Reader. Writer. Thinker. Homeschooler. Insomniac.
This is long, but it’s worth watching.
Jonathan Haidt: On The Moral Mind.
It’s not very often I find something like this, that describes so well why I hate talking politics with people. Because to have good honest political discussion is impossible if people cannot grasp what this guy is talking about.
And because, so often, so sadly often, I hear both sides screaming the same exact things about each other. And they’re both right.
It’s been raining, off and on, for almost 4 days here.
I love the rain. It was one of the things I missed most, living in Colorado all those years. These steady days of rain. This is a warm rain, warm enough to go out in for a while, when you get too stir-crazy. Me, I’m just about too old for stir-crazy. But my kids? They’re stir-crazy. They’re ready for some sunshine.
They’ve got more bumps and bruises than they had a few days ago, from wrestling with each other, and using my living room furniture as a gymnasium. Among other activities normally not permitted inside. But after all these days of rain, when even the excitement of umbrellas and boots has gone stale and dry, we’ve looked the other way more than usual at some of the shenanigans.
My living room is now littered with a smattering of Webkinz and Little People toys, magic markers, empty DVD cases, cheese stick wrappers, apple cores and unpopped popcorn kernels. There’s a pile of damp socks and discarded hoodies near the backdoor.
But tomorrow the sun will come out again. This mess of a storm will be gone, and I’ll send the girls out into September’s final warm days. We might skip a lesson or two in favor of an extra ten minutes on the swings. We might skip history entirely and just take a walk down to the creek and see what the storm has brought us. We might end up all muddy and in dire need of hot cocoa even though it’s not really all that cold yet. Marshmallows may be required.
We most certainly will not be stuck behind a metal desk for seven long hours, resenting the rainy weekend, and wondering when exactly everyone else will be finished with their math. We won’t worry about getting in trouble for tracking mud on the classroom floor, or having to sit uncomfortably in wet socks all day long because we don’t have access to our wardrobe.
Yeah… we homeschool. I’m not even gonna try not to gloat.
We’re still recovering from the festivities on Sunday, when about a dozen or so completely unsocialized homeschoolers and their moms descended upon us, and we celebrated the fact that my 7-year-old is now an 8-year-old.
She’s so damn big now, it’s not even funny.
Details of the party to follow soon.
Out shopping for birthday gifts for my niece last week, I picked up a copy of Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon. I finally started reading it two days ago, and I’m having trouble keeping myself from cancelling my 8-year-old’s birthday party tomorrow so I can hole up in my study to finish reading.
Right now, glancing at the front cover of the copy on my desk, I see the words haunting, searing, and brilliant used to describe the book, and really — anything by Alice Sebold can be described as such. She’s got this utterly unique voice to her writing, a quiet voice that screams the truth at you on every page. Her other books, The Lovely Bones (a novel about the brutal rape and murder of a teenager and what happens to her family in the aftermath) and Lucky (a memoir of her own equally brutal rape and beating and its aftermath when she was 18 years old) are just as haunting, and just as honest. They are, for me as the mother of daughters, harder to read, but still worth it. Life isn’t always easy; neither should our reading material be.
In The Almost Moon, the subject changes to one that’s a bit easier for me (the relationship between a daughter and a mother who is mentally ill) but still resonates in a particular way. My own mother may not have been as crazy as the mother in this book, but it’s close enough. And in the end, it’s not having a crazy mother that’s the hardest thing to handle — it’s STILL LOVING that crazy mother no matter what she does that’s hard. Oh, how I understand that part. And oh, how I wish I didn’t. Here’s an excellent passage:
I walked to the center of my front lawn and lay down, spreadeagled. I looked up at the stars. How did I end up in a place where doing such a thing marked you for crazy, while my neighbors dressed concrete ducks in bonnets at Easter and in striped stocking caps at Christmas but were considered sane?
I let my shoes and purse fall from my hands. Only a few stars were out. The earth was cold beneath me. “There are children starving in China,” my mother had frequently said to me when I gorged on food.
“That doesn’t mean I’m not hungry,” I whispered now. I thought of her face when I had brought Jake from Wisconsin to meet them. He had been the first, and last, direct challenge to her power. She had welcomed him with a floor show so extreme that is was almost painful to watch. She forced herself to smile and bow and scrape as if he were the lord of the manor and she merely a lowly thing. Why hadn’t I seen the truth? She had a steely resolve that surpassed anything Jake and I might build. Our swizzle-stick empire was so fragile in the end. “The only thing you’ve ever loved is you mother!” he had yelled at me. I had refused this truth, brought my hands up as if to stop a blow. (pp. 88-89)
The novel is, essentially, a chronicle of the events of the day when she stops refusing this truth about herself. Or at least it is, so far. I’ve still got about one-third of it left to go. I could be completely wrong. But whatever it is, it’s still worth reading. Hell, I’d say it’s worth owning. And I say that about less and less books these days. And even if your mother’s not crazy, this book will still make sense. Because, crazy mother or not, haven’t we all had those moments of clarity — when whatever screwed-up thing about our lives we’ve been denying becomes suddenly undeniable? And aren’t those moments always filled with utter insanity?
That’s what Sebold captures for us and forces us to look at, and no matter how hard it is to face it, somehow she shows us that we can still land on our feet. That we’re brave enough. That we CAN do this. Pick up a copy of anything by Alice Sebold, and see if you agree.
Me, calling from the kitchen: Hey! How do you all want your sandwiches cut?
5-year-old: The Great Pyramids, please!
8-year-old: Triangles…but big, like yesterday.
RegularDad: Two trapezoids and a rhombus!
8-year-old: Da-ad!
RegularDad: Just kidding. I’ll have an ellipse with an eccentricity of 0.8.
5-year-old: Da-ad!
8-year-old: Mom! Dad’s making up words again!
RegularDad: Am not! You know what an oval is, right? An oval is an ellipse. And an ellipse is a circle with an eccentricity that’s equal to zero.
8-year-old: Well…okay. But Mom won’t cut sandwiches into circles, you know. She says it’s a waste.
RegularDad: Oh, well. Okay. Gimmee a dozen rectangles, then.
Me: Rectangles it is…wait–what??? You can’t have 12 rectangles. I’m just gonna cut this thing in half for you, okay? And sweetie (glancing at my 8-year-old), those were real words. When you’re in high school in a few years and doing higher math, those words will make sense.
8-year-old: Yeah, but you still won’t be able to eat them for lunch.
Oh man, I’m so sorry about that, you guys. A day or two turned into almost a week. That wasn’t my plan.
First of all, I’m better. It was a very strange cold — the kind that never really escalated into messy plugged-up sinuses or total body aches, but kept you tired enough to just do the minimum. And around here, the minimum is schooling, cooking, dishes, and laundry, and then collapsing on the couch with the remote and a book. Yeah, I read while watching TV. I’m just weird like that.
Second of all, thanks for all the well wishes. You all are so sweet. I’m so glad I started blogging just because I’ve made such great blogging buddies. And my apologies, again, for failing to post. It’s one of my worst habits. But…anyway…
The girls are all better, I’m all better, schoolwork goes well, I’ve met my deadline, this weekend’s birthday party plans are underway and under control, and as of about 10 minutes ago, the house was straightened up enough that I could actually sit down at the laptop without being distracted beyond all sanity by the mess.
I’d love to tell you all the funny things that have happened since my 7-year-old changed into an 8-year-old, but I’ve got other things on my mind, and most of it isn’t all that funny.
The big news around here is that RegularSis is moving to Texas. She got a job offer that She Simply Cannot Refuse, and so after all the Moving Back East To Be Near The Family we went through the past two years, it turns out that an enormous chunk of that family has to move on to a place closer to Colorado than Pennsylvania. A lot closer. Ah, the irony.
But, having heard about the job and heard about the situation with her current job, I can’t help but agree that she has to go. If it were me, I’d go. Besides, she reads this blog, like, everyday. It’s sort of like getting together for lunch every day knowing that she’s reading this and leaving comments. So, we all need to say: Go RegularSis! Texas is gonna be great! Pay no attention to that sobbing blogger in the corner… oh, wait. whoops. (guilt…guilt…guilt…) I mean, Texas! Whoo-hoo!!!! Go Cowboys. (Egads! Did I really just type that?)
So, big changes up ahead for RegularSis. And honestly? I just completed a move with a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old. She’s about to move with a 3-year-old and an 18-month old. She really needs all the well-wishes we can send her way. Seriously.
Once she’s gone with my RegularNiece and RegularNephew and RegularBIL, all that’ll be left here is our mother (Yeah, THANKS A LOT, REGULARSIS!!!!!!!!!!) and RegularDad’s side of the family, which if you’ll recall is somewhat large and (as luck would have it) Just As Dysfunctional as my side of the family. If not more. There are large parts of the Dysfunctional Family Dynamic that are HILARIOUS, and any other day I’d be happy to regale you with as many anecdotes as you want about what happens with The Entire Family Including All The Great Aunts and Uncles gets together, but right now the things that are going on in the family are the kinds of things that are more tragic than funny.
Things like watching RegularDad’s brother struggle with an unhappy marriage to a woman who seems to have some sort of as-yet-undiagnosed mental illness. And watching my other Niece and Nephew on that side of the family struggling already with self-esteem issues at the ages of 4 and 2. And to be unable to really do anything to help, because the only way to Really Help is to not do anything at all.
Things like watching my father-in-law take care of his wife of ten years, as she slowly succumbs to heart and lung failure caused by breathing Beryllium for over 20 years in the factory she worked in. Watching as she becomes bedridden and the medications stop working, and trying not to let despair set in as she learns that she waited too long to have a lung transplant and now her heart has grown too weak so that she now needs both a heart and a double-lung transplant, not to mention that she needs to regain some significant strength if she even expects to survive such a complicated procedure. If the organs even ever become available, that is. She’s got that gray look about her now. The one that reminds me of what my father looked like right before he died. And even though she’s the Ultimate Codependent Woman and has never been able to grasp the nuances of sarcasm, which makes it nearly impossible for me to communicate with her because she keeps taking me seriously, I do love her very much, and my girls do too, and this is going to be a HARD, HARD YEAR if things don’t suddenly take a turn for MIRACULOUS.
And speaking of my father-in-law, and miracles, it’s also hard to watch this man continue to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, and drink to excess, after surviving open-heart sugery almost 9 years ago, and then recover from lymphoma even more recently. He’s really what prompted us to say yes to the Pennsylvania job. Him and his cancer. The same day we heard about the job in PA, we heard about his cancer, and I told RegularDad to take the job, that we would go back. To be there for his dad.
He got the cancer from too many years on Coumadin. He’s been on the Coumadin ever since his heart surgery. The day he was released from the hospital, he stopped off at the closest shop to pick up a pack of Winstons and got himself right back to where he was. When the lymphoma diagnosis came through, he never once considered quitting. He smoked all the way through his chemo, and he’s still taking the Coumadin. And his cancer remains in remission.
And his wife, who never smoked a day in her life, slowly got sicker and sicker over the years until she had to carry oxygen everywhere, until finally even that wasn’t enough and she became bedridden. And she told me last weekend when we went up there for a visit with them and with my brother-in-law and the kids (but not his wife, thank God) that the reason she waited so long for the lung transplant was that she didn’t want to be unable to take care of my father-in-law.
These are the things that are happening in the family since we moved back here, and somehow it all came to a head this past weekend when we went up there to visit for the day, especially seeing how sick my ste-MIL really is. Not a whole lot of chuckles, I know. And all that on top of my not-so-bad cold, and then hearing that RegularSis is moving, it all just made me feel tired. And strangely quiet. I’d think about blogging, and I’d realize that I couldn’t think of one funny or interesting thing to write about. Can you blame me?
But maybe, having written all this down tonight, I’ll find a silver lining. With a whole lot of mother-in-law jokes scribbled on it.
This is life. Real life. This is as real as it gets, I guess.
2 kids with colds
+ catching the cold from the kids
+ homeschooling the kids because they’re not sick anymore and they’re bored
+ taking kids to karate and swimming lessons
+ planning and leading very first Daisy troop meeting
+ the ubiquitous piles of laundry and dishes
+ trying to put party invitations in the mail for 8-year-old’s birthday party
+ poetry submission deadlines
_____________________________________________
= Not Much Time To Blog
I’ll be back in a day or two. 
We’re rolling along a NJ county road caught behind a loooong line of cars. We’re doing exactly 5 miles under the speed limit because the car way at the front of the line is being piloted by the World’s Most Cautious Driver EVER. We’ve got about 17 more miles to go before we can exit this road, and it doesn’t look like that cautious dude up front is planning on pulling over any time soon. In the back of the van, the girls have started on what I believe is about the 92nd verse of “The Poopy Song.” Did you know that the 92nd verse is the same as the first? Do I have to tell you that all other previous verses were also hauntingly familiar to that infamous first verse?
I glance over at RegularDad and see his shoulders squared, his jaw set. He breathes a little teeny sigh and keeps on staring at the line of cars ahead of us.
Me: I read recently, on some message board or other, that if you pray for patience, you don’t just suddenly get this Whopping Butt-Load Of Patience. What you get instead, is opportunity after opportunity after oppotunity to Practice Being Patient.
Behind us, the girls are belting out yet another verse of the ever-popular Poopy Song. The crawl of cars in front of us slows down even more.
Me: You…haven’t been praying for patience recently, have you?
RegularDad: Huh-uh. Not me. No way…. Have you?
Me: Nope. Me neither.
Waiting in traffic at the NJ turnpike toll exit, my 8-year-old spied a car pulled over to the side of the road, loaded with a family of people, luggage piled high on the top of the car. Next to the car, a man spoke urgently on a cell phone.
8-year-old: Huh. I wonder what they’re doing.
Me: Looks like they broke down. Bummer. I can’t imagine a worse place to break down than the toll area of the turnpike. (Brief silent pause.) Well, actually, I guess it’s better to break down here than somewhere in the middle of nowhere. (Another brief silent pause.) Well, actually, with cell phones, I guess it wouldn’t matter if you were in the middle of—
RegularDad (with a wink and a knowing grin): Oh, well, gee… I guess a flip-flopper like yourself would vote for Obama after all, wouldn’t ya?
Doing my part to show the world that the home- schooling community is more than just a bunch of crazy fundamentalists. There's plain old regular crazy people who homeschool, too. Like me.
Email me:
regular_mom at yahoo dot com
