Who's in Charge of the Kids Anyway?

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Yesterday I was at coffee with a cluster of my good female friends. (I am purposely not calling them girlfriends because I am already old enough to wonder if I should dye my grey streak and too old to be posting selfies to Facebook and calling my female compatriots "girlfriends.") Anyway, we were all of us drinking lattes at my friend's kitchen island while someone was making a hair-removing concoction of lime juice and sugar and the rest of us were watching in fascination.

My friend's oldest son, who is seventeen, was wandering around the kitchen and talking, and all of us were torn between enjoying his company and wanting him to go away so that we could talk about the things that you can't say in front of teenage boys. As he moved back and forth through the kitchen, lighting briefly on counter tops before hopping off again, his mother questioned him about his homework, suggested what speech he should choose in the next Speech and Debate tournament, and told him to go and weigh himself and see if he had gained any weight, like his swim coach wants. He remained rather congenial throughout these suggestions despite not really doing anything she said. Somehow, all of us fell into talking  about internet security and the necrophiliac-bestiality porn that we are all afraid our boys may be watching on the ginormous cesspool called the internet. That, and all the countless hours some of them spend staring at screens instead of doing their homework. My friend with the seventeen year-old talked about a program called Safe Eyes and how it was installed on her kids' devices now, allowing her to limit their screen time and block unsafe sites. Safe Eyes, I thought. I should write that down. Her son asked her to unblock YouTube, and she told him no, but she could unblock it temporarily that afternoon. He didn't get obviously angry. He's a good kid. They're a good family. A supportive, interested mother and a son, almost a man, still letting her do her job.

"You're lucky he lets you do that," I teased her. "My teenager would leave home if I did half of that [meaning half the instructions, half the incursion on what he has learned, to my dismay, to think of as his own business]."

Another very good friend (who also has a teenager) responded to me, saying with alarm, "Let? Who's in charge?"

I chose not to respond at that moment, sensing the presence of a complex subject, but I have been thinking about her words ever since then, and I think her question is both very understandable and also a really good starting point for discussion.

When I was myself a teenager, my parents (who, you have to understand, had only recently been hippies) tended to take the attitude that if they forbid me to do things, I was going to do them anyway, so what—really—was the point. This was not really untrue. However, not having the boundaries they might have given me to push against, I assumed both that I was not loved enough to protect and that the world was very unsafe. I felt like a person walking over a high and narrow bridge without guard rails on either side. It always seemed like I was in danger of falling, and I felt equally sure that nobody would catch me if I did. I looked for boys and best friends that might catch me and tested them all repeatedly by hovering over the edge. With my chronic drama, I used all of them up so that they could barely stand the effort of knowing me. And then I did whatever I did—to show them or to show my parents or to make someone come and rescue me.

What I learned from this, by the time I was eighteen and sober, is that no one can really stop you if you want to destroy yourself. Nobody's love for you, no matter how great, can substitute for your own sense of self-preservation. When I did finally return to safety, it was of my own volition. Many, many people loved me and helped me to do this, but they all made it clear that my decision to survive would be completely my own. I had always blamed my parents for what I thought was not loving me, and for being human and therefore imperfect, but in the end, the damage I had done to myself through alcohol, drugs, and anorexia was entirely my own responsibility. Both the mess and the cleaning up.

This was a good beginning, but I was twenty-five, with two children, when true sanity finally dawned on me. My oldest child was struggling in school and, due to an extremely unfortunate presentation of severe ADHD, was chronically in trouble for doing something awful to someone else. I tried my best. I was extremely young and extremely stupid and had assumed that if I provided what I thought were the right ingredients that my child would come out happy, successful, well-behaved, and nice. He would be like a cake that I had baked following a recipe. I had read countless parenting books. I knew the recipe, but the cake still kept coming out fucked-up. One day, it hit home to me what was so hard about parenting a kid like mine. It was that it was assumed that I was responsible not only for my parenting—for my own actions—but entirely for the actions that my child himself chose to take.

It was then that I realized what I had done to my own parents. I had held them responsible not simply for their own actions but for all of mine. I could only now begin to appreciate how painful that blame must have been. Stricken, I immediately called my mother and apologized. I can still feel now the horror that I felt at the moment when I realized what an asshole I had been to the people who loved me most, who had stood by me, always doing their best to help me in whatever way I could receive any help they gave. They had been afraid that if they laid down the law, they would lose me altogether—and they had been absolutely correct in having that fear. Instead, they had managed to maintain a relationship with me, and because they did, I had been able to stay with them and get well on my own, when I decided to.

Which brings me back to my friend's question. Who's in charge? The answer is actually obvious if you can look at the situation for what it is.

They are.

It seems to me that to think otherwise is to buy into a luxurious deception wherein you can go on thinking that your children are somehow within your control, that they are appendages of your own desires and intentions, and that, if you follow that sure-proof recipe, they will turn out as they "should." You can get away with the thinking this way when you happen to be parenting compliant children—children who, by temperament and circumstance, are not especially inclined to go to war with what you want. But when you are given a spirited child to parent, you quickly learn the folly of this kind of parenting.

Certainly, parents have enormous influence over their children. We make rules. We set examples. We encourage. We inspire. Good parenting is as important to children as good baking powder is to cake. Without it, nothing is going to rise. But here's the part most parents never grapple with—when you make rules, kids either choose to follow them or not. You can give consequences and you can give rewards, but if they don't want the reward as badly as they want to break the rule, or if getting the consequence is worth asserting their own will, they can and will break the rule anyway. Day after day, they comply with our smallest desires, with our endless instructions to get ready so that we're not late, with our requests that they eat vegetables, and our injunction that they go to school.

They do all of that of their own free will, and rarely do we appreciate that they Do. Not. Have. To. When we encourage or inspire, the child still has to be encouraged or inspired. They have to participate. They have to value their relationship with you enough that they are interested in what you say.

They get to choose—always.

A wise man in Alcoholics Anonymous once told me, "You can do anything you want—as long as you are willing to accept the consequences of your actions." Later, my friend Amy gave me the keys to the kingdom, saying "I think your problems parenting come down to this essential problem of belief. You think you should be in control of him and not that you are two human beings trying your best to work out your relationship."

Realizing that she was right may have saved me from committing child abuse (or some other horrible result of my constant stress in the face of not getting what I wanted).

These are now the truths I choose to parent from: The choices are theirs. The consequences are theirs. Just as my choices and consequences are mine. I make as many rules as any other parent. I follow my kids around, entreating them to complete their homework. I threaten cell phone confiscation. I follow up. I praise. I hug. I rub backs. I apologize. I lay down the law. I build and nurture our relationship. But I never forget that my children's choices belong to them. That, in fact, they don't have to do a thing I say. I can restrict their internet and, if they want to, they can watch porn over at the house of a friend whose mother does not. I can pack them healthy lunches, and they can toss them and spend all their allowance on Fun'yuns and Arizona iced tea. I can spend sixteen years raising them to value themselves, to work hard and try and make a difference, and they can still choose to ditch class, smoke pot, or bully other kids, if that's what they've set their hearts upon.

Parents who have never dealt with real behavior problems in their children are like wealthy people who have never known what it is to walk around with holes in their shoes until next paycheck, who have never had to choose between groceries and electricity, who have never had to stay home praying with a fevered child, terrified and wondering what the emergency room might cost. Studies now show that we all make the same mistake about our good fortune: We think we deserve it. We think we have earned it. And we think—all of us—that those that don't have what we have simply have not done as well as we.

I think it all the time. My kids know how to think critically because I engage them in interesting conversations. My kids know how to work because I expect them to do so at home. My kids are smart because I picked good books, because we don't have cable, because we value education in our home. I have done a damn good job, I think.

That kid with the meth problem? Bad parenting. How the Hell are they letting him do that? The bossy tyrant in my sons' play group? Naturally, he's a bully. Just look at how cute his mom thinks his antics are. That woman getting the divorce? Bad picker. Why would you choose to marry a man like that?

As long as I can continue thinking I have what I deserve—bright, drug-free, compliant kids, a supportive husband, a vegetable box filled with organic food—I am protected. I don't really have to worry about teenage addicts, about painful divorce proceedings, about how I might feed a family on what I could buy with SNAP. Even if I feel compassion, I still don't have to feel fear.

But it's a lie. I don't have what I deserve. I have what I am blessed with. I have kids who, every day, choose to let me parent them, kids who do the dishes when I ask them, kids who listen to what I say and text me, over and over this letter:

"K."  [Yes, Mom, I'll do what you say.]

Except when they don't. And whenever they don't, I am presented with the conundrum at the heart of all human interactions: that I very badly want what I cannot make another do.

It is at these moments that I find I can use force, I can direct anger like a fire hose in hopes that I scare them into doing as I say, I can cajole, I can entreat, I can cry. I can make new rules. I can enforce existing rules. I can be authoritative but not authoritarian. Not permissive. Empathetic, but strong. And how will they respond? I am suddenly aware that my relationship with that child that is almost a man hangs by one tiny, frayed thread of remaining belief that I am the parent and he is the child, that I am really the authority figure governing his life. We have to agree to this reality—both of us—or we lose each other. We damage ourselves.

And, again, he agrees to believe that I am the parent, that my rules govern his behavior, that he still needs me and I can be of some use to him. He does not have to believe this, but he does—as much as an act of love for me as because it is easier to think it true. The fraying thread of his childhood thread gets smaller every time, but he still believes this. He still looks at me and answers "K."

At that moment, I am blessed by his choice—as I am blessed that my husband doesn't leave me, as I am blessed that, despite the economy, I still have vegetables in my frig to eat. I may be blessed, but one thing I am not is in charge of anyone's choices. I am again granted permission based on the shared illusion we call parenthood.

Here is a strong-willed, intelligent, complex human and he has given me the honor of continuing to let me be his mom. If he wasn't as much like me as he is—strong-willed, feisty, single-minded—I wouldn't have to know that I'm not really in charge. I wouldn't have to deal with the fact that I want very badly something which I cannot make another person do. I could go on believing I am the only parent he has—that there are no teachers, no peers, no media, no unexpected disasters, and no authority within the young man himself.

To believe all this would be easier, but it isn't true.

And so I remain profoundly grateful to have strong-willed children. I am a better human for not thinking I am in charge of what I'm not in charge of, that I am the master of what I am merely the servant of. I cannot fall asleep to the truth because they won't let me. I am a humbler and more compassionate human being for every single time they have looked at me and, instead of saying "K"—have told me "No."

My Father

When I was a little girl, my father drove an old white Plymouth Duster, and he used to let me climb in through the window like I was one of the Dukes of Hazzard, getting in by way of my grubby sandals on his seat. When he came to pick me up from my mom's house on weekends, I would run out to the old, familiar car and get in, with a great joy suddenly inside me—a joy made of the musty, closed-in, old smell of his car, with its floorboards full of magazines that shifted under my feet, and the not-yet-known location we might go to eat our lunch, and the possibility of adult attention that I could have entirely to myself.

At my dad's apartment, when he first had an apartment away from us, I would sit behind his kitchen counter and he let me order my snack from him. What I always ordered was Marie cookies a glass of Like cola. He was prepared for this and produced them right away. I ate the sweet biscuits and drank the soda and then we walked across the way to where there was oak forest and supernatural creatures could be found. I was seven at the time. I talked about the Carrion Crow and her minions and my dad listened with interest, and hummed. Always, he whistled and hummed. I drew pictures of the planet I said I had come from and my dad looked at them, asked questions, and approved. I made up songs and my dad recorded them, set them to a drum machine, and played them back for both of us. I wrote up small performances and cast him in roles which he performed as I told him to.

"Pretend that I'm a mermaid," I told him.

And he did.

Dad didn't sign me up for music lessons that I hadn't asked for. He didn't give me unasked-for books on how to draw or how to write. He didn't correct my spelling or my choice of words. He just provided an interested audience and let my encouraged creativity work out the rest. As a result, I was a writer and an actress and a singer, an artist and a playwright. I needed no one's permission, having been given the impression that my own permission was enough.

When I was a teenager, I moved in with Dad and that was when he taught me how to cook. Carefully, he'd walk through one meal or the other, explaining how to mince garlic and how to make a roux, how to slowly add liquid, how to thicken a too-thin sauce. Once, for his birthday, I tried to make Mushu Vegetables with homemade pancakes and the pancakes were revoltingly lumpy and thick, inedible. Dad wasn't disappointed. He never seemed to be expecting anything. He was pleased that I had tried.

When, at 22, I was in the hospital giving birth to my first baby, Dad called us on the phone.

"I wonder if there's going to be heavy traffic heading up that way," he said.

We told him it would be a little while, that he should wait.

Later, he called again.

"It's getting close to rush hour," he pointed out.

Still not having the baby, we said.

The phone rang again.

"I'm on my way," he said.

He arrived just after Rowan came into the world, like a tiny, angry wizened grape, and was lifted off by scrub-clad cherubim to the Intensive Care Nursery away from me.

"Do you want me to order Thai food?" Dad asked.

We said yes.

Dad is a dream-tender. Last summer, when my youngest, Mikalh, came upon a street musician in the Boston Commons who handed him a small violin to try, he decided to become a violinist. I called my dad.

"Can you pay for lessons?" I asked.

"Yes!" he said, enthusiastically.

When my middle child, Devin, wanted to go to an expensive sleep-away music camp in the mountains this summer to study his tuba, he called Grandpa Rick.

"We're trying to raise 200 more dollars," Devin said. "Just give what you can."

Dad sent all of it.

Dad reads my blog and he tells me, when we talk on the phone, how much he enjoys what I am writing. I tell him how much I have to learn as a writer and he tells me, "Don't sell yourself short."

My dad, knows something about creativity because he, himself, is an accomplished musician. He has studied Indian music and Jazz and learned to play six instruments. Now, his favorite instrument is his voice.

Thanks, Dad, for 38 years of encouragement. Happy Father's Day to you.

Strong Dreams

Photo by Todd Nickols

You are the youngest, and the one to whom childhood still belongs. You are the one with the LEGOs strewn all over the floor like tiny dangerous pebbles, the one with a thousand costumes you still wear, the one who looks for leprechauns. You are the only one of these magical creatures—a child still being a child—that I still have. You wake daily, with tousled hair and bleary eyes, ready to climb into laps and cling like a monkey to whichever parent, or whichever brother, is holding you. You come downstairs, suddenly awake and planning to play, and are interrupted by ordinary life again and again, turning suddenly to glare at me, your delicate face framed by wild hair still unbrushed, so that you look like a cross Albert Einstein with his finger in a light socket.

"I need you to eat because it's time for school," I tell you.

Harumph to all my plans.

Other times you are very congenial about the paces I put you through. You indulge me, like I'm a senile auntie whose time on this earth may be limited, doing your grammar pages beautifully with periodic declarations of "You're the best Mommy in the world." There, there, now, old woman. Don't fret. I've put marks on your pages. Now let us get dressed up and travel to Ancient Greece.

You've taken to quoting the Buddha. This is disconcerting in someone so small. Your mind is a place of spiritual largeness, a sky in which you walk from star to star and explore the wisdom of the Lakota, the Ancient East, and talk to Aslan, asking him if he is Jesus and what it means to have faith. You think about everything; you already have all the right questions to hand.

Outside, you build a trading post, a rabbit trap, a long house. You snare rabbits, you tell me, and use all their parts. You remembered, you say, to say a prayer of thank you for their lives. And can you have some candy now? And some juice?

"I have strong dreams," you tell me.

Yes, you do. You are made of strong dreams. Dreams that sometimes scare you, that rip your insides out.

"I can see it, Mom. I can see just what it would look like. I can see everything just how it would be." Fear touches each feature as you speak to me. Waking dreams of sadness. Sleeping dreams of monsters in the night. Around your room, we cast strong spells to keep both out, the two of us.

I think you are made to walk what wiser cultures called the spirit path. I think your time here is to be spent, in part, bearing the discomfort of living in the loud and angry world of war and televisions and Walmarts and finding your way back to the unity of the stars—that sense that you already have and talk about that we are all one, we are all sacred, we are all a part of God.

I know a little bit about this, because I was a child like you.

I lift you in my arms and carry you, because I still can and I won't always be able to. I hold you close so that I can feel your heartbeat against mine. And, for now, all the bad dreams are kept at bay by this simple act of love.

Today, you are eight. You will wake shortly and see that balloons rise above your bed. You will come down, excited, and get a special smoothie and some cereal you really wanted at the store. You will come down, trailing God in your blankets, rubbing stardust from your eyes, and join me as we celebrate the occasion of your birth in this mortal world.

Happy birthday, child of wonder. May this year bring strong dreams of wisdom and peace to you.

Mother's Day: Just the Way it Is

Techno music is blasting at Chili's. The clatter of stacked plates on trays erupt from the nearby kitchen. A cacophony of voices; plates glancing against each other with the force of swords in battle; glasses set on tables like mallets against sheet metal. Lights vibrating like strobes. Silently, I rest my head on the table. It is Mother's Day. 8 PM. Three hours of driving from Durango and we are in Española where the streets are lined with fast food Walmart chain link desperation poverty, and nature has been tucked away behind the concrete asphalt—just far enough away that it is lost. Forty-five minutes from home. They have to eat. My body is screaming, dying, assaulting me. My legs are going numb. A pain from my lower back rises up, wrenches my neck, twists my jaw and binds my head. I cannot cry in Chili's and so I keep my face still, impassive, expressionless, vacant.

"Happy Mother's Day," Devin says and smiles at me, checking.

And so I am struck again with the brutal reminder of what I'm doing wrong. Carpe Diem. I am supposed to be having a good time. I smile and the stretched, thin smile just makes it worse. I hate myself in this moment—for being the wrong mother. The mother of whom it is said constantly by one child to another, "She has a headache," the mother who needs it to be quiet, the mother who isn't having a nice Mother's Day, the mother who wishes she wasn't in Chili's, who can't eat anything normal at restaurants, who needs to support her neck—and can someone get her a place to rest her back, the mother—the only mother—who is too tired from watching soccer games to walk steadily to the car, the only mother in the world who gets frustrated at the sound of her children's laughter because it's like a bomb going off in her head. (There was a time, wasn't there, when laughter was not like a bomb going off in my head...I wish I'd known then how lucky I was.)

And I've just had it. I'm through with myself. I give up. I am supposed to be able to accept this pain. I am suffering because I resist it. If I could accept it, then it wouldn't hurt so much. If I could accept my children and their loud, bomb-blasting laughter and repeated getting up from the table into the walkways and the path of servers, then there would be no suffering. If I could accept that I can't accept it, then there would be no suffering. But there is suffering. There is tremendous suffering. And it is contagious. It infects everyone at the table as they hang by their fingernails on the expectation of my delight in Mother's Day, making small talk and glancing at me nervously. I am so—disappointing.

There is one job given to me worth doing—to be a mother—and I am screwing it up. And I cannot seem to figure out how to do it better than I am.

I think there is some lesson here, just out of reach; just behind a corner, that I can't see yet. I tell myself I am not supposed to see it yet. I am supposed to hang out here, increasingly desperate, until I am ready to learn something. Meanwhile, my ego is having a temper tantrum: throwing blocks and spitting, pulling hair, refusing to accept reality—just wanting anything other than the body and the familiar set of thoughts and emotions I've come to know as "me"—wanting to cut to the chase, come out on top; be crowned as a winner, able to laugh at my former idiocy, and have laurels set upon my brow. I want very badly to be an inspiration to everybody, unearned, and I don't want to spend time with the ugliness of pain and fear and disappointment and wanting things I cannot have. I want to to have survived.

This is what I'm like: I am not good with pain. But I like the after. I like the accomplishment of having lived through things. I feel elevated by the times I've spent with darkness, the prayers I've prayed in desperation, the emptiness I've stood in and stayed with and learned from. But I don't write much to you from there. I write from the after: the bliss where a child is suddenly handed to me, wrapped in warm receiving blankets—not the moment when I'm screaming that I cannot do this, that I want you to shoot me, that I don't have what it takes. I want you to see the victory and not the sobbing, bloody slog that took me there. I don't want you to see me scream.

But here I am anyway. When I am in pain, I shut down. I focus my eyes on a nearby tree through a window and I wait for the pain to go away. I pretend that I don't have a body, that I am astral projecting somewhere else. Every time someone speaks to me, asking if they can do anything, it disrupts my small sense of relief. When I am in fear, I press it deep down like a seed, far into the soil, so deep that the light can't get there, and I stand on top of where it's planted and bite my cuticles. When I am angry, I breathe deeply and focus on a stillness that I think is inner peace. I am shocked when fire blazes out of nowhere—anger out of nothing. Because I really wasn't angry. I was sure I was doing fine.

I think—have thought all my life—that I can get 'round myself; that I can cheat, that there's some way to get quickly to the moment of glory without paying the price of pain. Maybe this is why I get to have fibromyalgia and migraines and TMJ. I don't really believe in divine plans per se, but I do believe that the Universe just keeps presenting us naturally with opportunities to master things we haven't yet been able to learn. (The more I think about it, the more I think these two ideas are basically the same thing anyway.) If I have failed to learn how to live with myself while recovering from alcoholism and bulimia or getting divorced or having three kids or falling in love, then I get to keep developing chronic painful conditions, so that I can practice noticing that I can't really escape suffering. The Universe is boundless, generous, infinite. I get every chance I need to learn again.

At least, true or not, cast in that light—I'm doing this exactly the right way. I'm just a child being raised and making mistakes as I grow up. I'm up in the walkway of the restaurant again and I'm causing a disturbance, but I still get a chance to sit in a restaurant once more. No one ever takes the chance away. I still have my menu and my drink and my fork; I am taken here again and again, no matter what kind of scene I make.

"Suffer, Child," the Universe seems to say kindly. "Suffer your physical frailty. Suffer the pain of not being who you think I want. All these ideas are yours: 'Should be happy,' 'should be well,' 'should be calm.' Suffer as long as you need to. I will wait for you. There's all the time in the world."

And so my instruction is to suffer and really do it well; really notice it; to not give it short-shrift—to suffer so well and so authentically that I'm right there with myself—to finally just give up and let the suffering be there.

I can't do it yet. But I'm trying.

So—all this is to say: Happy Mother's Day. It's fine just the way it is.

From Womb to Waves Goodbye

The school year is drawing to a close. I can't think of a single year when I have learned so much about what education is and isn't and how parenting fits in, and doesn't, as I have this year. I am in no way done learning. I started my homeschool year with my son attempting to replicate school at home—only better, I thought, and more tailored to his needs—and I have learned that homeschooling generally doesn't work that way for a reason. Seeing what and how things can be learned by doing less has been eye-opening, but more than anything, if I'm honest, it has been terrifying. When my kid learns without my overtly planning everything, I feel moorless and I come right up against the deep and paralyzing dread that I am ruining him, setting him up to fail, leaving him behind, not doing my job. These moments of doing nothing are scary. All evidence to the contrary, doing what is closest to what everyone else is doing just seems the safest thing. I have learned that I will just keep on doing this act of imitation until I realize that I am sacrificing my son's happiness on the altar of my fears. So, now I'm looking again and asking myself how much of what I ask of him is what he needs and how much of it is like a little comforting rhyme that I repeat to myself in the dark so the closet zombies will not come.

Parenting my older kids has also been an opportunity for growth. With one child suffering from chronic health issues and the other peaking at perfect grades before suffering apathy and depressed disinterest in school, this year, I have learned that I care more about my kids' well-being than their grades. I didn't used to know that they were necessarily separate things or could be in conflict occasionally. I used to feel like if I just kept baking special cookies and serving healthy salads with dinner and giving hugs and attention and guidance, then the grades would obviously come. It turns out life is more complex than this.

At the very core, I've learned that my worst fear—that my kids will turn out like me—says something about the gratitude and joy for my life that I'm clutching to myself and hiding from my kids, lest they also wish to become teenage alcoholics who don't complete college. It's time to give that up.

The ultimate task of parenting, from womb to waves goodbye, seems to have something to do with first connecting with this other human so that you do not know where they end and you begin and then learning to understand that you are ultimately not in control and not responsible for how their lives shape themselves. To the extent that I can do this well—that is when I love. As long as I am attempting to control the experience and trajectory of a person who isn't me, the two of us will suffer, because I cannot make them grow up to whole and happy, I cannot make them find their way to spirituality, and I cannot even make them clean their rooms, no matter how much love I mean. I have power to influence and love, but none to control.

I am profoundly grateful to these children of mine for letting me test-drive my infant soul with their very lives. They are quite forgiving, quite patient with the efforts of all these silly adults to control their hearts with our tiny dams. They roll over us—sometimes smiling, sometimes yelling—like the swelling ocean breaking over our walls. They ebb back, patiently cooperating, and then surge forward, to finally grasp the adulthood that was always theirs.

Mexico

They are back—the husband and my eldest son, back from Mexico, where they went to build houses, back with tents and foam sleeping pads and dusty, dirty laundry and grime deep in their hair. They are back with gifts for the family: a chicken planter for me, some t-shirts, and a wonderful wrestling mask from Rowan for Mikalh.

They are back with inspiration. They left as pioneers—the first large batch of members from of our church to go on the  mission trip with the local church just down the road. They have come back having touched the sacredness of shared purpose and accomplishment.

In the parking lot, the vans pulled in, and out came teenagers, dazed and weary from the road. Behind  and around them were the shadows of even more tired adults. The kids wore t-shirts with lots and lots of tiny words, almost too many to read: "I want to have billions in the bank. I want to be successful. I want all of my endeavors to turn to gold." "DISRUPTED" was written through these words all across the front.

"It says sex on this shirt, Mom," Rowan demonstrated.

In the dark, the kids couldn't stop hugging each other. They piled around one kid and cooed his name. They jumped on each other.

"I want to go home," Rowan said. "I have to pee and vomit and take a shower." Fast food—road food—doesn't agree with him.

"You can pee and vomit in the building," Mike told him. "But the shower will have to wait. We have to unload and clean up."

Rowan, unperturbed, went off, hauled tools, put his belongings in the van. Minutes rolled by and I stood and watched the kids, glowing like fireflies in the dark.

"Are you all packed up?" I asked Rowan, as he passed by.

"Yes, he can go now," Mike told me.

But I watched Rowan, watched all the kids. In the dark, they hung together like insects clustered onto life-giving plants. As soon as they started leaving, it would really be over and they'd never all be together again. They hung in hallelujahs, in hugs, in glorious filthiness—together.

Then, finally, they started to disperse. All at the same time.

"I'm going to go home, take a shower, and go back to Mexico to build three more houses," Rowan suddenly said.

"Mom," he asked me as we got into the van, "I'm going again next year, right?"

"As long as you want, babe," I told him.

"When we handed over the key," he told me animatedly "I felt something in the place where I should have a heart."

So, I've decided that I really don't care if my son earns a lot of money or makes really great grades or does really well in his sport. Those things are nice, and sometimes helpful, but what I want for him—more than anything—is what he just found: his spirit somewhere, a reason beyond himself to be alive.

It's really all you ever need.

Fortitude, and the Secret Truth about Home Education

The kind of thing I photograph: Here is my child, cooperating with a plot to teach classification using LEGOS. 

Two weeks ago, my fifteen year-old was in my kitchen dry-heaving into a garbage can. Eyes watering, between retches he shot questions at me about what his coach would say when he missed track practice, the details of a math test, and the history assignment he needed to turn in.

"Go lie down," I told him. "You cannot go to class if you're throwing up. They won't want you there." I placed a bowl next to him on the couch, smoothed back his darkening blond hair and again directed his homeschooled youngest brother, who was spinning in circles with a bow, to continue practicing his violin. My seven year-old's eyes, now dark with something like evil, fixed on me, and a harumph escaped his tiny chest. He collected his instrument with all the enthusiasm of a person holding a now-familiar dead rat.

"Nice bow grip,"  I told him. "Check your foot position."

This is the sort of comment I am supposed to make.

"My feet are in position," he told me, imperiously, and turned to play as if drawing a crossbow, ninety degrees from the music stand—like Hawkeye at Carnegie.

Trapped between the rapidly approaching walls of pleasant indifference on one side and firm and loving commitment on the other, I chose the latter and was crushed between them like a bug.

"Fine," he wailed. "I'll do it your way! I can't even see my music!"

Obstinately, he thrust his violin into an unnatural position, his waist twisted, shoulders thrust and lifted, and, standing uncomfortably, abutted the scroll into his stand. "See?!"

"OK. I'm not going to argue with you," I explained, impersonating Ghandi, as passive and loving as a gently swaying shrub. I would let his anger complete itself without my participation. I was a master of non-violent communication. I was modeling patience. I let myself fill with inner peace.

In the new and ridiculous position, my youngest applied his bow and let out several tortured sounds: "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" played as the unsettling interlude to a Megadeth song.

"See?" he continued to demonstrate.

"I don't want to argue," I explained, from my happy place, as peaceful as a dove.

Moans sounded from the couch, and again I stroked my oldest's hair.

The argument, with or without me, continued, the pitch of violin and voice reaching a sustained staccato whine.

"Put it away then," came a voice from my lips, sounding a bit more cross than Ghandi's would have, "If you can't do it without getting angry, put it away and do your grammar then."

The tone was somewhat grumpy, I reasoned, but this is more or less exactly what the great man told Britain, if I remember correctly. "If you can't stop acting like an asshole, just take your crap and leave," he said. "I'm setting boundaries here."

Having failed to embody non-violent communication, I now attempted to channel Gloria Steinem: rational refusal to be stepped upon, firm boundaries, an unflappable sense of self.

"I don't think," I said, firmly, "that I told you to pet the dog." My youngest was stooped by the couch, midway between violin and grammar book, and, for two full minutes, had now been gently stroking our family pet. "The choices are: continue playing violin but without whining or stop, and come and do your grammar pages."

I was glad that, from my years of work at an elementary school, I have retained my teacher voice.

He put the violin away and stomped over to the open grammar book where, subsequently he decorated several lines of grammar with wavy patterns, like verbal Easter eggs. I erased the lines. He aggressively misread directions. I corrected. He scrawled in cuneiform. He was told to sit on the stairs, was talked to, agreed to behave, then came back and started up again. Gloria Steinem began to stew.

For several more minutes, I had strong boundaries and an unflappable sense of self. Following the tenth act of grammatical sabotage, I was broken. I became June Cleaver and turned, pleadingly to my half-dead teenager on my couch, a look of constrained panic in my eyes. Let the oldest male in the house save me, the look said. I am clearly dying here, and it is only 9 AM.

"Stop being so difficult," he told his brother, firmly, in his deepening male voice. "You could have had this done by now."

There. See? From Ghandi to June Cleaver in so many minutes and we've not even finished one page of work. I blamed my child for this transformation. Even Ghandi couldn't have stood up to this kind of bull crap. My eldest slumped back into the couch cushions, disintegrating into nausea, as his brother, now chastened, did some work.

Things went on from there, haltingly, in fits and starts. Handwriting was aggressively looped and scrawled, subjects insulted verbs. We were on thin ice the entire morning period until I mentioned the hero's cycle to him. Then, suddenly, pencil racing, the rebel, now a writer, put down the beginnings of the heroic tale of Silly Dog and Super Kitty Paws, his unexplained rage forgotten. Watching him with gratitude and relief, I turned into Sigmund Freud.

What was his problem anyway? (The mother. Freud's answer is always the mother.) After several moments of irritated contemplation, I switched psychiatrists, becoming instead an anonymous, empowering female—frumpy but clever, and wearing low beige heels.

Jealous? Could he be jealous that his brother is home, lying moaning on the couch?

At any rate, the cloud of dark rage seemed to have passed. We went on to the subject of history and finished strong with a start on the early Greeks. I wondered only periodically if it would be worthwhile to get him a psychiatric evaluation. (Perhaps, if I had not, at some point, had this thought of all my kids, I might have taken it more seriously.)

The day ended with laughing neighbor children in my backyard, petting our chickens, and with the quiet work of making a green salad and thinking in the kitchen by myself. Again we had made it through.

I follow several home-school blogs. On one of them, the mother—who is a fabulous photographer—splashes the web with images of her gorgeous  almond-eyed children dressed like fairies, felting rainbow wool, having tea parties with real china, and studying clouds through the pursuit of art. On another, the mother publishes complicated unit studies she has developed to tackle everything from dinosaurs to natives of the northwest coast. From hers, too, smiling, happy children beam up, engaged in hands-on learning, and absorbed in happy, loving play with their adoring mom.

Searching Google, it would be easy to think that home schooling is the art of taking little children who might, under normal circumstances, drive anyone crazy and making for them a utopian educational dreamscape—a measure I'm sure I could never meet. It's daunting—this idea we have of what education might really be, what we have to make it. I also think it's crap.

Maybe it's because I've worked in public school classrooms and seen the debacle of a kindergarten child who has peed through her pants onto the gym floor—just before the other children race back in her direction during a game of tag. (School: the place you send your child to slide through a puddle of someone else's pee.) I've seen the ever-patient teacher, just like me, lose her patience with the child who refused to do his work. I've seen the worksheets—some clever, some boring—the art projects, the play-dough ground into the floor.

Human beings work at schools, as frail and real as mothers. You would not confuse them with saints, once the parent volunteers leave and shut the door. They are ordinary, like I am. Ordinary in personality and extraordinary in commitment. They are dedicated, kind, wrong-headed, inspired, angelic and destructive, and doing the best they can.

Maybe having seen all that, I realize that it's always easy to assume that if I can send my kid Somewhere Else, that Somewhere Else will do a better job than messy, impatient me. (Which, of course, is fine, as long as it's true in the particular case of my kid. I've decided I have to evaluate the truth of this notion on a case-by-case basis, one child and one year at a time.)

I am guilty of this misrepresentation. I put pictures up on Facebook—show my friends the gorgeous paper fractals (without any pictures of me snapping at my child that he's not gluing fast enough) or the day we were Phoenicians and used blueberries to dye our socks. I show them our ecology with Skittles, our owl pellet dissection—replete with smiling faces and a love of learning glowing in the scene. I leave off the glowers and stomping feet, the jealousy and defiance, my ineffectiveness to the background sound of dry heaving on my couch.

But all of these together are the truth of what it takes to educate my child. Because I worked at his school and was stopped in the hallway in the middle of my workday to discuss the stomping feet and scribbling that happened there, I have no illusion it would go better Somewhere Else.

My point is not that everyone should homeschool. It's not necessary for every child, and most parents don't want to. And that is that. (Most of these pro- and con- conversations about child-raising come down, of course, to what a parent wants to do or not. The rest is largely noise.) My point is that education, like parenting, and like life in general, is kind of messy. It requires talent, commitment, and a sort of stubbornness. It seems to require a lot of toilet paper tubes and white glue and endless pencils and most of it does not make good photographs. Perhaps that's why we respect teachers—because we know they're in the trenches with our children, their hair flecked with glue and scraps of paper, and that they're demonstrating a patience we fear we may not have.

They probably don't have it either, sometimes. Then, they take a breath and just keep being there. That's when they have fortitude and they have no other choice. There is no one else coming to teach this trying child.

Fortitude. In parenting and in life, it can get you to the end of a great many trying days.

Bones in a Bag: the Reduction of the Human Soul

Photo Credit: by T.Voekler Wikimedia Commons

On my kitchen counter: a half-gallon of vanilla soy milk, two cookbooks, an empty cup for coffee, a naked paper towel tube, and rodent bones in a bag.

I pour myself the cup of coffee, pick up the tube and, looking through it like a telescope, wonder about voles. An interesting fate, that—to have ended up inside an owl pellet carefully wrapped inside tin foil, crowded together with the skeletal remains of other voles. Then to be slipped into a plastic sleeve and stapled together with a minute magnifying glass and plastic forceps, sold as a hands-on element in a literature unit on Poppy, a book which has no voles.

Much later, after waiting all winter in a drawer, to be found, in pieces. "Oh, yes! Here is a complete skull!" Vertebrae choked with digested grey fur laid out like beads in a row, alongside slender ribs like tiny Cs which opened their jaws too wide. A jawbone complete with yellowed teeth, hipbones like odd spatulas. "Look, honey! It's a vole!"

This vole is old now. Its great-great-great-great grandchildren have probably already been raised and have bred and are now, as we speak, being consumed by hungry owls. The vole is archaic. Alive, he'd be a relic, a Civil War re-enactor in the streets of the lively now. He could tell us tales of the ways voles used to live—the simple, idyllic days of vole-ish harmony that went before. Instead, though, he's been scraped off my counter and placed carefully into a sandwich bag.

I am forced to wonder: what would I be, once reduced to my components, laid bare and labeled according to a chart? This metatarsal laughed uproariously at The Big Lebowski, no matter how many times it saw the movie—it just laughed and laughed aloud? The third vertebrae up loved lilacs. The lower mandible made Christmas cookies with its children every year. This rib cage, intact, provided the nurturance that raised three sons with all its heart.

It seems ridiculous, to be so reduced. And yet we do reduce each other. Right down to the bones.

I had, this week, a most unsatisfying set of conversations with some of the staff of my son's school. It has been difficult to put my finger on what was so insidiously soul-sucking about these exchanges, why they felt like entering a strange land in search of allies and leaving instead at war. Looking at this bag of bones, I know.

In the reflected words of the school counselor, I felt myself made small as the spit-up vole—felt my heart picked up and examined, laid down and labeled; one word applied, unsaid but loudly shouted, for all the fierce love for my child, my desperate desire to see the world do right by him:

"Difficult."

And so the label will be stuck. Ranks closed, rude politenesses were offered, the smug certainty of barely-restrained scorn was held in check until the counselor could get off the phone and tell a colleague what a pain in the ass this woman was.

I am sorry that it went that way instead of how I hoped. I look in this bag. Bones, devoid of flesh and meaning. Devoid of motherhood or fatherhood, absent context—swallowed and spit up. I do not know this counselor, whether she is a mother, whether she ever lost a child. I do not know the mistakes she thinks she made or the wars she is fighting to preserve the children placed under her charge. She is nothing to me but the woman who is treating me like a problem while I am trying to help my child.

Perhaps I will write her a thank you note. Or, perhaps, I will just remember that I know less of her than nothing—her name and her title, as meaningless, after all, as old bones in a bag.

Of Cats and Camellias, Boys and Girls

My son doing boy stuff, back in 2010, when he had his hair long and people kept thinking he was a girl. Picture by "B" Gordon

I stood on the sidewalk, watching the boys. They were playing, hollering, running—doing the crazy things that boys together do. I’d walked to Daniel’s house hoping to find him by himself and instead he had a friend. With the friend here, the rules of our usual friendship did not apply. No tea parties or dress-ups, no complicated fantasy book schemes. Should I go home? I stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, which was wet with recent rain, shifting my feet and waiting for clarity about what to do. On the ground around me, worms were drowning, and sodden flowers fallen from the yard’s camellia bush lay flattened on the ground. The sky was ready to erupt again at any time.

“Bam!” yelled the second boy, a redhead. A wet camellia went spinning through the air. I dodged it—barely.

“It’s a bomb,” he said. “You’re dead.”

I didn't want to be dead. I stood there, calculating stubbornly my response to a scenario in which I did not want to play my part.

“Come on, Tara,” entreated Daniel. “Play along. You can bomb him back.”

Well, I supposed. I bent, picked up a flower. It was as soggy as a sponge. Pink like Pepto Bismol, rose-like, damaged by the rain. In my hand it felt substantial, a water balloon ready to be tossed. I chucked it. I couldn't aim and it missed the redhead by a yard. It landed with a satisfying splat on the concrete by the steps. The boy ran away, whooping. The war was on.

Racing, smacking through wet shrubberies, running over saturated grass, we gathered up camellias and lobbed them at one another until out of breath. I was hit once. Surprisingly, it stung. The flower smarted when it smacked me on the cheek! Nothing but petals and yet there it landed, hard as a mother’s warning slap, leaving my cheek red. I felt anger rise up in my gut.

“I’m going to get you now!” I roared.

I came home later, covered in mud, the marks of petals on my skin. The world of boys was enchanting. A world of war and terrible aggression—of letting go and going after—it was a carnival ride, and sword wounds just a bloody grin.

Boys had never really been interesting before, as boys, as suddenly they were.

*

"Come back here!" I yelled and then muffled my voice. The cat with the leaves in her tail would not consent to let me place the tail in water, and relieve her of the leaves. And if someone caught me at this, I was definitely going to be in trouble. Adults, who never really undertook anything of importance, would not understand.

"Bear-Bear!" I insisted.

The bowl of water slid and tipped.

"Mraaaaaooowww!" the cat complained.

Finally, I got hold of the tail, which was interminably tangled, always filled with leaves and things. Her nose was filled with snot. She breathed it in and out—she was a snot-dragon full of tangles, knots and the leavings of old trees. "A permanent cold," my mother said she had. Pneumo-something. 

She looked to me like something needing care. Holding onto the captured tail with both hands, I directed it into the mixing bowl. 

"You're going to be fine," I told the cat in a motherly voice. "You need a bath."

Submerged in the cold water, the leaves got wet and the tangles stayed in place. Over the course of several seconds, it occurred to me that perhaps I'd miscalculated. Lacking a brush and the necessary fortitude to work the tangles out by hand, I let the kitty go, and she scuttled off and hid. I emptied the bowl into the sink and left a small, hairy puddle on the floor. Then I set about making her an apologetic milkshake made of milk with cat food sprinkled in.

*

Right now, I'm thirty-seven. I have three boys and a husband. A boy dog who chews up garbage and a boy cat who pees in anything rectangular which I leave in the kitchen corner that he likes. Two male ducks, one of whom likes to bite my jeans as I turn and leave his coop. There are my egg-layers, of course—six of those; two white ducks who spend spring underneath the boys with the feathers wrenched out of their necks, and four hens, who squat obediently when I go out to pick them up. They all live outside. Inside, there are penises wall-to-wall.

Except for a few moments of wild abandon, I spent my childhood preparing to nurture things. I dressed cats in little outfits, placed them into various houses and set up a battle triage for wounded shrews. When shrews kept dying anyway—because of the activities of my cats—I set up a war memorial for them on the refrigerator door. This was a stark exposition of life lost, bearing simply a date, the cat responsible, and the posthumous name of each shrew. I wrapped them in paper towels and masking tape and deposited them in the earth, where I said a solemn prayer over their souls. And so it was that I prepared myself for motherhood.

The boys, while I was doing this, were preparing themselves for war. They were throwing down their lives for a cause greater than themselves, unnamed, and collapsing in splendid agony on the concrete to die with howling cries, only to rise again later and launch a last attack. Every day on the agenda: Kill. Die. Rise from death. Kill again. Perhaps die. Win, if possible. Then, snack.

I have given up combating this tendency in my kids.When I initially forbid cartoons and movies, Rowan pretended he was a lion and the girls at playschool were gazelles. The last thing they heard was a roar in their ear before they died. I kept on getting phone calls with requests to cut his nails even shorter than they were. If you want to comment on my parenting, don't. It's too late for me to parent him differently now. He's fifteen and, happily, he's stopped roaring in people's ears. Nobody cares anymore how he keeps his nails. At any rate, it was then that I introduced superheroes. At least they were "good." Rowan stopped being a lion and started being Spiderman. I think this may have been an improvement, ethically.

Boys on the playground, forbidden to play-fight, play-fight surreptitiously or simply get in trouble all the time. Not every boy. Lots of boys. The ones I'm talking about. What is this war they are girding themselves for? Am I missing something about adult male survival that they really need to know?

"I didn't want to play World War II games," confided Mikalh to me, "but that's what everyone was playing, so I just pretended I was an archaeologist in World War II."

"It sounds like a good compromise," I told him.

Later on, he killed his evil brother with one powerful kick to the head. I hope this training will prove useful someday. 

On second thought, I fervently hope that it will not.

In Which My Kids Take Over My Blog

The photo on the right is of his painting of Enkidu.

I am sharing some stuff with you today just because I think it's cool. This falls into the category of "what I'm up to" rather than deep thoughts.

This year, to my great delight, I've been teaching my sons history. My second-grader is currently departing Ancient China for Ancient Africa, and we've traveled a long way already—from Çatalhöyük to Egypt, from the Indus Valley to Mesopotamia. I read him a chapter in his history book while he takes notes on what I say. Then he gives me a narration (tells the story back to me) while I write down his words. We find the area on a map, mark it on a timeline and an add illustration to his own history book of the ancient world. He usually gets to do a craft, and I photograph that to put in the book as well. By the time we've finished  he'll have created his own living history book of the ancient world.

My seventh-grader is in New Mexico this year. Our focus has been on slowing down the relentless slog through time he's used to and setting a while with a place and time so we can really get to know it. He is learning to see how history reaches out its skeleton hand from the grave and shapes events as they happen now. He recently did an assignment called a flash-draft. The idea comes from What a Writer Needs by Ralph Fletcher, which anyone who is either a writer or a writing teacher must go buy right now. In this assignment, the object is to create a character who will allow you to convey some expository information that you are supposed to learn. He has studied Oñate and the Massacre of Acoma, and I told him to create a character that was there. "And I want to be there. I want to be able to smell it," I told him. 

I am very, very proud of what Devin did with this assignment. He asked me to post it here and I am more than happy to share it with you. He worked hard on it, and maybe it will interest you to see how my kid writes. (His older brother once got this privilege, too.) You get a prize if you can tell me where Devin borrowed the first line from.

Battle on the Butte by Devin Cantua

Background

In 1595 the Conquistador Don Juan de Oñate was granted permission by King Phillip II of Spain to colonize Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico, the present day New Mexico. The Acomas and Spaniards had been peaceful with each other for decades, since they first met in 1540. In 1598, the Acoma leader, Zutacapan, learned that the Spanish intended to conquer them. They planned to defend themselves when the Spaniards came.

Don Oñate sent his nephew, Captain Juan de Zaldivar, to the pueblo to consult with Zutacapan. When Zaldivar arrived on December 4, 1598, one of the first things he did was take sixteen of his men up the mesa, on which the pueblo was located, to demand food from the natives. After being denied the Spanish attacked some of the Acoma women. A fight raged, leaving Zaldivar and eleven other men dead. When Oñate learned of the incident, he ordered Juan de Zaldivar’s brother, Vincente de Zaldivar, to go punish the Acoma. Taking about 70 men, he left for the pueblo…This is what happened next.


*

Nervous! Very, very dreadfully nervous! What will the Acomas have planned for us when we attack? Whatever they might have, I’m ready! I have to be ready, or I won’t survive.

“Ok men, let’s start making our way towards the base of the butte. Once we get there I will give you further instructions!” said Oñate.

“Yes sir!” we all screamed.

Only few of the men got to be on horses—the higher ranked men, of course. I myself was only one of the lowest ranked men there. I had to keep pace with the horses. I don’t think that I am one of the better soldiers, but Oñate only picked the men he thought were sufficient. So why—

“Ok men, I will take half of you guys up the path where the Acomas will see us and we will distract them with friendly talk. We will do this while the other half of you will climb up the back of the butte and set up the cannons and rifles. Then when I give the thumbs up symbol you guys will fire, Capiche?”

“Yes sir!”

Some more men and I sneaked around the back of the butte and started climbing to the top. I was surrounded by the musky scent of man and awfully disturbing noises. This was hell for me. Just imagine being in a bone dry desert, climbing up the side of a cliff, surrounded by the smell of a month old road kill. Sweaty men who haven’t bathed in weeks smell awful. Plus it was about -12⁰ Celsius with no snow, with the sun shining brightly in the sky. I’m not used to this weather yet.

Once we got to the top we started setting up the cannons and rifles. There were only two cannons, but it was tough. I glanced across the top of the butte and saw the Acomas captivated in Oñate’s “friendly” talk. This was going to work out.

After all that climbing and sweating and building of cannons, my hands smelled like dirt covered in brass with a touch of gunpowder all mixed together. We were all ready; we were in our positions and ready to ambush. My friend Manuel lined up next to me and asked, “You ready mate?”

“After all that training how can I not be ready?”

We both chuckled, focused our attention to Oñate, then waited. We’ve been on the same path since we were little boys in Spain. We both wanted to move to Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico with the governor and help colonize the new world. And here we are today on the top of a mesa just outside of Santa Fe about to attack the Acomas with the governor—just like we wanted.

A little later he made the thumbs up symbol. We fired a cannonball and charged in with screams and yells to surprise the Acomas, the attack finally began!

The historic battle raged for three days, but by the end, hundreds of Indians lay dead. The ones who survived were enslaved, and the young men each had a right foot amputated. Just seeing the men crawl away in a pile of blood with a stub on the end of the leg… it left a mark in my head for ever. Turning around and seeing the pile of amputated feet on the ground made me feel nauseated for a while after.

I myself managed to escape with only minor wounds, a fractured wrist and a concussion, but my friend Manuel—he didn’t make it through the rough battle. My stomach tensed up like I was about to vomit. I felt that my stomach would burst and I would fall to my knees in tears, but I had to get over it and move on back to Santa Fe. If one of the generals, or Oñate, saw me tearing up they would think of me as a weak warrior; I had to keep cool.

Was what we did the right thing to do? After all these years are the Acoma people still mad at the Spaniards? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I followed my dream and that is most important to me.

“Wow!” the kids said in amazement.

“Will you tell us another one? Please Grandpa, please?”

“Sorry kids but I think we’re done for today.”

I sat in my chair as I heard the kids walking away saying, “When I’m an adult I’m gonna to follow my dream like grandpa, and I’m going to colonize the new world, too!”

“Well I’m gonna be the governor in the new world, when I’m older!” said Diego.

I just chuckled to myself and puffed on my pipe. I guess they’ll find out what it’s like when they get there.

The Only Self I Have

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Flutterby

Some days, when you are a parent, just suck.

Yesterday was one of those. It was not without its pleasant moments. A flash of brilliance in my older son's writing and a smile exchanged afterward. A hug from my littlest. A moment cuddling the chicken, whose feathers are now growing back.* Most of it, though, felt like slowly being bludgeoned with the hard surface of a pair of fuzzy dice.** I couldn't teach anything. We were learning a new step in adding: two digits each addend with neither a multiple of ten. Carrying. All mental. No quick-pencil algorithm in this math. Numbers lay in disorder on the floor—their teeth bloody and broken; they refused to stay in columns, refused to join one another into sums. Nothing I did would work. It was the second day with the same small problem set. My anxiety was starting to rise. My child was stubborn, belligerent, spacey, despondent and disinterested by turns.

This is where my large decisions come back to bite me in the ass. Last year, at public school, he refused to work in his first grade class. He dawdled, dropped pencils and languished in his chair. At the end of the year, he knew less math than he'd come in knowing at the start. We kept waiting, waiting—and his teacher kept waiting, too. We waited for him to decide to try. We encouraged, gave consequences, gave love, sent him to therapy. We didn't know what to do. None of us.

"What can he do in Math?" I asked his teacher. "What does he know?"

"I don't really know," she told me. "He won't do anything."

And so went the entire year.

When I decided to home school my son, I did it knowing that, when he doesn't know how to do a task, he will go to war with anyone, rather than having to try and fail. He will show you he is choosing not to learn, so that you can't see he has no choice. It's the strategy of a learning disabled child. I felt that my job would be to love him, to show him that it was always OK to try and fail. And to never let him win by refusing to do his work.

Yesterday, my patience went bankrupt. It wasn't OK for him to fail. He needed to do it right. I needed him not to struggle to add together eight and two. And I was stuck with myself. There was no one else to do the job.

"I would just give up for the day," said my husband, reasonably.

It sounded so right, so obviously the perfect thing to do. And maybe it was. But I couldn't do it. Tomorrow was coming after me, already the same way as this day and the one before. I can't get away from my learning disabled child. He is brilliant and confounded, all in the same breath. He is epic in his thinking; he is stuck on basics; he is mine. He is mine. And I am his.

This is the only self I have. This self I have is the sort that will become impatient when it takes ninety seconds for a child to recall a math fact that we both have filed as "known." I will try to conceal it. I will stifle my sigh. I will scrunch up the frustration on my face. But I will be frustrated. I will be that way today and tomorrow and Friday and next week and next month and forever. My son will notice. He's sensitive. And he will always be the sort of person who answers slowly, who doesn't hear what I said, who has the slipcover over his ears and is refusing to do his work. He will be that way today and tomorrow and Friday and next week and next month and forever, too. His is the only self he has.

I can give this unpaid teaching gig to someone else. I really can. It's a valid thing to do. That's why we have public schools with fine teachers and administrators and speech language pathologists to help him. It makes all the sense in the world, especially on days like this. But...he has gone there and...I have worked there. And so I know that they are just trying their best with all their knowledge and commitment to teach the children, same as me. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail.

In the end, no one is more committed to this one child than I am.

My art as his mother and teacher, then, becomes one of avoiding false choices, getting past do it or leave it alone. I have to know that there is always another option, always another way. He can learn and I can teach. The problem is with neither of us. It is the method that is wrong. And then, back to the drawing board, over and over—how will we learn this thing? The art I speak of is of never giving up.

The child in psychic pain rushes at me like an angry bull, teased by crowds, poked and prodded, bullied into a fight. You're telling me I have to learn this, woman? OK, the fight is on! The child has no choice but to fight me or must give up being a bull. To sit there, passive, when provoked with education beyond him, is too much. He's heated, angry, petulant. He's coming after me. When I'm tired, when I'm foolish, I will stand there. I will argue with the bull. Holding back its horns until my arms are aching, wrestling with its nature, yelling curses about crazy cows, I'll drain myself of everything I need to win the fight. Some days are like that. Other times, I remember what to do.

The bull charges, tears toward me, ripping up the earth. I stand still; my heart is pounding. Still, I remain there; I can feel its musky breath fill the air just near my face. And then, as the horns lower to gore me, seconds from my end, I make one movement: I slowly step aside. The bull expends his energy in the run. My own is preserved to face him another time.

So it is with children. My job is to be that matador—to let them have the power and anger of their run and to keep from getting impaled on the process of their growing up.

1 PM.

"You did it!" I tell him. "You really did it. You finished that whole sheet. You got all of it correct. I am so proud of your hard work."

He beams.

"I learned it."

"Yes," I tell him. "Yes, you did."




*Yes, I got her a diaper. She has only worn it once since it came two days ago. Her feathers are regrowing on their own. We are all very happy she is doing so much better now.

** This is what I say it feels like being worn down by adorable little people—kind of like being tied up by Ewoks.

Already a Prize

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons by Claire S.

I like sunrises, don't you?

Morning is grand because yesterday is over. Now things can start again. The persistence of things from yesterday into the brand new day is surprising. Possibility seems to abound and then there is your life from before, like cold leftovers, coming at you again. Tomorrow, I will return all my comments. Tomorrow, I will write a new post. Tomorrow, I will finish...Yesterday is following me like a bit a toilet paper stuck to my shoe, or like Ariadne's thread, making sure I'll get back to where I was. O, yes there it is!—my context.

Don't worry. That last paragraph doesn't make sense even to me.

I have something I am writing for submission. I have done that only once before. Then, it was a contest. I had to pay twenty-five bucks. If the editors liked my piece, they'd send me comments. If they liked it best, I would get to be princess of Tunisia. No reply was sent. I was reminded of my sons, standing giddy as helium balloons before a mechanical claw.

"If I put in a quarter, I'll get a toy! Mama, pleeeasse?"

"Me too, Mama! Pleeeease?""

I let them do it several times. Some things you have to learn yourself. Some lessons are worth carrying two children out of a mall in tantrum for. This is one: You don't get a toy in a machine for free.

Here is another one: my writing isn't as clever as I think it is. It's not as good. Accolades are not free.

Real writers: they work.

I am trying to do this, but I don't seem to have all that much free time. That's not precisely true. I have, in spades, the kind of time you could use to write one good sentence and then tell your kids gruffly to go away if you wanted to do any more. I'm not complaining. This is my chosen life. I homeschool one child and a half. I do this, in the way I do all things, which is to say: I go overboard. I have lesson plans. I have objectives. I do research. I pile books upon the table and we work. Grammar, literature, mathematics, world history, spelling, typing, vocabulary from Greek and Latin roots. We are deep and thick in all of it. After the "work," there are library books to read, documentaries to watch, debates to undertake.

All this is to say that I have made my life more about mothering than writing. I am fine with that.
In the spaces in between other people's needs, I tend to look at Facebook. It is easily broken off from, but gives me something to do. My writing, on the hand, sucks me in. When I write, I get up at 4:45 am. I sit in silence. If my husband wakes up and starts talking, I've been known to cover my ears, without thinking, before noticing how rude this is. It takes me twenty minutes to produce the first paragraph. That's the hardest one. Then, hopefully, it goes faster. Sometimes, it doesn't. The process is less like bleeding out lyrical inspiration and more like hacking through stone. Hack, smash, cut. I keep dusting up so that I can see what I have done. The longer I write, the longer it takes for me to write. The longer I do this: The more I revise. The more I think. The less likely I am to hit publish. I have studied grammar, learned to diagram sentences, sent copious emails to my writer friend. I have become much more insecure.

The longer I do this, the longer the chances look of catching that animal in my claw. I think it's called perspective. Or depression. Take your pick.

This writing has made me a lousy blogger. I haven't returned enough of your comments. I read every single one. I haven't visited enough of your blogs. Often, I visit and then leave before I can think of anything to say. I'm a lurker. I've used up all my words. I just wake up, write, school my kids, clean up the books, serve lunch, tutor, clean up again, start dinner and collapse on my couch in a pile of frizzy hair and clothes. Some child comes and cuddles me. When a fifteen year-old head perches on my shoulder, I remain still, like there's a butterfly on my hand.

The sun is up. Today I am going to see a circus. I have a migraine. It's beautiful outside. There's other writing to do. It's time to start thinking about buying seeds. Context. My context just keeps chasing me through my days. I am surrounded by all the parts of me that I have already won and only have to keep. There is no suspense as the claw hovers, no disappointment as it pulls back.

Here, I am already a prize that somebody gets to hold.

The Best Ingredients We Have

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Xandert

Standing in the kitchen with my teenagers over the sundered carcass of a beast, I swell with joy. For the moment, I have their attention.

"We need more sea salt in the rub," I admit.

"Is this enough?" asks twelve year-old Devin, with the eyes like wells, Devin with the lashes like one hundred bolded question marks.

"Not really," I tell him, "and you need the fine rather than the coarse."

Fifteen year-old Rowan grinds pepper. In his able hands, the pepper grinder rumbles, purrs, obeys. Devin separates rosemary from a branch.

"Mom, is this the thyme?"

Innocence and ignorance sit so closely on my tongue. Rowan scoffs. I smile, and Devin answers with a smile that owns his question, the scoff and all the amusement in the world. The lashes blink and cheeks run to merry red.

"Is this the thyme, then?" he kids and points at the other herb. "No! What?" He enacts the drama of the fool. Rowan looks on through half-lidded eyes, as skeptical as a snake. I giggle. They push and pull and shape one another with their tugs. Logical and lyrical, an answer to the other's strength.

"We could do a dry rub," I tell them. Rapt eyes focus on my face. "But I am going to use olive oil."

We cover the chicken in olive oil, anoint it like a supplicant before its God. Then we pat on the salt, the pepper, the rosemary and thyme.

"I am going to slice the lemon finely," I tell them.

"Why can't you slice it coarsely?" Devin asks. Because of the laws that govern words. One can slice finely or chop finely, but one cannot slice things in a manner that is coarse.

"One slices thickly," I tell him. "But I am going to slice it finely." Somewhere an Adverb Judiciary nod their heads in frank relief, disaster averted once again.

For a few moments, I slice in silence. The boys watch me as disks of lemon fall decisively from my knife.

"You're slicing them thickly," admonishes Rowan. "You're screwing this all up."

Of course I am. It is my job to teach him things so that he can think that he could do them better than I can. It's his job to rib me and tell me I'm a fool. The basis of our good-natured fondness for one another rests in my willingness to assume that he may well be right. I grin and he grins back.

"Well," I tell him, "They'll have to do." We layer lemons over the chicken.

"It goes in a 400 oven uncovered for an hour or until done. Now, what shall we do with the butternut squash? "

We halve the squash and scoop out the seeds, cut it into manageable wedges. Then we sprinkle it with pumpkin pie spice—nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, lemon peel and cardamom. It is dabbed with what passes around here for butter and settled in a bit of water, covered in a casserole dish. Into the oven it goes. I am confident in this experiment. Anything blessed with cardamom will sing.

"We need to make a salad." Bell peppers hardly bigger than Christmas lights, yellow, red and orange, and English cucumber, carrots—purple, orange and white. Leafy red lettuce. Devin has disappeared and it is only Rowan and me.

"I want to show you how to make my signature dressing."

"I just remembered I have something else to do," says Rowan.

"No, you don't."

"Yes, I do. I have to go lie on the couch."

"Come here," I tell him, using my Mother Voice and he Comes Here. He still Comes Here.

"You mix two tablespoons of red wine vinegar with two tablespoons of dijon and whisk."

"That smells disgusting," he tells me.

"Of course it does. It's vinegar."

"Then add in six tablespoons of olive oil, gradually." As I measure and add, he whisks it in, unasked.

"There's something about the way that looks that just...is wrong."

"Well, it tastes really good. Try." I hand him a lettuce leaf. Dip.

Meh, he tells me. Meh. Whatever, Mom.

When dinner is served, I put out cheap wineglasses and serve sparkling cider with the meal. Devin asks continually if he's holding his glass correctly.

"You look like a redneck who's trying to have class," Mike tells him. Devin rewards him with the deep red smile, the fluttering of lashes and the further mocking up of drinking wrong.

Rowan takes a bite of chicken and stops for a moment of what might be prayer.

"That's gooood," he says.

It is. It is good and it is simple, made of things that happen to be around. Leftover herbs from Christmas. Two lemons on the verge of getting hard. I stock good vegetables, good spices and buy cheap chicken then let everything marry itself on our tongues. I am raising my kids the same way, with whatever is in my cabinets and whatever I find at the store, whatever is on sale. Yesterday it was cooking, tomorrow history. Add good ingredients and a little know-how and forget the recipe book. One may taste like lemon and dijon, the other like cardamom and clove. It doesn't matter. They will sit and watch me cook until one of them takes the knife from my hand, saying, "Mom, I can do better than that." Then, he will cook his own meals and eat the ruined and the rich. He will learn from the smoke about arrogance and devise greatness in his own dry rub.

Until then, I will look for moments where I can stand with each of them in the kitchen, with the smell of lemon and fresh herbs, the warmth and closeness. I will look for them surrounded by the best ingredients we have.

Adventures in Adolescent Corruption with David Sedaris

People hate Facebook ads. It's the idea of somebody watching us, I think. How dare you follow my activities on your free site and use this information to make a profit? Nothing worse than a plutocrat with a bit of tracking technology. Next these capitalist spooks will be positioning books I specifically like at bookstores to make it harder for me to treat them as nicer libraries. It's 1984 all over again, but without the leg warmers. Tell me if I've got that bit confused.

Personally, I love Facebook ads. Driven by a dilettante's interest in sociology, I can't wait to discover what categories of product Facebook believes that I will buy, what group that I will join. The algorithm of my unique personality is displayed in icons neatly on the right. Featured upon my page are currently these suggestions: Sleeping. "22,978,738 people like this," it is explained. Eating, it additionally suggests, is only liked by 11,719,551—probably due to the high incidence of rat parts in food. Facebook thinks, quite reasonably, that I might want to "like" both a superior sounding atheist society and a web ministry for Christ. I am finding myself tempted to join neither, but ModCloth beckons to me with their discounted "perfect party dress." What better gift to get a solitary house troll who despises parties and spends most of her life lightly dusted with cat hair and straw? I will have to drop a hint to my husband. A ball gown for the chicken yard, I say. Facebook ads. They show us what we didn't know we needed to want.

Sometimes they're right.

I am thinking about David Sedaris. Facebook cleverly inserted him on my sidebar, after watching my status updates and evaluating them for evidence of appreciation for dry wit. Also, because I had helpfully stated that he was one of my favorite authors when creating my profile several eons ago. "David Sedaris at the Lensic. November 28," said the ad. OK, I'll bite. I have read several of David's books and they remain some of my favorites. If you haven't read him, here is an excerpt of his writing for you to enjoy.

In addition to simply liking David Sedaris, I have shared him with my son. For years, I watched him, waiting for exactly the time when I thought that he was old enough to read about a hitchhiking episode wherein a truck driver with a natural cleft in his forehead offers casually to deliver oral sex. This is an important decision for every parent, I suppose—when to start offering literary fellatio references to their child of the opposite sex. I was patient. You simply cannot rush these things. Some time when he was around fourteen, he came to me with a number of Lonely Island videos that he wanted me to watch. Ah! My little boy is growing up, I thought. I had limited his media, sent him to public school, and he had made friends, just as he was supposed to do. The result, quite naturally, was that he had now developed a working vocabulary for the discussion of various sexual acts, drug paraphernalia and other useful slang, all without my active corruption of his mind. What would we do without public education? It takes a village. I smiled and handed him Me Talk Pretty One Day. He read this avidly.

"Do you have anything else?" he said.

I gave him When You are Engulfed in Flames and Holidays on Ice. My eldest isn't much of a joiner, so while of spend most our meager savings on his younger brothers' desires to dance, kick a ball and play "Hot Cross Buns" on every instrument they can, he rarely warrants an expenditure. His cynical nature makes him cheap. I decided to splurge on this David Sedaris evening for the two of us. Months and months ago, I bought the tickets. I waited and he read Let's Pretend This Never Happened. I tried unsuccessfully to interest him in the works of Kurt Vonnegut, on the purported basis that they included a drawing of his own asshole, but really because of Kilgore Trout and his pointy chin. Months rolled by.

Last night it was the night. We arrived at the Lensic a full forty minutes early to find David signing books. Naturally, we had left all of ours at home. A discussion ensued as to whether she should buy more books. There were two we hadn't read. Finally, we selected one and allowed that it was part of a Christmas gift.

"Go and get it signed," I told my son.

"Why?" he demurred. "Then it will no longer be in mint condition."

"Go," I told him.

Arriving at the front of the line, David surveyed Rowan with apparent delight.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Fifteen."

"Oh, good," said David. "I have something for you." He turned and rifled in a plastic shopping bag for a period of time and turned back to my son.

"I imagine you like to wash your hair," he supposed.

"Yes," Rowan admitted.

"Do you condition it, too?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'm staying at this place. The Inn of...."

"The Inn of the Anasazi?" I inquired.

"Yes," he said. "They have this shampoo. "It is piñon-eucalyptus. I want to give it to you."

He handed the small bottle of opalescent liquid to Rowan and surveyed him pleasantly for a bit.

"I have something else for you as well," he announced happily and reached again into his bag. Withdrawing an attractive business card holder, he explained.

"These are nice because they're good quality paper. You can give them to people." He withdrew a card.

"It's great because it doesn't say 'Shut-up,' but you can hand them to people when you just need them to stop saying things.

Listen", he added, "I'm going to say a word. I will read out of my diary and there's a bit where I'm going to say 'What do we want? A cure for Tourette's! When do we want it?' When I say that, you should cover you ears. I don't want to be responsible for teaching you this word. It's a really dirty word."

Rowan agreed that he would. He didn't, though, and when the expletive was flung into the auditorium to uproarious guffaws, he leaned over.

"I already knew that word."

I know, I thought. And that's exactly why I brought you here. That and the brilliance of Facebook ads.