Actual Unretouched Photo

I’ve talked about this before, but . . . oh, how I hate trying to teach my children composition.  Writing comes as naturally to me as breathing.  I compose sentences and paragraphs in my head.  I sit down at the keyboard and phrases appear as if by magic on the screen, directly from my brain without even pausing in my fingertips.  I can’t stop writing and my boys can’t begin. 

I wonder if they really think in the limited vocabulary that appears on the page when I ask them to write something.  Do they notice any details as they careen through life?  Do they have an interior life in which they actually contemplate things and consider ideas? 

For this assignment, they were to write a “compare and contrast” essay.  I suggested the topic: comparing school at home with public school (because they couldn’t even come up with a topic–they acted as if I demanded that they come up with a solution to the unrest in the Middle East or solve the mystery of orphan socks or to create a new color for Crayola).  Doesn’t that topic I suggested sound easy?  

They did all the pre-writing, had their points lined up in columns.  Then, they committed words to paper and again, the question came up:  does one sentence make a paragraph?  Oh no, it does not, if you are a 13-year old boy.  (You must know the rules and be able to follow the rules before you are allowed to break the rules.)  Today they were to proofread and polish their work. 

Here are the final two sentences as written by my Reluctant Student:

“Woke up time what you eat and how fast you go but.  You learn in both and accomplish in both.”

That was after he proofread and polished.  Oh, my aching head.  And how about this paragraph/sentence by my other student:

“For example when I went to public school I had to get up really early to get ready now I can sleep in to a later time.”

When I suggest that details would, perhaps, be required, my students react with astonishment and horror.  When I point out that a sentence fragment is, perhaps, nonsensical at best, my students respond with the defensiveness of a politician caught with a mouthful of lies.  By the time I am frothing at the mouth, shouting, declaring my superior writing skills and yanking at my hair, they are falling to the floor and crawling under the table to escape my frustration.  Really, one prone on the floor and one hiding under the table. 

Oh, yes, I am a very effective teacher of composition.  And Mother of the Year.  Ha ha ha.

So, what a day full of frustration.  Tomorrow, no more composition.  I’m going to have to work up the courage (and possibly get a prescription for muscle-relaxers or hallucinogenics or both) before we tackle the next composition assignment, a persuasive essay dealing with United States history after the Civil War but before the Great War.  Tomorrow, we focus on reaching our required percentages of completion for all subjects before February ends (lots of grammar, a little science, some history and a touch more literature). 

Or die trying.

Note to self:  Never become a junior high composition teacher.

Nine years ago tonight, I floated in a rented birthing tub in northern Michigan, trying to relax and breathe.  My husband hovered near the tub, along with my midwives.  The Amish midwife held my hand, squeezing it tightly.  The “English” midwife listened to the baby’s heart-tones with her stethoscope.  My labor support people stood around, watching.  (I felt like I had an audience, but my mind was so disconnected that I didn’t care.)  By this time, darkness had fallen and I’d asked that the overhead light be turned off, but Lonnie pointed out that she needed the light for the video camera.

So, I squeezed my eyes tight and concentrated on not fighting my body.

And what do you know?  At 11:43 p.m., my third son was born.  He was the pregnancy the doctors said was “unlikely” to happen, the baby I was eight weeks pregnant with before I even took a pregnancy test.  Weeks before I took the test, I told a close friend that I was either pregnant or dying from a terrible disease.  And yet, after nine years of assuming the doctors were right and five years after adopting twins, the lines on the pregnancy test assured me that I was, indeed, pregnant.

I planned a home-birth.  In our previous church, I’d met a midwife.  We were waiting to adopt at the time and this lovely woman answered all my questions about birthing at home.  Then, her grown daughter invited me to be at her home-birth.  Witnessing the peaceful birth changed how I thought about birth forever.  So, I never even contemplated a routine hospital birth when I became pregnant myself.

I labored for forty-three hours, most of them not difficult.  The first twenty-four hours were humdrum, though at the time, I regarded the contractions with the serious contemplation of a first-time mother.  I breathed.  I knelt.  I concentrated.  Only toward the end when I struggled did I realize that the earlier contractions were nothing, mere blips on the pain scale.

The baby was born under water at 10:43 p.m.  An hour later, I was tucked beneath my flannel sheets, my sweet baby boy inches from my face.  We slept all night in the king-sized bed my husband and I had purchased in anticipation of the birth.  In the morning, my 4-year old twins came rushing in to see their baby brother. 

When a friend of mine came to see the new baby, she exclaimed, “Look at his crooked pinkies!” and sure enough, I noticed for the first time that my baby boy had inherited his daddy’s hands and feet.  As the years have passed, this boy of ours resembles his father more and more and I finally understand why tear sprang to my mother-in-law’s eyes when she told me that my husband had been a joy to her all his life.  My husband’s son, this “unlikely” baby boy has brought me undiluted joy from the day I knew he was snuggled into my womb.   

And he makes me laugh.  When he was about four years old, he once told me, “I know why they call it duct tape.”  “Why?” I said.  “Because,” he said, “It’s sticky and it smells like a duck.”

One whole summer, we had to call him “Thunder.”

Before he went to kindergarten, he insisted his middle name was “Dayba,” and only his kindergarten teacher could convince him that it was really “Davis.”

When he was three, he instructed me to make a hopscotch, numbered from negative 11 to 3.  He has always had a thing for numbers.  He knows his multiplication tables better than his 13-year old twin brothers do.

I love my boy.  He has a soft heart, a goofy sense of humor and a sharp mind.  I want to keep him here at home forever so he’ll be safe and secure and sweet.  Today he is nine.  Tomorrow, he’ll be nineteen and I already miss him.

  (At age 5.) 

I wish Judy were my neighbor.  Read this and you’ll understand: 

Another book idea. This one is for children. It’s to be called “This Is Mom”. In it, the child will follow what ‘mom’ does all day. I’m getting sick and tired of books about what the child does all day. One page will be “This is mom eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with you. She loves you, but she hates peanut butter and jelly and can’t wait for you to take your nap so she can eat the M&M’s she has hidden away. Although, she has to eat them on the run, or she will not have the dishes washed, laundry going or dinner started before you wake up, requiring a diaper change.” That particular page COULD have an element of ’scratch and sniff’, I’m not sure about that yet…

That just cracked me up!

In other news, today I was sitting at my computer “working” (or reading blogs or checking email, who knows?) and I heard my 4-year old daughter screaming upstairs:  “I DO NOT HAVE A BRAIN!  I DO NOT HAVE A BRAIN!”  She repeated this several times which could only mean one thing:  one of her 13-year old brothers had wandered upstairs and was torturing her by telling her she has a brain.  For several months, she has insisted that boys have brains and girls have hearts.  (Leading to the inverse truth:  boys do not have hearts; girls do not have brains.)  We cannot tell her otherwise and so, this particular brother delights in teasing her by saying (out of the blue), “Hey, Gracie, do you have a brain?” and then she yells, “I DO NOT HAVE A BRAIN!” 

He finds this funny.

I find this annoying because I am in dire need of peace and quiet and deliberately provoking a four-year old to shriek does not promote household harmony. 

(And now, 3 p.m. on the dot and doorbell rings.  The first neighborhood kid of the day has arrived.  I can’t wait until summer gets here and I can shoo all the kids outdoors all afternoon.  I’ll even throw in two dozen popsicles, a small price to pay for silence.)

I’m rather nostalgic for the days when only twelve people came to read my daily postings.  Now, sometimes–like today–I feel self-conscious, worried about what people will think of me.  (Especially since some real life people read this now.)  I feel vulnerable when I pull back the curtains and let people have a glimpse inside my house.  If I describe my kitchen full of dinner dishes and abandoned glasses, everyone will know that I’m a slob.  A lazy slob.  If I exclaim that I am so tired, just so weary from my responsibilities here at home, everyone will roll their eyes and wonder just what is so difficult about maintaining a household in alignment with my very low standards of housewifery.

If I tell you about the pile of eighteen books near my desk, everyone will realize that I have pack-rat tendencies (and a lack of adequate bookshelves).  If I talk about my non-existent relationship with my sister who no longer speaks to me, you’ll assume that I am a rotten person, especially since I talk about the estrangement.  (How disloyal of me to speak the truth!)  If I offer details about life with teenage boys (stinky shoes, stinky armpits, repetitive noises, broken beds), you might think that I have no idea what I’m doing as a parent.  (You’d be right.)  If I mention my 4-year old daughter’s impressive ability to write letters . . . on her face, her pajama pants, the wooden arm of the child-sized rocker, her little table in the kitchen, as well as on paper . . . you might think I’m bragging.  Or that I have no control since she won’t stop marking every flat (and not flat) surface with neat little rows of letters.

It’s funny because I’m not really concerned with fitting a certain stereotype.  I don’t care if people think I’m not a picture-perfect pastor’s wife or a holy enough Christian.  It makes no difference to me that the Almas and Eleanors (anonymous commenters of prior days) of the world think I’m judgmental.  I do worry about appearing to be a messy housekeeper with an abnormal level of clutter.  If I knew you were coming by, I’d work myself into a lather putting things away and dusting and washing the kitchen floor on my hands and knees.  But on a daily basis, I don’t want to devote time to bringing my household up to higher standards because that effort is ultimately such a losing battle.  The kids undo what I do almost as quickly as I do it.  (I know.  A better mother than I would make the kids do it.  I told you I have no idea what I’m doing here.)  I just don’t want to work like a slave cleaning and tidying.    

What I want to do is read.  I want to think.  I want to plant flowers–will the ground ever warm up?  I want to be uninterrupted.  I want to enjoy just a day or two of an empty nest.  I wish I could exchange a couple of days of the normal chaos for a couple of future days of quiet.  Alas, time is linear . . . no loop-do-loos, no skipping ahead, no backtracking.  Just today.  And then tomorrow, another today.

I need to shake this self-consciousness.  You can help by pretending that either 1) you are just like me, thus feel no judgment, only empathy or 2) you aren’t reading this blog and won’t look at me cross-eyed when you see me in public.  Also, if you’re going to stop by, give me a few hours’ notice so I can find someplace to stash all these books.

A newspaper article caught my eye the other day about the planet Jupiter. This quote especially gave me pause:

“We think the ocean leaks onto the surface,” said McKinnon, a planetary scientist at Washington University. “What does that tell us about the chemistry of the water that’s down below? And the 64 billion dollar question is, could any of that stuff have the signature of life?”

Apparently, life is most valuable on far-flung planets in the solar system. Imagine if a human embryo were found in that “vast, warm, salty ocean – bigger than all of Earth’s put together” on Jupiter. The scientific community, indeed, the world at large would be thunderstruck, in awe of the discovery. Can you imagine the furor? (The story might even push the Anna Nicole drama out of the news.) How many scientists have devoted their lives to the search for life in our solar system?

Now, put that same embryo in the uterus of a random woman in this country and you’ll hear that “life begins with the mother’s decision” (as General Wesley Clark asserted during his presidential campaign).

That life in a warm ocean on a distant planet would be a breathtaking miracle.

That same life inconveniently located in the womb of a woman on this planet is disposable.

I guess that old adage is true: It’s all about location, location, location.

Despite the holiday-status of this day, my teenagers had to go to P.E. at the YMCA.  While they were gone, I cleaned up the kitchen, then decided to clean their room.  They have a loft bed with a second bed underneath, but that bed’s metal bed-frame bent a week or two ago, so the box-spring had been sitting directly on the floor.  Since I had some spare time today, I screwed together the wooden bed-frame that matches the loft bed.  I bought the set at a garage sale, with full knowledge that the lower bed-frame would need a repair.  The previous boys who owned the bed broke the wooden support when one of them dived from the upper loft bed onto the lower bed.

Imagine that.

But I’d had the wooden frame repaired and so today, I put it together.  After vacuuming the carpet and pushing the bed into place, the room looked fairly decent.  I’d also vacuumed the family room and done some laundry before my husband liberated me from my happy home and sent me into the rainy world at 2 p.m.

Today Value Village had a half-off sale, so I perused books and second-hand clothing.  I spent twenty bucks before heading to the movie theater where I saw “Breach.”  (Good movie.  I recommend it if you like spy movies and promise not to be too distracted by the lump on Ryan Phillipe’s forehead.  What is that all about?)  I returned home at 6:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before I was expected home.  I exercised, then settled in to watch “24.” 

And somewhere between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m., one of my twin boys appeared at the doorway with a sheepish look on his face.  “Uh, mom?” he said. 

“Yes?” I said.

“Um, [my brother] uh, broke his bed.”

“Broke the bed?”  Heavy sigh.  Do I even want to know?  No.  Then, “Fine.  Go to sleep.”

Of course, when I went in there to investigate a few minutes later, I found the wooden support slats broken in two places (the repaired place, plus a new, previously unbroken place).  I said, “How did this happen?” and he claimed he merely sat on the bed, which we all know is a complete lie.

He admitted to “plopping” on the bed and honestly, I am so sick of my boys being so rough on belongings that I was speechless.  I told him to pull his mattress alongside the frame and to just go to sleep.  Tomorrow I will have to disassemble the bed and return it to the storage room until I can beg a woodworker to fix it again–at which point I will use it in my daughter’s room where it will be safe from teenage boys “plopping” on it.

I hate it when my work is immediately undone by the folly of children.  But there’s no point in going apoplectic over a broken bed.

Also?  I’m not going to shave my head over this. 

Last week, I read these words by P.D. James (Time to Be In Earnest): 

The suicide of the young is more common now than it was in my youth.  I can’t recall the suicide of a single friend or acquaintance during my childhood or adolescence.  Perhaps today we all take happiness as our right and unhappiness is seen as shameful or insupportable.  Or is it that some people have an imperfect appreciation of linear time?  For them, the present moment is immeasurable, fixed in an eternal agony.  There can be no hope that things will be better tomorrow, because the idea of a tomorrow has no reality.

I sometimes lose sight of the fact that time marches on.  But the empty milk cartons in the fridge tell the story of the voracious appetite of teenagers.  Those teenagers who stand and look me in the eye were seven months old just yesterday, it seems.  My baby girl declares, “I am a big girl now!” and looks forward to her fifth birthday (in September).  The mirror reflects back an aging face.  I put my fingertips just below my eyebrows and lift up my sagging eyelids in a parody of my youth.  The crocuses push out of the earth, eager for their turn to bloom. 

I thought this week about those moving walkways you find in airports.  You can stand still, yet be propelled down the hallway, moving while not moving at all.  Time is that moving walkway, carrying us along regardless of our willingness.    Even if I stay inside all day and cuddle with my children by the fireplace (and turn off all electronics!), time races along, carrying us into a new moment, into a new day.  Whether we’re ready or not.  (Ready or not, here I come!)

I remember when I was a teenager, feeling like I was stuck in a vast whirlpool, never actually moving forward, just swirling around and around in the angst that is adolescence.  And yet, though I thought I was circling, I was moving forward, propelled (in slow motion) toward adulthood.  No experience, devastation, delirium or delight was eternal.  Time inches us forward, so slowly sometimes that we can’t tell we’re in motion, so quickly at other times that we get carsick. 

This morning at church, a 4-year old boy nodded to my daughter and said to me, “Where is her other mother?”  I said, “I’m the only mother she’s ever had.  She just has one mother.”  He asked me because last summer, his mother killed herself.  He has another mother now.

And yesterday, I went to a memorial service for a 23-year old man who ended his life.

Words fail me when I try to make sense of this sort of hopelessness and decisiveness.  I understand sorrow.  I understand loss.  I understand the terror of feeling that life will never change, that things will never improve, that the clouds will never lift. 

But I also know that with dawn comes hope.  Time itself brings a change–if not a change of circumstance, at least a change of scenery and perhaps a change of perspective.  Time, linear, sequential, inevitable.  Time, our friend, our enemy, rushing us along, even when we feel like we’re slogging in slow-motion through quicksand.

No more time for those with broken hearts who break the clock, stop the hands from tick-tocking.  Farewell, strangers I never knew.  All the same, I feel the empty space where you should be and hear the silence you left behind. 

I took a nap today.  You know what that means, don’t you? 

Don’t you?

That means that after the nap, I was groggy and headachey.  Recent news stories suggest that naps might benefit your heart, but I have always found naps unappealing, except during those rare months of pregnancy when naps were essential.  When I wake from a nap, I never feel refreshed, but rather as if I’ve spent a half hour submerged in a murky pond, deprived of oxygen.  I come up with algae in my hair and sand in my eyes.  

Anyway, I took a nap today while listening to kids stomping up and down the stairs–playing tag?  hide-and-seek?  dodge ball?  My daughter came in periodically to insist that we go shopping.  From under the comforter where I’d hid my face, I promised a trip to the store after the kids went home.  And, sure enough, at 6 p.m., we went to the Dollar Store where she wandered up and down the aisles admiring all the tacky ceramics and cheap stuffed animals.  She spent her five bucks and a few of my bucks as well.  (I mean, sure, we needed that clear plastic bag full of 250 hair bands, even though she won’t wear any sort of hair accessories, ever.  And the stickers?  Oh yeah, we must have stickers.  And a felt basket decorated as a bunny.)

(I needed the nap because I am still fighting off this cold.  Today was the day of the headache and occasional cough.) 

My crocuses have begun to sprout, but I fear they will not survive the trampling of boy feet in the back yard.  Alas.  But, I am not in the business of growing crocuses, but of growing boys.  Still, I think I’ll put a little fence around my little garden patch because I’d like to grow flowers, as well as boys.

Along with my protest of Science Fair Projects, I must add my critical voice to the issue of half-days of school.  While I understand the benefit of half-days for the teachers and administrators, I hate half-days.  I hate getting up in the mornings to get my student off to school only to have him return three hours later, hungry for lunch.  Today, I hated the noise of children running through the house all afternoon and the shouting . . . half-days are loud days around here.  Some days I tolerate loud less well than other days.  Today was one of those days.

That is all.

Oh, and kudos to the local school district which cut short a dance (and cancelled future dances) because kids refused to stop simulating sexual intercourse on the dance floor.  Someone ought to give those school administrators a large cash reward.  Hooray for sensible adults.

So, I was too lazy to get up early enough to make heart-shaped pancakes.  I have such great intentions at night, but very little follow-through in the mornings.  But, I did redeem my myself by hanging up decorations–those vinyl clings that stick to the window and a banner that reads HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY and some red cupid cut-outs.  Then, my daughter and I baked homemade cut-out cookies in heart-shapes with sprinkles.  She created some “valentimes” with scissors and glitter glue and markers.

I will gloss over the two hours this afternoon when I went stark raving mad, crazily vacuuming and picking up toys and dirty socks and bowls and empty Triscuit boxes . . . we had a babysitter coming over, a 15-year old girl, and I absolutely could feel her Eye of Judgment on my house which I maintain at a low level of constant clutter because I do not have a pantry nor storage appropriate for Play-doh and its accessories, a plastic tea-set, and extra cases of Diet Coke.  I really do try to keep the piles to a minimum, but where am I supposed to put stuff like food? 

Anyway, I exercised this afternoon, then turned into a cleaning lunatic before jumping into the shower (with its newly renovated water pressure) and preparing for a dinner date with my husband and two other couples.  We had a nice time and returned home at 9:30 p.m. to find my daughter sound asleep on the couch and the house still in order. 

This week is conference week at school which means half-days.  I hate half-days.  Seems like such a hassle to get ready for school only to return home a few hours later.  My house was full of running, screaming children all afternoon–while I was trying to get stuff done.

By the way, did I mention that I’m sending the novel Children of Men to Kimberlie?  And My Losing Season to Suzanne?  And The Handmaid’s Tale to Mopsy?  Well, I am.  I have more books to get rid of, so stay tuned. 

And Happy V.D. for another thirty minutes (Pacific time!) . . .