Process

My son was five years old.  His two little brothers and I ran, breathless, to keep up with his endless quests for knowledge.  I provided endless strewing and modeling.  Anything I threw at him, he'd absorb.  He split light, built a telegraph, raised a butterfly, read chapter books silently, and memorized nature encyclopedias for pleasure.  At night, we'd lie in bed and read E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan.  This was his kindergarten year, though I never told him that.

Our homeschooling success hinged upon two things: a rich, authentic learning environment, and my silence.  He seemed born knowing how to drive his own education, and my early attempts to require any sort of script-following in the name of standards or learning outcomes were unnecessary at best and damaging at worst.  

I hadn’t planned on homeschooling, but the nearer he got to school age, the stronger and stronger became my instinct not to send him.  It was undeniable and slightly terrifying, and I had to dig deep to figure out why.  I had to define for myself what school and learning really were and examine their relationship.  (If you haven’t done this for yourself yet, I recommend you start now.)

The main reason I chose to homeschool him was to protect and nourish his holy curiosity.  I had to come to terms with the unsettling irony that sending him to school would sabotage his learning and his identity as a learner.  I do not think this is the case for all children, but it is unmistakably true for him.

Although my conviction of this was clear and solid, it took some time and some work before I would learn to release my self-imposed restrictions and root out the limiting public-school-absorbed beliefs I still held of what a school could look like.  And of course, I had to face my fears.

The times I am least effective as a parent and educator are when I react to the fear of being different or trying to please somebody else.  My mama-bear instincts and experience are strong enough to now to keep such fears in their cages.  But I was a new, fiercely dedicated homeschooler who was determined to get it right, and every time I hit a bump in the road, I came face to face with those fears.

When his progress wasn't steady in a particular area, or if we hit a wall, I worried I was doing it wrong.  Trying to push him up and over a hurtle did nothing but frustrate and distance us.  Even my offers to let him sit on my shoulders to get a better view were rebuffed.  I laugh now to think that steady progress and no obstacles should be either possible or desirable hallmarks of a quality education—homeschool or otherwise.  But at the time it felt like the goal, and while I may not have reached it, I had to at least outdo the public school system.

I know now that there must be walls to climb for growth to happen, and growth is the real education.  My son showed me time and time again that he had to climb over the walls himself.  I learned that my job was to provide him with the tools he’d need and get out of the way.  He’d build and climb the ladder.

We had been reading about animals and food chains, and I thought it would be fun to create a mural and hang it on the low wall in our foyer.  (Yes, we had a foyer where we lived.  That is a story for another time.)  I cut a long piece of paper from our easel and handed my son a roll of teal, patterned washi tape to secure it to the wall.  I envisioned the hanging of the paper to be a quick, efficient process, which would be followed by hours of enjoyable, collaborative mural-making.

My son had other ideas.

He was taking much too long.  Instead of just taping each corner of the paper as I had expected (but not instructed), he seemed to be intending to tape the entire perimeter of the ten-foot-long banner.  His face fell and the light in his eyes dimmed as I lectured him about wastefulness, took the roll of tape and walked away.

It took me maybe sixty seconds to come to my senses.  I was no poster child when it came to efficiency or thrift.  I radiated hypocrisy, and stung with shame.  I wondered how I had missed the mark with my vision of this learning project.  And then I realized it had been my project, not his.

I approached my crestfallen child, still kneeling on the ground beside the unfinished work I'd snatched from him.  I crouched down, looked him in the eyes, and said, "I'm sorry.  I shouldn't have done that.  Tape is meant to be used.  Use all you want."

He seemed to re-inflate the moment my respect for his work returned.  "Thank you, Mommy," he said, and resumed his process.

The mural hung there for months, with only a few sparse pencil sketches my son made at my request.  (I suppose if it had been that important to fill the paper with the colorful animals and habitats of my imagination, I would have drawn them myself.)  But they were surrounded by a vibrant, painstakingly-applied border—the real masterpiece.  My project had fizzled, but his was complete.  Authentic, hard-earned, and beautiful.

Weaned

Yesterday I got my toddler to sleep in her bed at naptime without nursing her.  This has never happened before. 

She’s a focused, peaceful, no-fuss kind of person.  As toddlers go, she asks for relatively little during the day.  She’s content to explore, forage, rejoice in her brothers’ good fortune, and create her own purposeful work.  She keeps me in her line of sight, and all is calm.  (With her, anyway.  My three boys are another story.)

But at night, she asks for all of me.  And I oblige, partly because I feel such gratitude for the flexibility she graces us with each day.  But mostly because she is wee, I am tired, and we have a rhythm. 

I’ve felt a gentle pull the last few months to change it.  Because co-sleeping is beautiful, but nighttime nursing is a little wearing.  And my husband is sleeping a room away, and I think it would be nice to be nearer.

But after all the nights my husband was gone during all the years he traveled for work, my little ones and I have perfected our bedtime routine and my husband and I have forgotten ours.

He’s home now.  The long-hoped-for local position at his company became available a few months ago, and after four and a half years of going the extra mile (quite literally), he earned it.  Sleeping a room instead of a state away feels like heaven.

But I am bonding with someone all night, and he is not.  Hence the pull. 

But this means more work for me.  To create two new nighttime rhythms. 

The one with my husband feels elusive.  His frozen shoulder pain dictates his sleeping position.  He likes a fan blowing on him at night, and I don’t.  And the farther out of earshot my children are, the harder it is for me to relax.  When I hear them breathe, I rest easier.  So when I am in the master bedroom with my husband, I lie awake long after he’s fallen asleep.  And when I’ve finally calmed my mind, relaxed my body, and given myself permission to turn down the volume on my internal baby monitor, a child cries out my name, and I know I would have gotten more sleep if I’d stayed in her room to begin with.

Are nights for rest or relationships?  With my toddler I can do both simultaneously, automatically.  But when I sneak away from my child’s room and lie near my husband, I can do neither.  Because he’s already sleeping without me.

I want to jostle him awake, and let him know I’m there.

He claims I have no time for him.  I might just as easily claim he has no time for me.  But where is the purpose in playing that game?  So night after night, I fight the urge to fall asleep with my child, even though that’s what works.  I rouse myself if I’ve drifted off, disentangle my body from hers with my fingers crossed that she won’t wake.

I have time for him!  I’ll prove it!  I walk in the master bedroom and lie down next to him, hoping he’ll sense me and roll over to acknowledge me.  But his breathing is heavy and slow.  He’s in another world.  And I think of how hard he works and how tired he must be, how selfish of me it would be to put my arms around him now.  I cannot steal a moment of his sleep.

In my child’s room, guilt robs me of sleep.   In my husband’s room, loneliness does.  I don’t know why a person can be so close and feel so far.  Like the date night that comes after weeks of fighting for time to talk, only to find ourselves alone together with nothing to say.

Now what?

So I sit in the hallway, bedless in a house full of beds, and write.  I hear the rustle of blankets or the gentle bonk of a knee against a wall as my boys shift in their sleep.  I don’t have to look to intuitively sense and mirror the steady rise and fall of my toddler’s chest in the next room.  But when I listen for something—anything—coming from the master bedroom, I hear nothing.

Travel and babies and more babies and more travel have weaned us off of each other.  Can we learn to synch again?   I know we can, and know we will.  But not tonight.

There’s been a brief window with each of my children that opens when I’ve weaned one a few months after getting pregnant with the next one.  They slowly learn to sleep on their own.  My husband and I find ourselves in bed together at the same time more and more frequently, and after a while, a new rhythm is forged.  Our rhythm.  And it’s nice and I sleep and we connect.

Then the baby is born, my husband says goodbye since there’s no sense in both of us being sleep deprived, and I’m up in the nursery all night every night again.

See you in two years.

Then it’s time for the toddler rhythm.

I’m not pregnant this time.  It feels...unfamiliar.

When my daughter learns something, she learns quickly and well.  Getting her to sleep last night without nursing was not difficult.  She had only one nighttime waking and let me cuddle her back to sleep instead of nursing.  This seamless transition was almost two years in the making, of course, but that’s why it was seamless.  To disassociate nursing from sleep, I knew I needed to wait for her development until she could see there are other ways of being close besides nursing.  I won’t make milk forever, you know.  And she’ll need more than that.

And now I feel double loneliness.

I watched a film once of midwives reflecting on the births of their own children.  One woman said, “You can cut the umbilical cord physically, but emotionally you never really do.”

It’s funny, this attachment to our babies.  So strong, so instinctive, so imperative to their survival.  But the ultimate goal as a parent is for your child to leave, to learn to do without you.

A marriage, on the other hand, is born with no instinct, no shared DNA.  But its ultimate goal is unity.  Some people think it’s impossible.  It can often feel that way.

I write and think and work a lot on growing things.  Growing plants and growing children and growing learning and growing courage.  Child-raising is gardening.  I’m steeped in that world, and getting wiser with experience.

Marriage is welding.  I don’t know much about that trade.  The potential damage of that much heat scares me, and the precision required is not in my skill set.  The vision it takes to forge something new and solid out of two strong, separate things?  I don’t think that big.

But as I write this, I realize that God does.

Bricklaying

Early in my homeschooling journey, my two boys and I were perusing the local bookstore when a title caught my eye.  I purchased it, took it home, and put it on the top of my bubble bath book stack.

It was a book about education reform.  On the first page, it asked me to consider if school really was as pointless as most of us think it is when we are going through it.

He believed it is.  He said the big problem with our traditional public school system is that learning has become decontextualized.  That we think with each assignment, each lesson, each test, we are giving a child a brick.  The idea is that after they have enough bricks, they will have built a house.  The reality for far too many children, he claimed, was that instead of having a house at the end of their twelve years in school, all they have is a pile of bricks.  And they don’t have them for long.

It painted a pretty bleak picture, and yet it resonated with me.  I appreciated that he was willing to challenge assumptions, even at the risk of the reader’s discomfort or outright outrage.

He didn’t offend me.  He turned on a flashlight.

I worked hard to give my children not only bricks, but blueprints for how to build a house.  I was keenly aware that my example was that of master architect, and I was keenly aware of my every misstep.  I learned as I went along, with only the occasional brick thrown back in my face. 

After a few more years of homeschooling, however, I discovered something.  The purpose of these days with my children is not to help them build their houses.

We’re building something else entirely.  And I’m not the master architect.

Because they may not want or need a brick house when they turn 18.  It’s not my job to prescribe that for them.  There’s no crystal ball, no way to know what they’ll be asked to face ten, twenty, thirty years from now.  The world is changing too fast.

Then what are we doing here, day after day, brick after brick? 

We’re laying these bricks not for a house, but a path.

I don’t give my children bricks very often.  They find them everywhere.  They pick them up and come running, shouting, “Mom!  Look at this!  Is this a good one?”  My job is to show them that bricks are worth finding, lifting, and laying.  So I send them outside, I give them some mud, provide some trowels, and set to work myself.

It’s messy work, and snail-slow going.  But we’re on hands and knees together.  And I’ve noticed that they only grumble when I do.

Our path is a little longer now, and stretching toward green hills.  You can stare too long at the brick in your hands, and forget how far you’ve come.  You can sit, discouraged, on the path you've built and wonder why you're not getting anywhere.

Or you can go find another brick, and trust the process.  Sometimes there's sun, sometimes there's rain.  Sometimes you're hungry or tired.

And you think to yourself, "Well, if we're hungry, we'll stop to eat.  If we're tired, we'll take a rest."  And you keep on going tomorrow.

Your neighbor is riding an escalator into the clouds.  A passerby, or maybe even your child, asks why you're not.  "Oh," you say, "I suppose it's because that's not where we're trying to go."

"Why not?" he might say, curious now.

"Because," you answer.  "That's not where things grow."