~Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 4, “Pangs”~

I adore Thanksgiving.  It is possibly my favorite annual celebration.  In the nine Thanksgivings since I left college, I have been known to put on some serious feasts.  The compulsive planner in me thrives on reviewing recipes, writing up a menu, gathering ingredients from at least four different grocerey stores,  and preparing each dish with love.  And like the Buffster, the sentimental mystic, in me is attracted to the ritual and tradition of the day and the spiritual nature of collecting loved ones around the table.  But the budding history buff in me (cultivates by Athena, actually) struggles with the background for this cultural melee and has to acknowledge that Spike has a valid point. 

So what’s a girl to do?  Especially a girl who espouses the goal of homeschooling socially conscious children with an accurate understanding of the true events of human history with all its inherrant beauty and malice, amazing acts of love and mind boggling atrocities alike.  The best I’ve been able to come up with is to focus on the “Thanks” part of Thanksgiving for now.  To teach our children that, in this day and age, it is our country’s cultural tradition to take a day to focus on our blessings, to cultivate a spirit of gratitude.  We’re going to skip stereotypical dancing pilgrims and singing natives.  Two years from now, when we reach that period of history in our curriculum, we’ll get to the settlement of North America by the European colonists and tackle the history behind Turkey Day. 

Modern Americans cannot make up for all of our early historical mistakes.  And this modern American is not going to waste time trying.  I’ll spend tomorrow revelling in the modern customs and rituals that are meant to invoke that spirit of gratitude within me and my offspring.  I will give thanks for my family and my life with reckless abandon.  And I will continue to strive to raise children who, with any luck, will turn out to be the type of Americans who can successfully lead this nation through their contemporary history-making events, learning from previous generations’ mistakes and moving forward into a brillant future. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

My mind has also raced through the day from one subject to another, begging to release it all somehow.  That’s surely been a contributing factor.  The tension in the country is palpable as the energy builds towards Tuesday and beyond.  Anyone who wanted to can probably sense it.  In a month where the natural world around us begins to slow down, turn inward and halt its growth, I find it terribly ironic that we are so out of sync with the season.  As the holiday chaos kicks off, we find ourselves accelerating our lives, piling more and more on our already packed plates.  Traditional images of autumn flicker through my mind.  The trees strip themselves bare and simplify their basic needs this time of year, while we deck our halls with layer upon layer of ornate junk and write out 74 item to do lists every Saturday.  I actually sympathize with the traditional Christian community during these months.  Their theology is generally made a mockery of and abused for greedy capitalistic purposes left and right and that’s got to be frustrating.  But there is hope, I think.  We do find that moment of clarity as the actual cultural holiday arrives and the unfinished items on the to do list suddenly aren’t nearly as urgent as we thought they were.  We settle in.  We trade party dresses and bow ties for pajamas and slippers.  We trade outside obligations for precious moments with family and friends.  We eventually strip down and simplify and focus.  If only we could get there without the lengthy, odd, stressful and, in the end, wholly unnecessary preliminary craziness.  On the phone this evening, my parents suggested they join us for the holidays this year.  Maybe if they do, we can all strive together to skip the annual rite of passage that is holiday stress and just enjoy each other and the Triad of Chaos in joy and peace.  Or maybe I’ll just be too busy NaNoWriMoing to care about the approaching holiday season and poof, suddenly it will be upon me with no time left to do much but enjoy it.  Except I’m not sure “Nope, honey.  No turkey, just PBJ.  I’ve been busy novelling.” would go over too well with Patris Maximus.

If you aren’t familiar with this particular brand of insanity, the basic premise is that hundreds of questionably insane folks around the world join together and attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. From the first to the thirtieth of November, they all typety-type-type like mad, squashing any self-doubt or self-criticism with the simple goal of just getting it all down on paper sans editing. It is pretty crazy. I’ve considered doing this in the past, but have always been a little intimidated by novel writing. Almost all other forms of writing (except any form of playwriting) delight me and I love indulging in them. Hence this blog, as a small example. But novel writing, with all its dialog and need for a coherent plot that could carry the length of the piece, always freaks me out. The level of commitment to a work that long is breath-taking. NaNoWriMo, however, strives to make many of the intimidating factors of novel writing irrelevant. Who cares? is the mantra of the month. Who cares if your plot totally falls apart and changes directions a quarter of the way into the story? Who cares if your main character’s name isn’t the same all of a sudden? Who cares if your novel is a total piece of hyena dung? It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you keep writing until the very end.

So this year, I registered at the site. I was really, until this morning, still unsure that I’d even get started. I dug out my old hunk-of-junk-barely-a-decent-word-processor-now laptop and a notebook with a few ideas scribbled down in it this morning. It sat on the living room floor while the kids played. I vacuumed around it, sorted laundry next to it, and during naptime finally booted it up. Day One of NaNoWriMo. I am happy to say that I have a plot. And a name for my main characters. And a little structure. And, most important of all– 876 words, so far. That’s about half of what I need to get down today to be on pace, so hopefully I can get the Triad of Chaos settled in a speedy fashion and knock out the rest of the daily quota. Who knows? Twenty-nine days from now, I could be a novelist. That is insanity.

 I really do adore the tribe of Mothers I find myself spending a majority of my time with these days.  These are amazing women and we are all learning from each other and supporting each other through this motherhood thing day by day.  But every time a new, first-time Mother finds her way to my favorite playgroup, she tends to wear this somewhat weary and shell-shocked look about her, as if she has discovered that upon entering our Sacred Order of the Mother, she was fairly unprepared for it all.  I blame us previously inducted Mothers for that.  I blame our closed off, or worse, condescending attitude towards the Maidens of society.  It goes both ways, I know.  But we, knowing what is to come for them, could make the first gracious step.  In a conversation with an unmarried, unmothered woman a few months ago, I managed to catch a thought on its way from my brain to my mouth as stuff it back where it belonged before it escaped.  One small victory for mindfulness, I suppose.  But I found myself about to say one of the most destructive phrases us Mothers toss out at Maidens flippantly.  When you have children of your own, you might not feel that way.  What’s wrong with this sentence?  Lots.  For one thing, it completely disregards the thoughts of a fellow woman.  Who am I to say that she will or will not feel differently about whatever subject was the root of the conversation?  I can remember back to many of my ideas about child-rearing and Motherhood that I held before crossing the threshold of giving birth.  Some I, admittedly, have totally discarded or swapped for the exact opposite stance.  Others held true.  So what are we to do then, those of us who stand on the other side of that rite of passage?  We should simply remain open to the Maiden.  Be fully present with her.  Do not ignore her or marginalize her.  Do not allow her to do the same to us.  Respectfully include her in your life.  Let her see what the life of a Mother is like for herself in a truthful manner with all of its ups and downs, joys and sorrows.  By doing this, by maintaining a connection between each other as women, if a Maiden decides to undertake the quest of Motherhood, she will know she can do so fully supported and not alone.  There are gifts to be exchanged if Maidens and Mothers will maintain, dare I even say, cultivate a loving relationship with each other despite the attempts at segregation by the general structure of our modern culture.

 Speaking of generational segregation, I totally detest the latest in modern home construction trends– The Active Adult Community.  I firmly believe these treacherously seductive monstrosities are a generally terrible idea for everyone.  Research indicates that continuous contact for older adults with children and younger members of the society assist in keeping the spirits high, the body active and the mind sharp as one gets older.  Isolation in a gated subdivision of “Over 55s” is not healthy or normal for the individual or for society at large.  Lately I have found myself longing for the wisdom of the Crone in my life.  In our culture, that is not seen as a pretty word.  The Crone, especially this time of year, is terribly abused.  But for me, it conjures up beautiful images of grace, wisdom, and strength.  And a presence that has largely been sparsely occupied in my life as of late.  Thankfully, my mother maintains a positive presence in my life and I am grateful for that, but I must admit that I crave more than just her to fill this space.  Recently, I held Patris Maxius down and forced him to add our congregation’s women’s book club meetings to his day planner under grave duress.  I rarely venture out after dark, especially on weeknights at his request.  But I politely (and forcibly) explained to him after I was sure he had written them in with ink, that I needed those gatherings.  Spiritual organizations seem to be the last bastion of intergenerational interaction and I want to exploit that as much as possible.  So what else can a Maiden or Mother do to reap the rewards of befriending the gifted Crone?  I think we must seek them out, to assure them of our need of them.  Let them know that we crave their company and the gifts they can offer us.  Let them know they are needed before they all disappear behind poorly paid security guards and wrought iron gates, sequestering their wisdom amongst themselves to the detriment of us all.

There is a fundamental reason that the Maiden, Mother and Crone are grouped together.  They, and we, are the same entity.  We are Women.  Separate from each other we are not whole.  Joined together, we are beautiful.  And powerful.  I for one, refuse to allow that beauty and power to be absent from my life any longer.        

It’s been eight years since I graduated.  And every year since I left college and set out is a different direction from my dear friends, I remember them both fondly every time I guiltily pay cash for my copy of a certain magazine’s fall line up preview so Patris Maximus wont see it on the grocery receipt.  This year, instead of having to whittle down the list to determine what I was going to try out, I got to program the DVR!  Oh, what a gloriously evil invention that little piece of techno-wizardry turns out to be!  I am just wallowing in oodles of tv that I can watch at any time I want.  It is instant gratification at its finest and while I usually cannot stand the quick fix, short term mentailty so prevailent in modern American society, I cannot help but rejoice in it’s ability here to enable my grossly out of control television addiciton.  Can I justify it at all?  I could tell you that half the programming sitting on my DVR is homeschooling/educational related (which it is) but the other half is blatantly my indulgences this not so autumny Texas autumn.

 So what am I watching?  Excellent question.  Well, let’s see.  I must confess right off that although I never, ever cared much for the original, the current revamp of 90210 has hooked me.  It’s the first time in a loooooong time I’ve been into a CW show (this from a former die-hard Gilmore Girls, Buffy, Dawson’s Creek, etc. fan.)  Also, I was never interested in X-Files, but Fringe is turning out to be facinating.  I am continuing to watch Heros, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Chuck, Eli Stone, Brothers & Sisters, Bones, The Unit and Boston Legal.  I’ve also rekindled an interest in Desperate Housewives after about a two year break from watching that show.  And I will be interested in getting to check out My Own Worst Enemy.   I told you it was a serious problem.  The only question really is whether or not all of these shows will hold my interest through the season.  (Oh and that tiny little issue of actually finding the time to watch all the material piling up on my DVR……) 

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!  

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.

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.”