize that I’m balancing “Children & Art” even though They advise against it–I’m beginning to see the visionary strengths I possess are in tension with love. They are even a danger to it.

I do not love the ideals of you. I do not love the images in my head of us homeschooling. I do not love the dreams I have of being with you. I will not love these: I will love you. Mary has patterned submission for us; I was learning that four years ago. But the submission she has patterned is a submission to love, and this is what I’m learning now. I’m learning it through Maya, because never has there been such a bumper-crop of love amongst us. The way you dote on her is stupifying. I just never knew there could be so much love. The way I feel as I lay her back in bed after a fifth night waking is stupifying. She’s my hard baby. Her needs and demands are unpredictable and frustrating, and I’m exhausted. But I never knew there could be so much love. And there was nothing else in the world our family needed to welcome amongst us but love.

Today as we begin, I pray love for us. I pray you feel my love in my presence. I pray you feel my love in acquiescence and acceptance. In my leaving the goals. In the unhung prayer wall artwork. In the way I accept this unfinished house we are still trying to fit ourselves into. I pray you find love, too: love for your work and love for yourselves. I see you needing both those things and I hope to keep my eyes on those objectives rather than becoming distracted by the scenes from my imagination which I feel an urge to conjure. Conjuring my imagination: this is a good description for how I live, and for how I’ve made the world for you. I’m proud of this, truly, and the proof has been in your delight. But the dark side of that moon is your stress and mine. And now at the end of two years of adrenaline, I cannot subject us to stress any longer. I cannot, I cannot, I cannot.

So I am choosing to stop. To be present to moments of utterly uncomplicated reality–to books and lessons and smiles and struggles however we encounter them. I am so desperate to be in your company and to be at rest. For me, this fall, love is shutting my ears every day to the song of the hat. Sure, I am forever an artist, and I will make beauty this fall. But I will not make myself or you wait for love while the beauty is unfinished.

I love you.

Love,

Mommy

(The literary references are to Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park with George” and that beloved-if-overly-optimistic little piece of children’s literature called “The Little Engine That Could.”)

A Lament and a Metaphor

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Here is a lament for the second morning of home schooling.

I meant to juggle two students during lesson time – a new milestone for us – but we came in for such a rough landing this summer that I wasn’t prepared yesterday, so neither of them “accomplished” much, and this morning my free time has to be allocated to lesson plans that should’ve happened in July.

I hoped my second grader would have time for piano practice in the morning, but he’s still struggling with buttons and I knew I shouldn’t help him so his shirt took him fifteen minutes.

I wanted to bask in our hour of Morning Time, but we sat on the brown couch (Rookie Mistake!) and they were all elbows and knees, and the three-year-old’s head makes a very poor window onto a page of text.

I planned us a calm afternoon routine, but I had to devote five hours to a doctor’s appointment 50 miles away, so my kids had to camp out at a friend’s house and I spent the entire day in a state of urgency.

I envisioned evenings being times of quiet togetherness, but I skated into town from that appointment just in time to eat the dinner my friend dropped off and run everyone out the door because baseball isn’t over yet.

I made my baby girl cry on her first day of kindergarten because she wouldn’t be straight with me about the Magical Disappearing Loom. She wouldn’t be straight with me about it because she was stressed. She was stressed because I was stressed. Multiple reports have it dangling from her backpack when she got home from her friend’s house. Three searches have yet to discover where it fell, somewhere within the tidy, five-foot-square mud room. We are all baffled by the mystery, like a twisted First Day of School Miracle.

I get Monday nights to myself for free time after my husband goes to bed early, but last night I had to spend it on cleaning the kitchen and then I went to bed and had a parade of stress dreams.

I mean to plant radishes today as our main school activity, but I haven’t had time to pull the first crops out yet so I’m going to sacrifice pace for getting work done that should’ve happened two weeks ago.

I’m serving tacos for dinner tonight, but that means attending to the four pounds of chicken that need to be prepped for the freezer.

Saturday as I triaged the remaining work to be done before our rough landing into this school year I recounted to my friend how I’d settled for Scotch Tape and Wite-Out on Friday night when my inclination, as always, was a freshly-typed revision with no trace of imperfection. Scotch Tape and Wite-Out may become my metaphor for this season. My friend wasn’t off the mark when she suggested perhaps Scotch Tape could be a spiritual discipline.

I’m just your average home educator, trying to gracefully walk somewhere between the lofty visions and the accompanying realities. Falling in love with baseball through library books sounds rather idyllic for a first week of school, until you factor in the dinosaur of a three-year-old sitting on your lap. He doesn’t understand how words get read.

So this morning I’m showing up for Day 2 with my metaphorical Scotch Tape in hand, ready to practice acceptance and presence, hoping to take more steps forward than back, wishing life could be as simple as I mean it to be. But it’s not: the reality behind that doctor’s appointment is that I’m scheduled for thyroid surgery next weekend, and your guess is as good as mine what that’s going to do my Teacher Voice. I’ve wrestled hard this summer with this lump in my throat, with this bump in the road, with all the implications of incapacity, both practical and spiritual.

I could’ve changed our school calendar to start after my surgery and recovery, but not only would it have sabotaged the gracious pace of No School Weeks I depend on, I think it might’ve missed the point. We’re not here to do a perfect dance, but to muddle through virtue practices while they slowly shape us. The math and French and baseball and weaving we learn along the way are incidentals by comparison, and any day is a good day to practice humility, honor, curiosity, attention, diligence.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s this simple line from my morning Psalm which jumped off the page at me just now:

“The Lord is my helper.”

OK, then.