It may be awfully cliched, but this peculiar window that opens between the crescendo of the Yuletide holidays and the boisterous finale of New Year’s Eve, always triggers a period of deep reflection, introspection and all sorts of other -ection in me.  I find that in this space in between I am able to stand still for a moment and just breathe.  As I breathe, I’m gifted with a temporary clarity that often escapes me during the rest of the year.  I can look over the year about to pass and into the year about to begin.  I can see all the gifts this year brought that would never fit into a stocking or under a tree.  And I can see the seeds of growing gifts to come.  It triggers an absolute laundry list of emotions; hope, wistfulness, joy, frustration, amusement, determination, pride, motivation, restlessness, mourning, optimism, rejuvenation and on and on.

I wrote a freakin’ novel this year.  A novel.  Insane.  I’m now deep into the editing process and enjoying the ruthless nature of my Inner Editor.  She’s terribly different than the Reckless Writer I was spending every waking hour with  just five to eight weeks ago.  But I have to confess that I adore them both in drastically different ways.  I’m also working on fulfilling an accepted magazine query now that is challenging me in a fantastically personal way and polishing the kerfuffle between yours truly and the legally blonde professor for submission a few choice places.  Between the Reckless Writer and the Inner Editor, I’m getting down to business this year.  If you want to track my journey as a writer, I’ve got a new spot to keep all those fun adventures at The Year of the Writer  I’m working up my official 2010 writing goals this week and will post them there on New Year’s Day.

Today, the first of what I am sure will be many, seed catalogs showed up in the mailbox.  It completely mystifies Patris Maximus how I can take a seed catalog and spend a good three hours flipping and sighing my way through it.  The last year I had an honest to goodness garden was the summer before Athena turned two.  I have sweet, fresh, glorious memories of that garden.  Athena eating sugar snap peas straight off the vine and startling a tiny bunny with her own rabid appetite.  Poking fingers around the tops of carrots and radishes, before deciding it was time to give them a yank.  Fresh, sun-warmed tomatoes and basil, purple green beans that turned green when you steamed them, the Aztec spinach plant that got totally out of control, the pickle and lemon cucumbers that cross pollinated and made lemon pickles, our wacky neighbor’s melon plant that stretched all the way across the backyard, fruited and then mysteriously disappeared in the dead of night.  And countless other simple, vivid memories that to this day have the power to make me smile.  The next growing season, all my cultivating efforts were internal and at just past the peak of the Summer Solstice I gave birth to my fiery, feisty twins.  Needless to say, I did not get back to the garden.  After that, we took a leap of faith and left the DC Metro area.  A listed house in a faltering real estate market meant the total destruction of the remains of my once fertile garden.  Our first year in Houston, we were apartment dwellers and last year we decided to forgo the garden for budgetary reasons.  But I had begun to plan for our Houston garden at any rate, with visions of the outrageously long growing season dancing in my head. 

Alas, my lush dreams of a semi-tropical gardening bonanza are once again, most likely being deferred.  With each day that passes, it is looking more and more like Patris Maximus will be working out of state very soon.  This is good and bad.  Good for us financially.  Good for Patris Maximus career-wise.  Bad for the pesky not-living-under-the-same-roof-all-together thing.  But we’re resourceful types and we’re working out details a bit more every day.  One of those details involves the potential for a considerable amount of travel for Crunchy Mama and the Triad of Chaos.  These would be the kind of travel plans that really preclude the establishment and maintenance in the type of garden I’m longing for. 

This travel thing could be interesting though and in the last day or so, I’m allowing the window of possibility to swing open just a bit wider on this idea.  It would mean a pretty severe reduction of our locally based extracurricular activities, for one thing.  We would basically cut down to our one weekly co-op and our Girl Scout troop.  Even with those, we’re likely to miss chunks of fun here and there.  It is possible that we will be splitting our time between Houston and travel.  At first, my gut reaction to this idea was actually not very attractive.  But the more I reflect on it, the more I can see a landscape frock with possibility.  There are plenty of long distance friends we could work visiting with into various itineraries.  Also, as we continue with our four year romp through world history, the discovery, founding and development of the United States will crest our historical horizon sooner rather than later.  And what better way to learn about it than to see it for yourself?  It is as if we will be building in ready-made adventures that have the potential to bring all sorts of new experiences into our lives and that is something to embrace.  Not to mention, it is something that would be literally impossible to embrace if we were tied to an institutional school schedule, so it’s also yet another opportunity to express gratitude for our homeschooling lifestyle. 

So what awaits the Maximus family in 2010?  Adventure, exploration, learning, growing and all sorts of other wacky hijinx, I have no doubt.  Wanna read about it?  Well, stick around and I’ll see what I can do.

It is just a month or so past his third birthday and Apollo has been out of diapers for about a week now.  He’s not exactly batting a thousand, but he’s well on his way.  I, however, find myself standing still for a bit in a rather reflective place where one is almost looking forward and back simultaneously. 

I left nursing behind fifteen months ago and now I’m suddenly leaving the other trademark task of babyhood behind as well.  I honestly thought I would not be here this early in my life.  I use to think I was going to wait until I was thirty or so to have children at all.  Now, at thirty-one, it looks like I’m walking away from the baby experience.  It’s bittersweet to say the least.  I would actually entertain the possibility of having another child, but Patris Maximus is not on board with that idea and I would only want another little person in our lives if we BOTH made that choice together.  Experiencing twin pregnancy, birth and babyhood affected us both profoundly.  In some respects it affected us similarly, but there were also different residual feelings.  As his partner in life, I respect his feelings on the matter.  So baring some sort of divine intervention (which we would fully embrace,) we are moving into a new phase of our parenthood adventure together.

It will be nice to leave diaper laundry behind and packing the bulky diaper bag when venturing out.  My stash is pretty worn out after covering three behinds in six years.  There’s not much fluff left to the fluff these days.  Over the next month or so, I’ll see what I can sell off for bargain basement prices and donate the rest most likely.  With both diapering and nursing, I think there are similarities to pregnancy in some ways.  By the time you reach the end of each of those parenting phases, nature has run its course and made you just uncomfortable enough that you are motivated to cross over the threshold.  There are things you’ll savor and miss, but there are also new things to enjoy in the next phase.  For example, I was afraid I would miss the cuddle time when we let go of nursing, but we’ve replaced that with snuggling while reading together.  And of course, homeschooling holds all sorts of adventures for us as Artemis and Apollo begin to be more and more interested in somewhat more formal learning alongside Athena. 

Athena had her first sleepover this week at her friend’s house.  Artemis, Apollo and I have all been struggling with a nasty summer cough that just wont let go.  I had run out of home remedy tricks and finally decided that a visit to our pediatrician was probably in order.  I dropped Athena and her carseat off at a homeschool group activity and took the twins with me to their appointment.  She caught a ride home with a friend in the neighborhood and stayed at their house for lunch (and playtime.)  I got us through the doctor’s office and an hour long wait to fill prescriptions.  By the time we got home, the three of us needed lunch and a nap.  My friend offered to keep Athena for awhile so we could get a little rest and I gratefully accepted.  I got a phone call about an hour or so later.  It turns out that Athena and her friend devised and presented a very well thought out and eloquent plan for the evening which included a movie, pancakes for dinner and sleeping over.  Given that this friend lives in the same subdivision and it would probably take all of three minutes to go over, pick her up and bring her home if she had changed her mind at two in the morning, I figured it was a pretty good first sleepover attempt.  I should have known that 2am phone call would never come.  When Athena sets her mind to something, she rarely ever backs out later.  I saw her at around ten the next morning with a content, but tired smile on her face.  She crashed a few hours later and took a four hour nap.  But she had fun.  Athena will be six in just under two months.  Six.  This fact is sort of blowing my mind.  Last year I thought I would feel as if her fifth birthday was some sort of major milestone for us both as mother and child.  But it came and went.  With the usual birthday fanfare, mind you– but it didn’t feel like the big deal I thought it was going to.  This year, we are two months out, the party planning has begun and I can really feel it.  Six is a big one.  Sleepovers and ever increasing independence.  A whole new set of joys and challenges.

I know I’ll feel this feeling again and pause to look forward and back again many times as a parent.  I can see other parents in our community crossing various thresholds with their children all around me all the time.  Many of them mentor me with their grace without even knowing it.  I’ll take my time crossing each one, doing my best to savor what I leave behind and look towards what lies ahead.  For the time being that means fondly remembering sweet and not-so-sweet baby days, and anticipating more sleepovers and a lighter weight field trip bag.

You know.  The God of Whine!   I love my little son oodles.  When I picked Apollo as his blog name this year, I was mainly thinking of his sunny blond hair and the fact that he’s a twin.  Artemis is beyond appropriate for his twin sister, so it seemed perfect. (I’d elaborate, but my intent was to blog about him, not her, so I’ll try to stay on topic.) 

That boy is the most emotional and most sensitive child out of the whole Triad.  It is crystal clear that one of the important purposes of his early life is to serve as my own persona live-in Zen Master, ready and more than willing to whack me with a large stick if ever I begin to tip off the ole’ Mindful Parenting bandwagon.  I generally consider myself a very creative person, but the ways in which I have to twist myself into incredible mental pretzles to facilitate this kid’s emotional growth stretches me beyond my limits on a regular basis. 

 If you happen to know anything about or are inspired to dig into the mythology of Dionysus, you’ll quickly discover that he was also know as the god of madness and ecstacy.  Can you see where I’m going with this?  Patris Maximus likes to say that Apollo lives life to the max all the time.  When he’s happy, he’s elated.  When he’s not, he’s lost in tragic despair.  When he’s angry, he’s furious.  And when he’s tired, he’s exhausted.  We’ve seen this kid go from doing laps around the house to collapsed in deep sleep on the living room floor with almost no transition whatsoever. 

 For the past two weeks I have been really working to invoke my inner Mindful Mama and striving hard to work closely with him.  All.  Dang.  Day.  Every time I’ve turned around, I’ve needed to fold him into a firm embrace, speak softly in his ear, help him name the emotion that is overtaking him and set him on the path to communication and problem solving.  I’m very proud to say that over 90% of the time, I’ve done just that.  Occassionally, I’ve sucumbed to Dionysus induced madness and just hollered louder.  Guess which method is totally unproductive.  Although I am confident the ”holler louder” technique is fairly useless, I wasn’t so sure the alternative was really doing that much good either until yesterday afternoon.  Sitting in a friend’s dining room, I witnessed Apollo quell and disperse his own rising tide of madness in favor of a clearly and calmly spoken objection to which he received back the exact positive feedback he was hoping for without so much as a sideways glance from me.  I was awfully impressed with us both.

Even as I type this I can hear him getting ready to totally lose it in the next room, so we still have more to work through, naturally.  But moments like yesterday make me think that instead of just hanging on for dear life, I may end up driving this parenting wagon myself one day after all.       

I escaped for a few hours to my book club last night and when I arrived home, I found Patris Maximus and the Triad of Chaos in our living room.  Inside our eight man tent.  Artemis and Apollo were wrapped in fleece blanket cocoons and had obviously called it a night, while Patris Maximus and Athena were kicked back, hands behind their heads watching a History Channel program on Ancient Egyptian warfare and weaponry.  I peeked in the door of the tent and was promptly instructed to change into pajamas and get in there before the show started talking about the battle of Quadesh.  I stashed my purse and snuggled in for the night. 

 In the morning, I took a look at how Patris Maximus had been able to pitch the tent without staking it through our living room carpet and into the foundation.  My darling husband is really pretty fantastic at these sorts of things, but it was obvious that it had taken some time for him to get it set up for them.  Over our mini-waffle breakfast, I tested the waters just for fun and asked the Triad if the tent should come down after we got home from co-op class.  I must know my kids, or just kids in general, pretty darn well because I got exactly the response I figured.  The tent is there to stay for today and tomorrow at least and they are negotiating for another day or so.  This afternoon we’ve done just about everything except eat and go to the bathroom in the tent.  (Any camper or ex-military officer worth their hiking/combat boots knows that you don’t eat or….. you know, where you sleep.)  But other than that, we’ve barely come out of the tent.  Athena even managed to come up with the inevitable “tentschooling” comment for today’s educational efforts, observing gleefully that “After all, you can learn anywhere, can’t you?”  The girl is wise beyond her years. 

I am looking forward to a fun evening of living room camping and I figure since it did take my husband so long to put it up, we might as well get some lengthy enjoyment out of his indoor engineering efforts.  I’ve already mentally adapted all of tomorrow’s plans to fit inside the tent because really, in all honesty, this kind of thing is just as much fun for me as it is for them.  And I’m betting I can get them to do just about anything (like helping to fold the laundry) as long as I suggest we do it in the tent.  Did I mention that this gig is actually my dream job?  Back to the campsite!

I am not Super Mom.  I struggle with my children too.  Sometimes on what seems like an almost daily basis, I match wits against the formidable Triad of Chaos.  And honestly, to date the score is about even.  There are days that I yell.  Days that I give up and just put us all to bed early.  And days that I end up crying in my Chardonnay at the end of a messy and exhausting day.  I do not have all the answers.  But I do keep trying.  After a tough day, I wake up in the morning determined to make the next day better.  Most of the time I succeed.  Occasionally I do not. 

More often than not, the members of the Triad take turns driving me to the brink of insanity.  Currently Apollo is the lead crazy-maker.  With the cunning of an African cheetah, he lays in wait for the perfect prey to wander within range.  Then with lightening quick speed and accuracy, he sprints across the living room with the flair of an Olympic powerwalker just shy of an illegal jog, crooked arms flying back and forth at his waist, to deliver one sharp, quick blow to the back of one of his sister’s heads with a small plastic yellow frying pan.  Once he hears the desperate howls of his victim commence, he drops his covert weapon of choice and saunters off cackling with the manaical laughter of the biggest, most bad-ass-iest hyena on the Savannah.  I feel like I have tried almost everything.  Talking to him.  Trying to encourage him to empathize with his prey.  Or sternly enforcing the unacceptability of his behavior in the Maximus household.  Yelling at him with my most ferocious lioness roar.  Scolding.  Putting him in his den for a wild animal time out.  Taking the frying pan and hiding it. (SIDENOTE: This resulted in nothing more productive than the creative substitution of a small wooden play HAMMER instead!  I gave him back the frying pan with a resigned sigh.)  Short of smacking him back with the pan, I was pretty much out of ideas.  Tempting as that last thought was, it did not pass my common sense test.  It has never made sense to me to hit a kid for hitting and then tell them not to hit. 

In the wake of Hurricane Ike, we have faired very well.  Some minor fence damage and a fridge and chest freezer full of spoiled food were about the extent of our losses.  Feeling extremely grateful for that, I offered up our home as a safe haven to friends who needed a hot meal, a few hours in an air conditioned environment and a working washer and dryer.  One friend took me up on the offer a few days ago and came to hang out and play with her chldren while she did her first load of laundry in about a week.  When I bemoaned my latest discipline safari with Apollo, she smiled empathetically and nodded toward her own two year old son, indicating she was experiencing a similar frustration in her own home.  For the next few hours, we chatted, laughed and occassionally refereed our kids while enjoying a lovely day together.  Our pleasantly refreshing adult time together was occasionally punctuated by Apollo howling.  Interestingly enough, his howling sounded a lot like that of his sisters after one of his now nortorious attacks.  This was because, my friend’s two year old son was fullfilling his destiny as the hand of karmic retribution and was using a wide assortment of different toys to whack little Apollo in the rear of his very own cranium! 

It has now been three or four days since they were over.  And Apollo has yet to whack either of his sisters with a frying pan.  Like Archimedes in the bathtub, playing (because I guess that’s what you would call it) with his friend and ending up on the victim side of the head bashing scenario multiple times in one afternoon, seems to have resulted in Apollo’s eureka moment.  Hitting someone in the back of the head with a toy hurts them.  Perhaps it is not a good idea to hurt Artemis and Athena.  Perhaps they do not like that.  I am both impressed and befuddled that a fellow two year old was able to succeed where I could not.  But at least that lesson seems to be internalized for the moment and there is a lull as we are between major parenting challenges for the moment.  Super Mom?  I think not!  

This summer, I have been very focused on reading, researching and generally studying all manner of subjects associated with gifted children, gifted education, the pros and cons of labeling children as gifted, the concept of intelligence in general, testing for giftedness, American culture and its view on intelligence and giftedness and other assorted topics that might fall even remotely under such a large research umbrella.  The cornicopia of material I’ve sifted through and internalized has given me even more increased confidence in Patris Maximus’ and my choices about our children’s educations.  It has also helped me tinker with our current plans for the next year or two where Athena is specifically concerned.  But it had an effect I did not anticipate as well.  An effect on me as I consider my own giftedness; past, present and future. 

I’ve spent a great deal of time, this summer, rehashing and mulling over my own education and experiences as a giftie.  I have some new perspectives on several issues now.  For example, I find myself harboring some new and even slightly raw resentments towards some of the educators that crossed my path and at the same time, experiencing some newfound respect for other educators who really worked hard to foster me in various ways, not all of the academic, I never really appreciated until now.  I also have to really respect the way my parents nonchalantly handled the testing process that gained me entrance into the public school system’s gifted program and into a couple of dynamic, multi-age elementary school classrooms.  They made it seem like no big deal and placed pretty much no stress or test related anxiety on me whatsoever.  I would like to kick my junior high school, high school and even college self in the behind repeatedly for a variety of stupid missed opportunities and general laziness.  And I wish desperately that I could devise some way to destroy and replace the vicious and poisonous institutional school peer culture that seems to have only grown increasingly more caustic since my days as a student with something good and beautiful and true.

 When I think about where I find myself today, I am grateful to the first mother who ever recommended I read something by John Taylor Gatto or John Holt when Athena was less than a year old.  I am grateful to a high school friend and her mom who homeschooled her and her siblings until high school.  She was one of the most well-adjusted, self-disciplined people I knew at that age.  Knowing them made homeschooling always seem like a normal, acceptable idea to me and never a fringe concept.  I am grateful for the gifts homeschooling is reawakening in me as I deschool myself and begin to truly realize my full intellectual potential alongside my growing children.  I continue on our homeschooling journey with an eye to not only my children’s futures, but also my own.  The past year or two has really helped me figure out what I want to be when my kids grow up and I am looking forward to pursuing those dreams when the time comes.  

I am also able to now understand things about myself that I either did not fully acknowledge or did not have a name for before.  Suddenly my sleep (or lack thereof) habits makes sense to me.  So does my inability to maintain a schedule despite four years active duty in the military and an upbringing by a career military dad.  My total lack of patience with anything that remotely resembles “drill and kill” and my practically complusive need to multi-task at all times are both comprehesible now.  Understanding a lot of this is improving my relationships with my husband and my kids, as well as with others outside my nuclear family. 

 It has taken three decades, but I finally really feel like I am quite familiar with and fond of that giftie in the mirror.  And I have no doubt now that she is destined for her own unique brand of greatness.

I am exhausted.

Seriously exhausted.

But in a very positive way.   It is actually somewhat amusing to me that, as a year round homeschooler, I am being struck by the physical, mental and emotional adjustment period that is Back-To-School time.  Athena had no desire to take a break over the summer for more than a few days at a time, so we’ve been clipping right along through the heat and humidity of Southeast Texas, but in the last two or three weeks something has shifted and the pace has suddenly quickened.  It is as if she is tapped into some sort of energetic flow that causes the nation’s children to suddenly crave knowledge and new shoes again with a voracious appetite now that late August approaches.   Whatever it is, the girl is on an educational rampage.  Last Saturday became “The Day of Mesopotamian Madness.”  And she was not kidding when she made that proclamation over breakfast.  I asked her where that idea had come from and she showed me the source of her inspiration– blueberries and scrambled eggs.  Athena had used her breakfast to craft a map for the Fertile Crescent, complete with a blueberry Persian Gulf and two blueberry rivers.  You guessed it, the Tigress and the Euphrates.  She also decided to spend the rest of the day calling me “Mother of the Euphrates River“ whenever she wanted anything.  She used an old crib sheet to fashion herself a robe appropriate to wear to the ziggurat and presented Patris Maximus with a bedsheet, instructing him to do the same so he could assume his responsibilities as temple guard.  Amazingly enough, I was able to scrounge together a dinner that met her strict standards of authenticity- lamb chops, dates, kumquats, apple slices and sebetu rolls (which she helped to bake.)  The next day she wore her Mesopotamian robe to church and to a friend’s birthday party, came home, built yet another building block model of a ziggurat and opened a Mesopotamian jewlery shop in the playroom, magnanamously accepting Artemis as her apprentice and convincing Apollo to trade her animal skins (READ: beenie babies) for a hand crafted lapis lazuli necklace (READ: blue plastic luau party favor.)  It is on weekends like this, witnessing this all-consuming passion for learning shining out from her very spirit, that I wonder how anyone could ever mistake her own unique internal drive for hothousing on my part.  But it has happened.  It shouldn’t matter.  And really it doesn’t matter.  We are doing what works for us and Athena is thriving.  That is what matters.  All the same, it does sting a little to be accused of pushing your child in an unhealthy way when it is all you can do most days to keep up with her need for knowledge and keep meals on the table and just enough clean underware available for everyone to get through the rest of the week. 

Ocassionally though, I do catch a little break.  Apollo and Artemis are teaching themselves American Sign Language these days and will watch these videos, quite literally, for hours. Then, of course, Artemis wakes me up at 4am, vigorously signing something at me in the dark from the foot of my bed, so I pay for letting the video do the work later, I guess. That is the way of things though, isn’t it? Eventually the lesson comes back around to you. Funny episodes of karmic retribution have been taking place in recent days all over the place. The most amusing of which is probably the re-enactment of the Eighth Plague of Exodus everytime we return from a grocery run. I was mid-sentence, explaining for what felt like at least the twenty-first time, that we did not have to immediately devour every last scrap of food we had just purchased before I could even get it shelved, when I began to giggle hysterically. The Triad of Chaos just looked at me and then each other with this “Has she finally snapped for good?” sort of look passing between them. But I couldn’t help it. I sounded EXACTLY like my own mother when her four children, who also moonlighted as locusts, descended on her after her return from the military commissary. Here it was. The karmic boot to the behind for every time my younger sisters and brother and I managed to snarf an entire 2lb. bag of grapes or box of granola bars straight out of the grocery bags plopped hodgepodge across our kitchen floor while my frantic mother raced to store everything before it dissapeared for good. When I finally got my giggles under control, I tossed the Triad a bone and let them inhale a pint of blueberries while I finished putting everything else away.

It has been raining a great deal here the past week or so. This morning the Triad and I sat in the window seat of our kitchen and watched a small creek appear on our property line. We also got to watch the construction trucks attempting slow motion u-turns in our cul-de-sac through a little over a foot of water. But once the torrential downpour subsided, we discovered that the neighborhood actually has pretty descent drainage. The kids had a lovely time puddle hopping and delightedly drawing with chalk on the still-wet pavement after dinner tonight. They ended up drawing out most of the rest of the kids and parents on our block to join the fun actually. More storms are headed our way tomorrow. This sort of weather also contributes to my general sense of exhaustion. Rain just plain makes me sleepy. I better set the coffee pot on a timer for tomorrow morning so at least two mugfuls of steaming inspration and motivation will be ready and waiting for me. Athena warned me over dinner that tomorrow would be “Crazy, Fun Learning Day.” I asked her what such a day would entail and she looked at me with a mouth full of sweet potato and grinned. “I don’t know yet Mommy. That’s your job.”

I have heard this statement countless times in the last four and a half years in any number of locations, always in reference to the fact that I have taken my children somewhere with me that others dare not venture with their own or anyone else’s itty-bits.  Most recently, it was at a Major League Baseball game on a balmy Tuesday evening.  I have always been somewhat befuddled by this comment and the compliments on our children’s impeccable behavior that inevitably follow.  Are our children really that well behaved in comparison to the populace at large?  I seriously doubt it.  But we do take them out places few other children under five years old can be observed sometimes (much less three of them all together.)  So I think the positive observations about their behavior are mostly due to a lack of decent compariosn.  We often take them to museums, outdoor concerts, sporting events, camping trips, and so on.  It seems only natural to me to do so.  The foreign concept is that I should keep them shut up under lock and key until they are a “suitable age” to venture out into the world they are already very much a part of.  Young children are consummate observers.  They crave exposure to the great wide world and learn something new about life approximately every 2.3 seconds.  They absolutely teach me something new on a daily basis with their thoughtful takes on their experiences.  Possibly more importantly, I would go totally insane and probably turn into Total Psycho Mommy if I was trapped in my house for the first six plus years of their lives.  My children and I love venturing out.  As matter of fact, Athena wakes up EVERY morning and while munching breakfast, asks me excitedly, Where are we going to go today, Momma?  She is often totally put out when I occasionally tell her we are staying home to catch up on chores and other mundane household tasks.  Perhaps it’s the fact that we have a family full of extroverts.  Perhaps it’s the attachment style parenting.  Perhaps we’re just crazy.  But whatever it is, we feel that our children are real people in their own right and they are already citizens of the world.  Why not take them out to fully experience it?

It is a sad scene, often repeated over and over again in this country with a terribly messed up birth culture.  A mother learns she is pregnant with multiples.  Her thoughtless, institutionalized doctor fills her head and heart with crushing, fear inducing phrases- high risk, preterm labor, bed rest, preeclampsia, mandatory c-section, TTTS, long NICU stay, placental failure, survival rate, danger, death and on and on it goes.  Most Americans truly believe twins and triplets will always be premature, always be tiny, always be born via c-section and always end up in the NICU.  A dear friend, and fellow twin mother, has assembled an absolutely gorgeous montage that makes one simple fact poignantly clear.  Expectant multiple mothers have options.  Lots of them.  And they should have hope.  Hope for fully developed, huge, safely and naturally birthed multiples.  I know many of the mothers and babies featured in this film.  They are real women who believed in themselves and their babies.  They worked very hard to take excellent care of themselves during pregnancy and to surround themselves with highly trained, but also highly supportive professional care providers.  The message here is a powerful one.  One that I hope with all my heart reaches many and at the very least inspires a few to replace fear and pain with hope and faith as they welcome their own precious multiples into the world.

Natural Childbirth of Twins and Triplets

For more support and the chance to talk to real mothers of multiples who have had amazing experiences like these ones, try the Parenting Multiples forum of MotheringDotCommune.

I recently read an eloquent plea on an international discussion board for unity among modern mothers.  The board’s user agreement does not allow me to link or quote from the thread on which one woman bravely issued her clarion call, but I will try to give everyone the gist of her message and share my multi-faceted reaction to her words. 

First, a bit of background for those not familiar with this incident in this specific corner of cyberspace.  This particular online community is a base for mothers (and some fathers) who choose many different paths along their parenting journey that are not always considered socially acceptable among the bulk of our modern culture.  Many of the members follow some of these paths to extremely different degrees and there have been countless conflicts that have emerged on the board in all different forums as those extremes have clashed with one another. 

This mother was responding to these often brutal and divisive occurences.  She asks all mothers to examine what we, ourselves, have done to motherhood.  And she asks for a little perspective.  As the very nature of community has shifted dramatically away from the idea of smaller units of multi-generational neighbors supporting each other through the various trials of life, we have begun seeking community and connection along other lines.  This seems only natural to me as humans are social creatures by nature.  But, as she points out, it is how we have drawn the lines that now causes so much unnecessary and judgmental strife.  We have created tight knit tribes of mothers who think, act and make the same choices we do about our children.  Even worse, within these tribes, she says we are guilty of betrayal of our fellow mothers.  We criticize, insult and judge our sisters in motherhood, refusing to acknowledge our most sacred of common ground– our beloved children.  She reminds us that there are bad mothers out there.  Mothers who abuse their children violently or allow such abuse to happen.  Mothers who beat, starve, neglect and exploit the precious offspring the Divine has charged them with, truly betraying their sacred responsibilities as mothers, for their own selfish or evil reasons.  But most of us are not bad mothers.  Most of our neighbors are not bad mothers.  And, she pleads, we must stop treating each other as if we were based solely on the fact that we travel different, but parallel paths on this blessed journey. 

I have been turning her message over and over in the fire of my mind since I first read it, slowly melting it into my spirit and remolding it into some sort of response I can make sense of for myself.   I have absolutely entrenched myself in a community of mothers who make similar decisions such as choosing to birth without pain medication and possibly without a hospital, choosing to breastfeed for at least the first twelve months of life and possibly much longer, choosing not to spank, choosing to home educate, choosing not to vaccinate, choosing to seek out whole, organic food options and so on and so forth.  I actively advocate for these choices because I believe in them deeply and believe more families would benefit greatly from making the same choices.  I have a difficult time cultivating quality relationships with mothers who do not make similar choices for their families.  And as much as I would like to think I don’t, I have certainly been guilty of judging my fellow mother for making different choices on occasion.  But how to walk the line?  How do I continue to live my truth and advocate for what I believe are the best options for the health and welfare of today’s children, yet at the same time support all of my fellow good mothers in our journey together?  Is it possible for me to do both?  Can I say to another woman “You are a good mother and I lovingly support you in your motherhood, however I still do not believe it is right for you to give your child that chicken pox vaccine.”  How would that sort of statement be received?  Could my “crunchy-mama-still-nursing-our-two-year-olds” tribe and the “career-women-have-a-great-nanny” tribe get together, smoke the Peace Pipe of Motherhood, revel in our common joys and trials and congratulate each other on being good mothers without judgment or strife?  Could some of us even possibly walk away friends?  I would like to dream that this is possible, but I harbor reservations about the reality of manifesting that dream. 

One of the largest contributing factors to the divisions between mothers is our almost compulsive drive to label.  And when I say label, I mean both ourselves and each other.  I tried to think of all the labels I have pasted myself with over the past five years.  Homebirther.  Attachment Parent.  Extended Nurser.  Here’s a doozy for you: Relaxed Eclectic Classical Homeschooler.  My father might add: Semi-Wacko Liberal.  Even my Blogosphere name, Crunchy Mama, is a label of sorts.  Plus whatever labels I may have been gifted with by others.  I make it difficult for another mother with different labels to reach across and make a connection with me for four interrelated reasons; my perception of her self-applied labels, her perception of my self-applied labels, my perception of her perception and hers of mine.  That four layers of crap to cut through before we could even hope to connect with each other and discover the joys we might bring each other in the fellowship of motherhood.  Now, I even find myself struggling not to label my children.  Gifted Accelerated Learner.  The Twins.  The Princess.  The Sensitive One.  It is practically an addiction. 

If there is any chance for successful connections to be made between tribes of modern good mothers, I believe the first step must be to peel back the individual labels until only one remains.  The sacred label of motherhood.  Only then can many tribes exist in harmony as one as we move along parallel paths.  This will not be easy work for any of us.  It will be tiring and messy.  Sometimes we will peel back what we thought was the last layer, only to discover yet another has been pasted in place by ourselves or others. It might take a lifetime.  But the urgency and desperation in this one mother’s plea makes me feel that she has charged all mothers with a spiritual quest for unity.  And I, for one, for teh sake of my daughters, will attempt to the best of my ability to answer her call.  You may make very different choices as to the method by which you practice good mothering than I have, but I will do my best to respect the undeniable truth that though our methods may be completely different, we both take our sacred responsibility seriously and our love for our unbelievably precious children unites us both in the bonds of sisterhood for all time.  I invite you to reach out and connect with me, your fellow mother, and others who are proud to call themselves members of the oldest tribe.