Autumn and Grief

Halloween Day.  I’m getting ready for a our yearly party.  Our teenagers are excited about new friends and old coming over to carve pumpkins, dress up, trick-or-treat (all ages tend to do it in this town).  The phone rings.  It’s my mother.  For the first time since my kids were born, she and Dad do not plan to come over, have the traditional bowl of red, white and boo chili, take pictures and take part in the fun.

Mom’s voice starts to quiver.  “I’ve just been thinking about Glenn a lot today.”  Glenn was my cousin.   He shot himself in the chest on August 19th of this year.  He was 45 years old.  His obituary in the Wilmington, NC paper stated, “Kevin (Glenn) Maynard was bright, creative, imaginative and unconditionally kind to everyone.”  Understatement of the year.  He left behind a twin brother.  I cannot imagine what the last couple of months have been like for Brad.  The rest of us are heartbroken and will never be the same.

Three years ago, my dear friend, Guy Stuttman, hung himself from the loft in his Greenwich Village home.   He had lost his longtime partner to cancer five months earlier.  He couldn’t handle being alone and he couldn’t handle doing anything about it.  Alcoholism had paralyzed him and he refused help.  He joked about jumping off his terrace.  I begged him not to leave me and the rest of the world.  Emails and phone calls and visits to NYC only prolonged the inevitable.  My heart was broken. Guy was a genius.  Guy was the unpublished writer who rivaled the authors whose books end up the the classic sections in Barnes and Noble.  He had always kept his light under a bushel, as they say, drinking and smoking and socializing in small groups.

Glenn, on the other hand, shared himself tirelessly with anyone and everyone.  He was the person people called when they needed help.  He was earnest and warm and vulnerable and sweet and an expert on many subjects.  He could be tediously enthusiastic about things like list-making.  Ranking things in order of preference was  an obsession of his.  And he wanted to talk about it.  And he wanted you listen and he craved input.  He was unique, even with a twin standing in the same room.  He gave all of himself to everyone around him.  My uncle said of him, “That son of mine will give anyone the shirt of his back, even if that leaves him naked, with no spare shirts in sight.”

I miss these two more than I can express.  I met Guy in the early 80’s, during his college years.  Glenn, however, I held shortly after his birth.  I’ve seen him through the eyes of a child.  He’s my twin baby boy who is supposed to outlive me.  Or come close.

Losing him makes no sense at all.   It’s a pain that is too deep for words or sounds.  There is a scream inside me that won’t come out, but I can almost visualize it, rather than hear it.  It comes from the pit of my gut and pours out of my mouth.  It flows out and wraps around brilliant red and yellow maples and gets tangled in their dying beauty.  It slows down.  It frees itself and builds again.  It winds and builds like a southern, summer twister.  It bobs and weaves and finds its way east, and a little south of here.  It tears through fields, strewing clay clods and picks up speed in ditches beside highways.  It slows gradually, finds and bends into a dirt lane between crisp, brown cornfields, it curls around my grandmother’s grave and finally turns to sobs.  It heaves.  It wretches.  It calms.  It sleeps.  It sleeps for days and weeks at the time.  But it always wakes up.  And it begins again. 

The Real Bermuda Triangle

 I learned about the Drama Triangle in 2009, when I went to a highly-recommended doctor in search for a cure for chronic heartburn.  The kind of heartburn that literally burns the esophagus with acid, while the sufferer tries anything and everything to make it go away.  Good self-care habits helped a bit but the heartburn would strike sometimes when I was doing everything right in the self-care regard.  Or at least, as right as I ever have.

Finding out that peri-menopause, which lasts for years, can cause changes in progesterone levels that sometimes bring on heartburn was very useful knowledge.  But I wanted it to stop!  The damage being done couldn’t be a good thing.  I also found out that my DHEA levels were off the chart.  So much so that everyone at Duke University Hospital wanted a peek at me.  After being tested for adrenal tumors (cancer scares are not the best remedy for heartburn) pituitary tumors and ovarian tumors, and all manner of other tests, my crazy-high DHEA levels were attributed to the menopause journey.  Drug therapy was recommended.  After hearing about what years of a burning esophagus could do,  I gave in to taking the drug.  I’m glad I did.

One of my doctors sat with me long enough to ask a battery of questions.  He wanted me to be able to approach the issue from as many fronts as possible.  After hearing about my life, he was relieved to know that the members of my household, my husband and children, as well as my parents, my primary relationships, were so healthy and supportive.

He did pick up on something and shared his opinion with me. I, like most humans, operate much of the time in the throes of the drama triangle.  In relating to each other, people very often, if not many times a day, find themselves unwittingly taking part in unhealthy drama.   I am most comfortable in the role of Rescuer.  It’s where I feel alive and useful.  It’s where I try to live, without being conscious of it.  And sure, it sounds noble to say “I like to rescue.  None of this Victim stuff for me. And Persecutor?  Forget it!  I’m too well-meaning!”  Ah, but there’s the rub.  The more reading I’ve done on the subject, the more thought I’ve given it, it is abundantly clear that once a person enters the triangle, they are doomed to move around to all three sharp corners.  And often?  More than one corner at the time.

By constantly rescuing, one eventually feels victimized.  That seems obvious when we think about it.  What happens when we feel victimized or cornered?  We lash out.  We persecute.  There.  All three sides.  But there are other layers that are less obvious.  When we get some sort of high on rescuing, we often enable victims.  Do we intend this?  Of course not!  Enabling someone to keep their pathologies is another way to persecute them.  We are rescuing and victimizing at the same time.  And, we prevent ourselves from our own growth while we try to rescue everyone else.  Now, we are the victim or our own persecution.  It all becomes tediously tangled.

It’s not easy to change, but it’s simple.  “Easy” and “simple” are interchanged so often that we can forget that they are not synonyms.  How do you lose 100 pounds?  Simple.  Eat less.  Easy?  Maybe not.

To get out of the Drama Triangle,  one has to simply, not easily, observe their behavior and the behavior of others.  Getting into that observational state takes practice.  We all have rescuing, persecuting and victim tendencies.   We all have many parts to our psyches, as it were.  Who do you want to drive the bus, as they say?  I want the Observer to do the driving.  And I want her to thank the other parts of my psyche for trying to help.  And then ask them to sit down while she drives the bus.  Shaming oneself is a fast track back to the Drama Triangle.

And all those people who “need rescuing?”  They get the real me.  The resourceful me.  Sometimes the real me will say, “I’m not sure how I can be of any more help.”  It doesn’t feel natural in the beginning.  It feels crappy sometimes, to be honest.  Really crappy.  I’m highly attached to the idea that I can rescue.  But it’s even more attractive to have friendships and conversations within them begin to be about being heard, rather than expecting problems to be solved by others.   And that might even give me the time and energy to address my own problems.  And even to rescue when rescue is truly what is called for.

Was I asleep long?

When I take a break, I really take a break!

So much has prevented me from wanting to write in a public way.  The bad economy led to the evaporation of Jamie’s job, and by February, 2012, we were quaking in our boots.  After a LONG year and a half of underemployment, it looks like things are going to settle down again.

In the meantime, I’ve taken such poor care of myself.  My body is really angry with me.  I also turned 50 years old in the middle of this turmoil.  The “big five-o” seems to either hit a person hard or they laugh in its face.  Guess which?  Yeah, it flattened me.  To be this age, worried about finances day and night, thinking thoughts like “I thought I’d be going to Europe every couple of years by now,” and “Maybe I should’ve pored myself into a lucrative career,” and on and on, has not been good for me.  In short, I do not manage chronic stress well.  I punish myself instead.  I gain weight, in an almost force-feeding fashion and I hunker down and don’t want to move.

I say this out loud to whoever is there, because I’m ready to be nicer to myself.  I’m ready to wake up from this food and fear induced paralysis.

Writing will help.  And no, I don’t want to turn this into a weight loss blog.  But it’ll likely come up.

Here’s to new beginnings!

The good, the shallow and the ugly.

(Names changed to protect….ME!)

Growing up, I thought my cousin Brenda was ugly. I thought my neighbor, Margie, was ugly too. I felt a little guilty thinking that sweet Mary Willoughby was a bit ugly, externally. Aunt Fran said they were all three beautiful because they were petite. Aunt Fran was REALLY into petite. Why does beauty ever become standardized? I suppose ugliness and beauty in their extremes seem obvious. A beautiful landscape versus maggots on a corpse: but even the latter has a certain beauty, doesn’t it? The circle of life is self-evident, the lack of death present, even in death.

I’m trying to remember my first concept of “ugly.” My kindergarten boyfriend, Larry, showed me an ugly face he could make and I didn’t want him to be my boyfriend anymore. It’s difficult to remember my first encounter with the concept, as here in the South, we often use the word “ugly” to describe actions or an attitude. “Don’t be ugly,” we might say (we even “might could” say) if a sibling calls the other “stupid.” Or if a group of people are making fun of someone behind his back, we say, “We should stop being so ugly.” My grandmother said occasionally, “How can such ugly words come out of such a dainty mouth?”

I remember thinking racists were ugly. Race was an extremely hot topic when I was a child. Even beautiful-looking people began to appear ugly when they spewed hate. I suppose we all feel that way when someone shocks us with something that offends our individual sensibilities.

I remember thinking that people with ugly faces couldn’t be considered pretty, even if the rest of their bodies were phenomenal. Faces weren’t absolutely everything, but they were an essential start. Seems bodies matter more to everyone now. Back then, a woman could be squishy with a stunning face and she was considered gorgeous.

I remember that floral skirt and opened blouse over a white shell my mother used to wear. Her wedge haircut, that ugly outfit and clunky Bass sandals. I didn’t think she was ugly, though. Jane Archer, my best friend’s mom, dressed impeccably; yet her lack of warmth prevented the completion of the beauty circle somehow. Her home was beautiful but cold. It appeared then, that some warmth or some forward-reaching purpose must be present for beauty to catch hold.

Broken is often so beautiful. When we become inundated with standards of beauty, we run towards a conch shell on the beach but seem disappointed if the conch isn’t whole. Yet the broken conchs have so much beauty to reveal. The broken heart is beautiful, however painful, in its revealing how much we matter to one another, the clearing out of emotion, readying itself for new loves, be it people or passions. Ugly can become beautiful, looking through a new prism.

As I sit in here in “Boston Market” of all places, waiting for Ann and Bryan’s voice lessons to be over, I notice an older couple who just got up from a fast food feast. She has a very broad backside, he a large front. His ass is flat, her bubble bottom in too-tight jeans….ugly? Or do they complete each other? She goes out where he goes in. Rhyme to reason?

Does my own marriage provide another example? Does every meaningful relationship? Do the “ugly” times symbolize some kind of parallel beauty which I can’t perceive? If I’m on the inside of a beautiful loop of time and fate, can it not feel unsetting, dizzying, even gross?

Learning: It’s not just for autumn, winter and spring anymore.

The kids and I have been watching “John Adams,” the seven-part, HBO miniseries. It’s wonderful and has led us to explore other films and books about our nation’s founding. We weren’t even trying to line this up with the holiday, but we will likely complete the “John Adams” series on the 4th. Incredibly, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 4th of July, 50 years to the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Their relationship, as well as the bond between John and Abigail, has been engrossing.

We are all four entranced with this period of history. Jamie and I have been taking extra notice of the dates on the historic houses in Hillsborough when we take our nightly walks downtown. It is exciting to simply imagine what was in the hearts and minds of people in those houses, waiting for news during the Revolution. We walk past the Colonial Inn, neglected by its current owner, dreaming of having the resources to restore it ourselves. What a project that would be! I marvel at the amount of research it would take to do it as it should be done.

I think Thomas Jefferson is making the greatest impression on the kids. His love of continuous revolution, constant examination of the status-quo and fervent insistence upon the rights of the individual is music to the ears of this homeschooling family. Comparing his opinions to those of John Adams, taking notice of when and why they agreed and when they disagreed passionately, has been an invaluable lesson in how reasonable, intelligent people can have extremely different points of view. It is heartening to read accounts of the reconciliation of these two friends, after disagreement led to a long estrangement.

All of this history-diving has resulted in a plan to visit Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, in Charlottesville, Virginia. We leave next Wednesday and we are all looking so forward to it!

While we are there, we might also visit the university and see more of Jefferson’s handiwork. The homes of Madison and Monroe are nearby, along with lots of outdoor spots that need exploration. In the heat of the afternoons we can leap back into the 21st century and enjoy the hotel pool. Nothing beats a good road trip and time with my favorite people.

When we return, the kids begin their busy, summer rehearsal schedules. They are performing in “King of Hearts” and “Little Women.” Hopefully, there will be enough time and interest left over for Annie and me to enjoy the letters and John and Abigail, Poor Richard’s Almanac (I think Bryan will like it) and continue on to the next phase of American History — westward expansion. Who knows what trip that might inspire?

A Brief Declaration of Interdependence

I dropped my son off at a film camp this morning. He seemed excited and a bit nervous. We passed his old preschool on the way and the memories came. His four-year-old face, pressed to Miss Joya’s window, wanting me to stay with him. The tears he cried made me feel so selfish, as I pulled out of the driveway, trying not to look up over the steering wheel at his sad face. His sister never cried when I left. Why didn’t he trust me, I remember wondering?

Of my two children, he has always been the clingier. He took longer to sleep on his own, to want to go to other people’s houses, to be ready for sleepovers and such. Annie was ten when she said, “Can’t I just stay here?” as a grocery store trip interrupted her play. Not Bryan. He’d hop up and go with me until he was 13. And even then, he wasn’t so crazy about me taking a walk in the dark.

I used to worry about his dependence upon me. But as the teenage current pulls us further apart, I look back with no regrets. I will never wish I had spent less time with my kids.

The push for early independence is lost on me. I hear people talk about how their preschoolers can run the household. I think it’s great when kids feel needed and are taught by example to serve. So much of that can be covered, however, in building a good relationship. With that in place, is there really a need for chore charts or punishments and rewards? I don’t have a chart for my husband. He doesn’t punish me if I forget to do the laundry. Why this “us versus them” attitude where kids are concerned? Doesn’t that just put the seed of rebellion in place? Why then, are we surprised when our children become snarky in their teenage years? After all, their intellectual capacity is allowing them to realize we don’t know everything and we’ve spent precious years making them our adversaries. What else can happen when those two things intersect?

Teenagers want to feel needed. They want to raise a barn, as it were. They will willingly help out when treated like their help matters. How difficult and insulting would it be for us adults to do chores if we felt like they were being metered out just to structure our time (I can do that for myself, thank you very much) build our character, or worse, in order to punish? Teenagers already have to field the thousands of comments they will hear about how awful teenagers are. While the hormones rage, could we maybe encourage them instead? Be a soft place for them to land?

Sure. Independence, in many forms, is a wondrous thing. Being able to think independently might be the most important and profound human experience. But where people come together, isn’t interdependence worth some consideration? Being able to see the needs of others, along with one’s own needs seems vastly superior to me to being able to fend for oneself. I pull the laundry out of the dryer and my kids and I fold it together while we talk. More time together is created. Ideally, we work side by side. The same skills are taught but the atmosphere is loving and leveling.

And of course, chore charts and the like are not inherently bad. Shades of gray and all that. If they serve as a sort of friendly reminder to everyone and the kids respond favorably to it, then why not? Some people love visual aids. But if they take the place of leadership and are meant to get the child off on her own, not needing direction, I question the merit in such approaches.

Time is flowing like a river, as the song says. All too soon my kids will be cleaning lint screens, unclogging toilets and cleaning moldy food containers with no one to tell them how and when. How do I want to interact with them while I’ve still got them here? How much time to I want to spend focussing on the mechanics of living, checking off to-do lists? Yes, the mundanities need doing. But in what spirit? How might I best lead? I want my kids to remember my face brightening more often than not when they approached me. I want to be a person who makes their faces brighten — or at least not sour. They didn’t ask me to bring them into the world. I need for them to know I’m continually glad they came.

A thousand words? More. Much more.

I’ve always been drawn to old photographs. I collect them. I have books full of old photos of people I don’t know and could never trace. I see a face and the questions come. What were they thinking at that precise moment? Were they happy with their life? Did they want to be wearing that native headdress or did the photographer insist? Do those sad eyes point to a loveless marriage or simply a passing headache? What would he tell me about his politics if we could sit and drink beer? Or would he drink? Would she confide the frustrations of her day-after-day mission to feed all those children, who pose without smiling in starched, white, formal dresses and shirts? Was she ever hungry herself, to make that happen? Would there be a story about The Depression and how it turned a page of the calendar into a impossible onslaught, a harsh parade of days to be gotten through? Or would she tell me how precious each one of those faces are to her and how I’d better hang on tight to time, try to slow it down by noticing and savoring each moment with my own children? What was ahead in their lives? Who was lost first? Did a war take that boy before his parents grew old? Did childbirth or breast cancer take that baby girl later on? Or did they all go “in order,” blessed and thankful for all the incandescent moments of familial love?

As hard as I knew “Schindler’s List” would be to watch when it came to my local theater years ago, an early scene caught me off-guard. While Jews were being loaded onto trains, lied to about where their luggage was going, German soldiers were ransacking the trunks, spilling out suitcases, taking what they pleased, junking the rest. The Jews were told to pack only what was most important to them. The camera’s slow pan down a long table of discarded family photos, lingering pauses over sepia faces, pleading eyes, had me sobbing long and hard. Life can be so distilled in a photo. Something is present that can’t be noticed when motion and sound and task and flow from all directions takes over.

These antique images, the long-ago moments caught on film, are the past’s testimony. Lives were lived long before mine mattered. I look at the photos of my grandmother today, on her 100th birthday. Her grandkids called her “Merna.” Her eyes, so full of worry. She was such an anxious woman, trying with all of her might not to be. She was quiet. She hated discord. Yet, she wanted everyone together, even with the risk of debates and banter, loud opinions and chaos. She loved us all in a way that made her fear losing us. “Couldn’t we all just stay together?” she would say, when a teenager would head out for a night on the town. She craved calm and she wanted us all to crave it with her. She wanted to bake it and dish it out to us, like her coconut cakes — slices of bliss.

She married my grandfather, known as A.A. (Atlas Alan Maynard) when she was 19. I would pester her at least once a year to tell me of their courtship. She’d say how he walked into her workplace in Greensboro and noticed the run in her nylons. She raised a dark eyebrow and asked him why he was looking at her legs. She was already dating Billy Blalock, but as Billy lifted her over a hedge and made her choose, she chose my grandfather. “I thought Billy was going to drop me on the other side of that hedge!” Her admiration for A.A. ran so deep, it seemed miraculous she had pressed on when widowed at 49. She described the night he went to the kitchen to get some bicarbonate of soda and she heard him fall hard to the floor. She knew instantly he was dead. And she knew she’d feel married to him always.

When her middle-aged younger brother, Fred, killed himself years later, her anxiety ratcheted up many notches. As his older sister, she felt she must’ve failed him. She worried about the fate of his soul. She began to listen to Full Gospel preaching and started donating money to Jim Bakker and his ilk, turning away from her discerning nature and wanting things to be simplified. Rules, codes, tithes, guarantees. She became less patient. She would retreat with headaches to her upstairs room and turn on a preacher’s cassette and check out of life. Had my grandfather lived, I believe he could’ve coaxed her through that and back to the life they had built.

I felt his absence my whole life. I still do. He was the Atticus Finch of Sampson County, to hear folks tell it. My only direct connection to him is a boot sock. He gave my mother a pair of gray boot socks to use as Christmas stockings. My brother had already been born. His name is Dewey. My grandfather joked and said, “You can use the other sock for Misty, when she comes.” Every time my mother told that story, I wanted to be named Misty. I wanted to feel as if he really had known about me and I wanted to honor his knowing.

When old lady Sunday School teachers would speak of streets paved with gold and and harps and angels, I never thought any of that was true. My own version of heaven came to me in dreams. I would sit at the bank of Black River where my mother grew up, where my grandfather farmed, and I would see a fishing boat coming slowly up the river, meandering around Cypress trees. As it neared me, I could see my grandfather, in sepia tones, in contrast to my peachy skin and navy shorts and the mossy greens, browns and grays in the backdrop of the river bank. He would be standing in the boat, telling me to come down to the water’s edge and get in. When I came closer I would see other relatives in the boat, all in sepia. As he took my hand and helped me into the boat, I slowly turned to sepia too. He would continue on down the river, paddling through all the colors, taking me somewhere I knew I wanted to go to see more people who had waited eternities to meet me.

The photos stare back at me and I wish to speak to each face. They take me years into the past and into the pretend future of my childhood’s heaven. I sit here today, missing Merna, A.A., Tillie, Bryan, Louise, Jane, Annie Lee, and so many others. The scent of gardenia from a cutting on my desk pulls me back like a friendly current, way back to days when I trusted life completely. The more I remember, the more it infuses me with trust and thanks and peace.

I still have time to choose which legacy to leave my children. Anxiety and worry, masquerade as doing. They convince me I’m taking some kind of stand or needed action. When in reality, there is so much to trust in. I could choose that path. These sepia people who came before, the brightly colored people of now, they are counting on me to live a life of intentional gratitude. Not some Pollyanna world where no one ever gets upset. Not a life of looking the other way, silent through injustice. Rather the willful countering of needless worry, the whines over imperfections, the complaints, the wanting more of everything, those traits that devour time and leave us bewildered over where time went. I want to choose to slow down and breathe in trust, breathe out thanks, breathe in peace, breathe out joy. I want to contradict anxiety. Prove it wrong. Surely it’s not more effective than peace. My grandmother’s sepia eyes approve.

Reclamation

This has been a most glorious spring.  The hot weather is coming soon, so I need to remember how long spring has lasted and let myself go into summer with a good attitude. Heat never has agreed with me. My mother says from the time I was born in mid-November, to the first hot North Carolina day, I was the “easiest baby” in the world.  Always cooing and smiling.  Then, summer came. We had no air conditioner back then. I cried and cried until autumn.

As I grew old enough to spend my days in and around water, life in the heat became more than tolerable.  I loved to swim more than anything.  I barely needed a summer wardrobe.  When I was six or so, I would get up, put on my red bathing suit with the navy blue anchor applique, and go outside right away.  My thick, long, honey-colored hair was a mess.  My feet and knees were often dirty from the night before.  My mother would have me bathe after supper but I’d be out afterwards catching fireflies, listening to my brother’s basketball hit the backboard and the ground over and over again.  I remember staying out in the mosquitoey evenings until it got so dark that all I saw was the movement of the basketball. I was of the world. I was part of everything. I knew every branch of the unusually large pink dogwood tree, climbing toward the catbird nest into the darkness.

Knowing instinctively how to navigate the seasons, how to move through space, time and nature, is something that often leaves us as we grow older. We get sick and we don’t stop to sleep with a hot water bottle on our tummies.   We don’t stop and pick up something beautiful or interesting and turn it over in our hands and in our minds for as long as we feel like it.  We buy flowers precut and stuff them in vases.  We pick the brown leaves off of houseplants, ridding them of imperfection.  We look to the calendar for what’s coming next. And if there is a rare free square on the calendar, we say, “What are we going to do?  Or watch?  Or accomplish?”  We are slaves to plans.  We have to be told by people on television and in magazines or self-help books, “Listen to your body.”  We don’t stop and cry and say, “I’m sad” when we could. We are supposed to keep going.  We are often busy preparing hot water bottles for other people, looking at what someone else brings to us, listening to someone else’s problems. Noble, yes. But sustainable?

A few years ago, I yelled, “Wash up for dinner!” out the back door and I saw my children come running out of the woods and it hit me.  It washed over me — the memory of being called in for dinner, having no idea what was going to be served, what it took to make it, how many grocery trips each ingredient represented, what it meant to clean up afterwards, earn the money to buy it, how invested anyone was that it nourish me.  Just running from play to food.  As I remembered, my face got hot, and tears came to me.  I felt duped.  I was angry that growing up had meant forgetting so much. I was sad that I could never go back to sitting under the umbrella clothesline, between sheets, hiding from my mother when it was time to go to the dentist. I mourned the days when I could lie in my yellow bedroom in my spool twin bed shoved up to the window, curtains blowing across my skin from the force of the attic fan, thinking my sleeping father across the hall could protect me from all harm.

As I’ve watched my children pursue their interests with such joy and freedom, and as they’re brushing up against adulthood and contribute in new ways and need less hands-on care from me, I’ve realized that growing up “all the way” is a remembering, a return to childlike pleasures.  And, I would hope, for those of us who didn’t have charmed, protected childhoods, maturity can be a time to claim what one missed.  I really can wake up and go swimming if I want, I really can draw a picture just for me.  I really can study my toes and look at maps and read a poem and call a friend and go outside and sip honeysuckle ends and lie on a blanket and watch the bats just after sunset. I really can make a list of books I want to read.  And I can stop reading one if I don’t like it.  I can work and I can play and the two can merge. I can. I must. I will.

Simply Visiting?

Just write something.  There.  I did it.

This is a blog I’ve been meaning to begin for a very long time.  Over three years ago, my husband and I took our daughter out of school.  We wanted to home school until we could find a healthy environment for her.  We saw home schooling as merely a stopgap measure.

I began to read the works of John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, David H. Albert and Grace Llewellynn.  I watched my daughter thrive, learning at home, at her own pace.  She read and wrote voraciously, while slowing the pace for math.  Her social life took off, through her love of community theater.  She transformed into a well-rested, happy teenager who began to write, draw, paint, read, explore, laugh and cry.  No longer was she emotionally flat.  It was amazing to witness.

My husband and I began to question the wisdom of seeking out another school.  Within six months, our son joined us at home, leaving school behind.  I faced the next fall with the notion that this 8th grade girl and this 6th grade boy needed me to teach them everything they would need to know.   I admittedly felt a bit burdened.  For the first six months that autumn, I even hired someone to clean my house every two weeks, imagining myself wrung-out from being a full time teacher.

What I have learned since then is nothing short of astonishing.  Children really need facilitation, encouragement and for people to get out of their way.  They’ve amazed me in the last three years.  And no, they aren’t two more examples of home school prodigies. They aren’t winning national spelling bees or going to college at some wildly young age. They are living fully.  They are in the world.  They enjoy their days and nights and have no reason to dread certain days of the week.  They are learning.  They are content.  They are making me question this American concept of what it is to be a teenager.  What it ought to mean to be a child.  What it could mean to be a person.

Watching all of this unfold, two things (at least) have emerged within my consciousness. All institutions who want something from us should be questioned:  the education industrial complex, the food industrial complex, the religion industrial complex, if you will, and so on.  Also, the notion of how and when and at what times of life learning is to take place.  How a life is to be lived is something that we examine so seldom.  We buy tear-off calendars about how not to sweat small stuff, the self help sections of book stores are rife with answers, yet it seems people complain about their jobs, their country, their churches, their communities, even their families a good deal of their waking hours.

It seems people have forgotten how to eat, how to sleep, how to commune, how to learn, how to find reverence, how to move, how to pray.  Why?  Did we really forget?  Or did we ever know?

The poet Mary Oliver once said,  “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

As I lean towards fifty years old (I’m 48 now) I find myself fairly desperate to make certain I am living wholly and fully.  To say that a blog is going to be about life is as broad as it gets.  But there it is.  I want to live the life I was meant to live.  In this moment, and the next, and the next.  And I want to record some of my thoughts and realizations, pulling weeds and nurturing new growth.