The Pre-Teen Prep Zone

The other day Ru went off for a big boy day in the redwoods with friends, no mama oversight, not even any drop-off....just a handed him a packed lunch and waved as he hopped in the car with friends and took off. Its a wild new phase. I feel the tug of the crazy scheduling stuff yanking on us a little more as he gets older and we start to dip our toes into the world of the pre-teen, more independent zone. I am trying to help him get out on his own a little more and make sure I provide opportunities for stuff to do and space to build his own interests and world but keep the center of our life calm, teach boundaries and continue to help him nurture connection to home and those who love him. He has been texting with one of his grandmas this year, spending time having solo phone conversations a little with his other grandparents and writing private handwritten letters to one of his cousins.

There is also a lot of cozy family stuff still happening here at home to keep us grounded. We have folded Sabbath dinners into our life and moved them around from Saturday to Sunday and finally landed back on the traditional Friday night with our tea party tradition melded with the Sabbath meal. We have been hiking once a week together as a family which is a good practice in being outdoors and free together, learning about our California environment together and practicing understanding both parents and their differing styles of activity and direction. We have also been doing lots of read alouds. We are reading the Harry Potter series now (book 3) and also in the middle of Swallows And Amazons. We just finished The BFG which was really popular. We also try to take afternoon walk together through our neighborhood in the old time slot for quiet hour. As the boys get older I find that I am struggling to find more space for physical activity than for quiet. There seem to be so many times I tell the kids to just be quiet and to occupy themselves and to sit still and listen and to apply themselves and less opportunity to push them towards physical exertion. These are a few of the little home rituals that I am building in to try to keep life sane and warm, and build connection. Special Time with each boy, Family Meetings, outings to make sure that each kid feels celebrated occasionally and date night for Aaron and I are works in progress but are also part of simple routines for connection.

I have been watching Ru get more independent and thinking about all the ways I can support that leap to individual space and yet help him learn to respect advice, work towards closeness and feel understood and valued. I have the following on my reading list:

• The Teenage Brain by Frances Jenson
• Brainstorm by Daniel Siegel

He has taken over cleaning up the table and the floor under it after our evening meal and I have given him Pom as an apprentice to teach about the job. He decides what needs to be done to clean up and simultaneously gives directions to Pom and works himself. Teaching someone smaller is a good way to learn. He's also learning more and more in school. He's reading pretty fluidly and pleasurably on his own and he has been reading chapter books in his own time and we also have one that he is reading aloud to me (for fun and for the sake of correcting inflection, rhythm and pronunciation on trickier words), A continues to tutor him along in math (I'm impressed....fractions at 10!) and he is writing papers and diagramming sentences this year for the first time in conjunction with our co-op. So much new stuff. This week we added a run around the block every day, and when I told him his new assignment he said "Once? I think three times is better." So three times it was. Here we go racing around this new block in our lives, trying to stay tender to all the learning and then newness and then beauty and let go of my fear, relinquish the worries and open my hands to the strange things I feel intimidated by. 

Woman-ing Up For The Challenge

I have been all adrift lately. I have let the laundry get rather out of hand, the man I never thought would be elected was, I lost some sleep, I ate junk that I know poisons me and spent far too much time sitting, I skipped hiking and I fussed a lot about feeling lonely and not being sure I fit in at our church. I went down low. And then, because I am a woman, with capacity to create life and an indomitable spirit, because I can actually handle all of those things, because life is so much grander and deeper and richer than the man who was elected or the laundry....I dug in and looked for reasons to come back up.

The world is insanely beautiful. I believe in the human spirit, the rich spirit of each and every person....of Donald Trump.....of each voter....of working people in The Heartland and wild liberals in The Bay. I think that we become that which we brood over because we are walking prophecies, and I am determined to tell a good story over myself. I think we live in the luckiest time that's ever been historically. I think humility and compassion makes the world so much better than bitterness and overwhelm ever will. I think there is far more deception in politics and media than there is truth, even though each of us wants to be known desperately....even politicians.  I think that fear compacted instead of expressed, recognized and released becomes anger which becomes bitterness which is the great poison of mankind.

I saw a movie tonight, all about Big Ag and seed saving and the incredible power of life that is in all living plants. It was overwhelming and shocking and scary but they wound the conclusion deftly into a hopeful, Everyman's battle that made each home gardener, each heritage seed catalog customer, each lover of nature into a piece of the massive, powerful solution. I love that hopeful ending. I know I am only one woman and only a housewife who frequently feels the cultural weight of dismissal and unimpressed pity because I haven't got titles or jobs or resumes or degrees or any other grand things at all. I have an audacious sense of entitlement for a small town, female nothing. I feel a sacred part of what makes the world work, I feel insurmountable in the face of trouble, I feel charged to be a healer of the sick and broken things, I feel strong, I feel unwilling to back down, I feel able to flex and bend and survive because I am a woman who knows compassion and nurturing and hears the small, pouting child in everyone who just needs love. I feel able to create and draw power from nowhere, and I would rather create than wither.

I am caught between worlds right now. I voted one way, my man voted differently, my parents and siblings are on different shores, my hometown is a world away from this place I live now. I don't belong anywhere. I have my own opinions of course, but no matter what I decide, I know too much AND too little to fit in with any camp. I am some kind of  odd, cultural orphan without a social "home." I can let that unsettle me and make me feel damned if I do and damned if I don't. I can make it feel lonely and hopeless and impossible. I can let it sever my from people and places I love, from things I once thought or even from things I still think....from pieces of who I really am. I let it turn into apathy, immobility and lethargy with a jaded glaze over my eyes. I could let it make me pissed, full of vitriolic poison for all the things I don't understand or things I understand too well. But, I much prefer my eventual path. I think I'm super lucky to be hung in mid-air, in the very messy middle of it all. I can choose compassion and knowledge and hope and connection to all my scattered bits of self and reach and arm across the circle to the people that I love on each side of the divide and be a human conductor of kindness and love when they can not bear to touch each other. I hope that my discomfort will motivate me to keep working for belonging for everyone and if that's what a little awkwardness does its worth it. That's the way I want to live, so may God keep me uncomfortable and able to tap into my own displacement for a good long time.

My 30th Year Begins

I'm a youngin'.

Pretty nearly everyone I know has told me about five times or so since yesterday, the day of my 30th celebration of my birth. I think this is mostly a symptom of marrying early. Everyone I know is on a totally later life-track which makes me feel absurdly "ahead of schedule." I used to think I just looked really immature or was not very impressive but I'm pretty sure now that it's just the skewed life track at work, deceiving everyone. That said, youth or gravitas...whatever people choose to comment on, I'll take it. I want to live where I am and accept who I am at the moment. I earned every one of those 30 years but I'm still very young, it's true...and I am trying really hard to learn to live in the spongy world between them that constitutes this stage of life for me. Good stuff.

Here's a photo tour of my big day: