It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

More than a byline

Normally I try not to pay much attention to comments on my posts or articles.  It’s almost impossible to write in the age of the internet and take such things seriously.  That way lies madness.  But the last few weeks, I’ve felt sensitized to the endless division and judgment that has become so much a part of computer culture.  I’m tired, again, of people judging those they’ve never met, of calling names or saying things in public fora that they would never say in person.  It feels cowardly and slimy and mean.

We’re all guilty of it to some extent.  I’ve done it, too, ranted about the “idiots” who espouse such-and-such opinion.  It’s easy to forget that behind every posting is a real person.

Earlier this month I wrote a post for Waldorfish on Michaelmas and what that festival has come to mean to me.  I half-laughed with my friend Robyn when we found that my little essay had been posted on an anti-Waldorf/Steiner website.  Half-laughed, because you know you’ve made it as a writer when you incur hatred, but even after four years of writing professionally, I’m still not thick-skinned enough to dismiss being judged by people who’ve never met me. 

After sitting on it for a week or so, I finally decided this morning to submit a comment to the site, and to invite a dialogue here.  I guess we’ll see what happens next.

This, in case anyone is curious, is me taking my sword of courage to my own personal dragon – confrontation.  I’m not acting in violence or anger, but with the hope that maybe courage and compassion can transform confrontation to conversation.

Here is my comment:

 

It’s easy to attach an identity to a byline – to blame, to disagree, to judge.  I’ve done it myself.  But, the writer is more than her name.  Behind every faceless byline on the internet is a real person – with real values, dreams, goals, and feelings. And yes, real flaws, too.

I’m sorry for whatever has happened in the lives of those of you who would question the ethics of a stranger based only on a few paragraphs that you read through your own lens.  I can only guess that there is powerful hurt there somewhere, and that makes me sad.

I’m not responding to the criticism of my essay to argue or to try to change minds.  Different beliefs and opinions are what make life worthwhile.  I’m just here to introduce myself, to put a virtual face to the name whose ethics have been called into question.

I’m not some brainwashed cultist.  I’m a mother, a writer, a scientist, a friend, a lover, a runner, a dreamer, a thinker.  I have plenty of flaws if you’d like some to criticize.  I’m stubborn, klutzy, and sometimes selfish.  I procrastinate.  I’m a terrible housekeeper.  I’m all too apt to hide behind humor.  And I’m incredibly awkward at parties.

I’m also practical, idealistic, the most prepared camper you’ll ever meet.  I’m a loyal beyond reason to those I love.  I can bake birthday cakes in almost any configuration.  I’ve been known to quote Shakespeare while performing a Caesarean section on a cow.  I think about everything.  All of the time.  I love – intensely, painfully, and unconditionally. 

I believe in working for peace, justice, and acceptance for everyone.  Seeing my name equated with eugenics and warmongering hurts.  Yes, I’m also sensitive. 

You don’t know me.  You know only that I wrote about a topic where you have strong feelings.  Great.  Come discuss them with me.  I can’t offer a glass of wine or a cup of tea over the internet, but you’re more than welcome to stop by my blog, read a bit, and share your thoughts.  Conversation is so much easier than anonymous anger.

The End of the Story?

The hiking boots collapsed into a heap on the floor, crumpled socks tossed by their soles.  The journey had ended.

“When is the story over?  How do you know it’s over?” a friend asked me a while ago.  We were talking then about the stories we tell ourselves, the tales we spin of memory and emotion, the stories that grow, if we aren’t paying attention, to define us.

Another friend, with whom there have been innumerable endings and beginnings, once said during a similar discussion, “Yeah, but there are always sequels.”

When do our stories end?  When does the final page drop into blankness?  Do we close the book and move away, or do the lines and characters linger, writing and rewriting us?

This morning, I came out to the living room to find my hiking boots and a pair of wool socks in a heap near the couch – a cairn marking the end of my oldest daughter’s trip to Hawaii with her class.  Their group’s story is nearing its final pages; graduation, the final chapter, is in three and a half weeks.

And what a story it has been.  I worked with this class earlier in the year during their creative writing block, and we discussed the elements of fiction: setting, character, conflict, plot, theme… the saga of the class of 2013 has had it all.

The story begins in different places and at different times, a rose-accented redwood building and a kindergarten smelling of warm bread for a few; a yellow-painted second grade room full of sun for some others; a room with blue walls echoing the sky; a turquoise room; and for at least one, a periwinkle room with a skeleton in the closet, a room in which their journey ends.

In The Breakfast Club, the students mock the labels the adult world has stuck on them:

“You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...and an athlete...and a basket case...a princess...and a criminal... “

It would be equally easy, and equally false, to label the cast of the class of 2013.  A writer, an athlete, a clown, a musician, a bookworm, a cheerleader, a brain…Nope.  It can’t be done.  They all have had their moments of leadership, their moments of triumph and insight, their moments of sloth, of minor cruelties, of extreme dorkiness.  But, one day, during their writing class, they defined themselves.

Me: (discussing dialogue) Your characters will speak differently depending on who they are talking to.  For instance, you talk slightly differently with an adult you don’t know than with a kid your own age, right?

Nodding heads all around

Me: And you talk differently even to adults you do know, like me or Dr. Tan, than to your friends.

Fewer nods, some murmured, “Not really…we know you…well, maybe…”

Me: And you probably even talk differently with your best friends than you do with another classmate you might not be as close to.

Blank looks dropped across the entire classroom.  For an instant, all of their faces bore the stamp of the clueless, stoned out teen.  Then the protests began.  “What do you mean?  We are all close.” The words flew from around the classroom, not just one clique, not just the girls, not just the boys.  They rose up as one, and one sentence defined them.  “We’re all best friends.”

This character sketch, like most, is at best incomplete, and certainly not always literally true.  Like any good story, theirs has held plenty of conflict.  In a school system where the teacher moves with the grades, theirs was the class that couldn’t hold a teacher.  In the lower grades, accusations of “bullying” or “disruptive behavior” were sometimes tossed around.   Their social circles collided, burst, and re-formed, over and over. They argue – not civilly, but in tones that crash off of walls and ring through the rafters – with each other, with their teacher, with their parents, with school administration.  They do not go quietly into acquiescence, particularly when some deeply held value is threatened.  Theirs is democracy – in its coarsest, brashest, and often most eloquent form.  They form sharp edges and knock them off against each other, again and again.

Character, conflict, and setting shape plot.  The events in their story have reached the climax and are sliding into the denouement of graduation.  Solos have been sung and played; presentations have been given; the last lines have been said and bows have been taken.  They have snow-shoed, forded rivers, won and lost competitions with tears and hugs for both.  They have danced their last dances, and they have told their final stories around the campfire.

Yet, theme carries plot past the ending.  When we close a book, the story doesn’t leave us.  When we graduate; when we lose a job or a loved one; when we say goodbye, the story doesn’t end.  The plot is passed.  Events are over, and no amount of attempts can ever recreate them.  Yet, echoes of those people, those events, the joyful and the abhorrent, remain with us, to be passed to those we meet.

We can choose which themes we carry.  Do we bring the memories of squabbles or name-calling?  Do we apply that interpretation to the next people we meet?  Or, do we take with us the memory of a class united in triumph on a basketball court, or the sense of trust that can’t be quantified – the knowledge that a friend has your back, even though they’ve never said it?

 

Feeding the Rat -- Loneliness and Connection

Last night at a second grade parent meeting, the teacher talked about some of the changes in the children this spring.  The girls in particular, she said, were experiencing a shift.  In the Waldorf curriculum, teachers identify a developmental stage known as the Nine Year Change.  Simply put, this is the period when children begin to realize that they are individuals, distinct from their parents and friends.  The world is no longer a cozy dreamland.  They begin to sense their own mortality and their own isolation.

This recognition of the self as an individual is extremely painful for many.  As Sierra’s teacher put it, they begin to be aware of being outside of a group, and often they see themselves as being excluded where no exclusion exists.  “I’m over here, and you are all over there, and you’re leaving me out, and I don’t like it.”  Meanwhile, she said, the other children are saying, “No, we aren’t leaving you out; we want you to join us.  Come play with us.”  But, the child sees that she is on the outside, she is alone.

What kids of that age don’t yet realize, is that the exclusion comes from within.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that most of us never outgrow that Nine Year Change.  We find ways to cope with and, more often, to mask our feelings of exclusion, of isolation, of loneliness.  Yet, we rarely stare at the reality with acceptance.  We are all alone, and our aloneness connects us – or, it could, if we would let it.

Yet, rather than acknowledging that we are all standing outside that magic circle, we scramble to create a culture of inclusion, of belonging.  We pathologize our isolation.  What’s the first thing that is usually published in a profile of anyone who snaps into an action of mass violence?  “Well, he was always kind of a loner.  He kept to himself.”  We prize conformity.  We bend, twist, pluck, and repress ourselves into constructed groups and unions that may in part meet our need for belonging, but ultimately deepen our loneliness.

Listen to the voices in your head sometimes.  We all have them – the anxieties that we can’t name, the anger that wells up suddenly at seemingly trivial causes, the refusal to look behind our own dogma.  What are those voices saying?

“I’m over here.  Everybody else is over there.  I want to be over there, but they won’t let me in.  I’m not good enough, pretty enough, strong enough, smart enough.  I don’t make enough money.  I’m not fit enough.  I can’t talk to strangers.  I don’t know how to connect.  I don’t know how to connect.  I’ll always be alone.”

So, what do we do with those voices?  We fight them, we bury them, we hide from them.  We dress ourselves to fit in.  We diet.  We buy the “right” foods.  We scramble for more money, bigger cars, bigger TVs.  We lock ourselves into rules – politics, religion, cultural traditions.  We structure relationships within rigid boundaries that will “guarantee” that we are not excluded – if no one else is allowed in, we can’t be left out.  And we lash out at those who threaten the safety of our belonging.

I’m a veterinarian.  I grew up with horses – big animals with a strong flight response.  I learned as a child that you can’t fight a horse to make it do what you want.  The horse is too big, too strong, and you will always lose the tug-o-war.

Our individuality is a horse.  The harder we pull on the rope, the harder it pulls back.  The more we scramble for acceptance and certainty, the more we push others away, and the stronger the isolation grows.

My kids have a book called Three Samurai Cats.  This picture book is based on a Japanese tale of a warlord, a daimyo, whose palace is taken over by a giant rat.  The rat sets up camp in the hall of the palace, eats all of the daimyo’s food, terrorizes the servants, and generally trashes the place.

The daimyo goes to the local samurai training house and asks the master to send a samurai, a warrior, to rid his palace of the rat.  The first samurai, a big, strapping cat warrior, goes to the palace, confronts the rat, engages in battle, and gets his ass handed to him.  The daimyo returns to the palace, and tells the master he needs a stronger warrior, one who is better armed, more fully trained.  A second samurai goes to the palace. This warrior is even bigger than the first, with impressive armor and weapons.  He fights the rat even more fiercely.  And once again, the samurai is defeated by the laughing rat.

The poor daimyo has had it by this time.  But now the training house sends a third samurai.  Let’s just say that this particular samurai cat is less than impressive.  In the pictures, he looks like a hyperthyroid, elderly street cat with scraggly fur covering protruding bones, a notched ear, and a loincloth.  Hardly warrior material.

The daimyo is furious and humiliated.  The rat laughs openly and calls for more food.  The third samurai acknowledges the rat, watches the rice balls rolled out to the rat, and sits down on a mat to wait.  At this point, the daimyo can barely stand it.  When is this supposed warrior going to do something?  Why isn’t he even trying to fight the rat?  Is he just too old, too tired, too weak?

The rat eats every last grain of rice in the palace while the cat waits.

Eventually, the rat grows so rotund that his legs can no longer reach the ground.  The cat stretches, stands up, and rolls the rat out of the palace and down the hill.

Our isolation and the voices that arise from it are like the rat.  When we fight them, when we armor ourselves against exclusion with shields of labels, conformity, and arbitrary rules and spears of jealousy and anger, we get our asses handed to us.

What happens instead if we welcome the rat, hand it a comfortable seat in the corner, and give it a rice ball?  What if we say to those voices, “Yes, okay, I see you.  Sit over there for a while will you?  I’ll get to you when I have time, but right now I have parts of myself to share with someone over here.”?  What happens when we stop fighting the universal human truth – that we are all alone, and that it is that loneliness that unites us.

 

8th Grade Lessons

Since winter break dissolved into the new year, our lives have been very 8th-grade-centric.  With the start of basketball season started, and Saturdays have taken place in a gym in Fair Oaks.  Fiction writing, play practice, a snow trip, a dance, the yearbook, raffle ticket sales – events fly at us like confetti shot from a cannon with “The Final Year” emblazoned on the barrel.
Perhaps inevitably, I’ve spent an awful lot of time over the past two months with this class, beginning with teaching a couple of fiction lessons, culminating most recently in a field trip and carpools to various events.  I was supposed to help teach these adolescents how to write pretend lives, but instead they reminded me how to live.
This refresher course on loving, laughing, learning, and letting go has come at a good time for me, so I thought I’d pass it along.  Here you go – life lessons brought to you by the Davis Waldorf School eighth grade.
1.    Be yourself (Unless you can speak in a bad British accent; then do that.  Always)—Adolescents are magpies or sheep, mimics driven by imitation and peer pressure, right?  What if I showed you a group of teenagers who know that they come in all shapes and sizes, who know that one person’s quirk is also that person’s strength, who wear brightly colored skinny jeans, or vests and ties, who push the corners and seams of the dress code to find their own style?  What if I showed you teenaged boys waltzing together or holding hands with giant grins?  What if I showed you a quiet girl doing a Cockney accent in the back of a minivan on the way to a ball?
2.    If plan A won’t work, move to plan B, or, ditch the plan and grab a sled.  On the second morning of the snow trip, the planned sculpture contest unraveled as the perfect snow packing conditions of the day before shifted into crumbly powder.  The kids barely paused.  The teams of three flowed apart, grabbed shovels and began to “build snow caves.”  When this plan proved improbable due to a lack of snow depth and the aforementioned crumbling factor, the cave diggers became toboggan run designers.  When the run turned out to be more of a toboggan crawl, they shrugged, grabbed sleds, and headed up the mountain.
3.    Take the shot that counts.  From basketball to music, from tests to plays, these kids know that the score isn’t counted in practice, rehearsal, or study period.  They may miss a layup or free-throw in practice with a shrug or a grin, flub lines or goof off during dress rehearsal, but when it’s game time, they’ll make the 3-pointer or go down trying, and they’ll be encore-worthy perfect when the curtain goes up.
4.    Acknowledge the awkwardness.  A couple of weekends ago, we held a “fiction party” for the 8th grade at my house.  Even as I was buying pizza and chips, I had the maternal jitters.  “Do you think they’ll have fun, or is this just stupid,” I asked Caitlin more than once.  I worried that the kids would feel obligated to come, and that it would be a wasted Sunday afternoon for them.  Sure enough, as they arrived, our tiny kitchen filled with hovering teenagers.  My mind spun circles generating “fix-it” plans, but my internal writer said, “This is a fiction party; let’s see how the scene plays out.”
Finally, one girl gave a nervous giggle.  “Well, this is awkward.”
As anyone who knows this class could have predicted, this was the cue for everyone to laugh and grab pizza and soda.  Before long, the mood had shifted from freaky ‘what are we all doing here anyway’ awkwardness to a party.  (See below.)
5.    Life is a party.  If it isn’t, you’re probably doing it wrong.  I’ve yet to see a work day, school day, game, or event that this class didn’t turn into a party.  They spend a lot of time together; they know each other’s quirks; and every gathering is really just an excuse to enjoy that bond.  I’m reasonably certain you could line them up at the DMV and after about ten minutes, the lobby would look like a dance club.
6.    You don’t always have to like each other, but families support one another.  This class isn’t a class.  They are a family.  Like siblings, they bicker and badger, but they always, always have each other’s backs.  One weekend, the boys and girls basketball teams had games in close time proximity.  Many of the girls showed up early to support the boys, and the boys stuck around to cheer and advise the girls.  It was as though an entire coaching squad had manifested in one section of the bleachers.  No matter how annoying they find each other’s quirks, they cheered every play by every player.
During the final day of the basketball tournament, the girls battled for third place and lost.  They had given it everything they had – one girl even playing with a fever – but it wasn’t enough.  These are 13 and 14 year old girls.  They could have sulked, gone home to cry, and no one would have blamed them.  Instead, two hours later, the loudest voices from the stands came from those girls, chanting in unison and cheering their male classmates to the tournament championship.
7.    Sometimes common sense is overrated. You don’t know it won’t work unless you try.  Every adult standing on the hill cringed.  It was like one of those nightmares that happen in slow motion.  You know how it will end, but you can’t move fast enough to stop it. 
Two boys, one snow tube, one hill.  What could go wrong?  Well, nothing, unless, the boys in question decide that the best way down the hill is not the middle of the run; after all, that’s already been done, but rather along the edge of the hill, right where it tips into trees, bushes, and a mild precipice.  Yeah, that should work.
The run ended as any of the adults could have predicted.  I had just enough time to think, “At least we made them wear helmets” before the tube slid off the edge and two rather surprised teens became tangled in the bare branches of a tree.
This sort of experimentation may not seem like a great life lesson – or even conducive to long life – but I’ve watched those same boys transform cans of spray paint, an old bedstead, a saw, and raw energy into props for a spooky Halloween garden.  Hang around them long enough and you will hear “What if we…”  It’s hard not to wonder what could happen in the world if more people said those words and then followed through.
8.    Be a surprise.  They only think they know you.  We all carry our own surprises and inconsistencies, yet we cling to the notion that we “know” those close to us.  Watching this class, though, I’ve seen: the least athletic kid go for and make a layup in basketball; one of the most pop-culture-engaged kids express the most conservative views; quiet girls belt out songs that would make your average American Idol contestant green with envy; and my practical daughter don an evil grin along with a party dress, while wondering if she can confuse the boys.
9.    Stand up for what you believe.  No one else is going to do it for you.  Civics is embedded in the 8th grade curriculum, and this class has taken the lessons to heart.  Their teacher commented to me that he’s been able to get through more material with them in previous years, but this year they want to debate and discuss everything – and he’s glad to see them do it.
During the “fiction party” at our house, I imitated a fly on the wall, tucked behind a bookcase, while they discussed the occupation of one of the characters in the show we were screening.  (She’s a high-level courtesan.)  I weighed the merits of jumping in with some pompous adult wisdom, but decided to watch the debate unfold.  Several of the kids were morally shocked, others argued that there was nothing wrong with her profession within the social context of the series, and a couple of mildly misogynistic comments were shot down as quickly as they appeared.
In the end, my input wouldn’t have mattered.  It didn’t matter who was right or wrong; what mattered is that they could work out how to express and defend their opinions against the toughest audience in the world – their peers.
10.    You’re going to have to say goodbye.  Spend as much time together as possible.  The last times are piling up.  They’ve had their last snow trip together as a class; the curtain has come down on their last play; they’ve played their last basketball games together as teams.  There are still plenty of landmarks, big and small, to come over the next few months, but time is rolling them inexorably toward June.  These kids are tight, but after graduation, it won’t be the same.  They’ll move on to different Junior High and High School campuses for ninth grade.  They’ll form new bonds of friendship and conflict.  Time and distance will float them gradually apart.
Faced with separation, adults often prepare emotionally for the inevitable by clinging to the past, or, more commonly, by distancing ourselves in advance.  We seem sometimes to view wholehearted involvement in ephemeral relationships as a wasted investment.
This class of 2013 has shown something different in this last half of their final year together.  They are facing the end in their own way, with class, style, and a sense that they are “all in.”
The gym was being mopped, clusters of parents stood chatting while younger siblings practiced dribbling and half-hearted shots at a hoop far above their heads.  The trophy had been awarded, medals ringed the necks of the boys’ team, and the players hugged, mugged for photos, laughed, passed the trophy around, and basked – girls and boys alike – in being part of school history.  The boys won it, but for the girls, it seemed like their victory, too – the first championship trophy earned by a team from the school. 
Finally, a weary voice raised above the buzz.  We turned to see the senior referee with the microphone.  “We need to clear out the gym.”
It was time to go home.

 

 

Show and Tell: Thoughts on writing, teaching, and learning

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” – Anton Chekhov

What shall I show you?   Shall I show you the woman, staring at a computer screen, embedded in a sea of interview notes?  Shall I show you the blank face of the monitor, staring back at her?  Shall I show you instead young faces, many dotted with the badges of adolescence, some tan, some freckled, chattering and grinning?  Shall I show you the dynamics of character and plot, played out as the teens pass through their morning exercises in movement and dance?  Shall I show you the boy, in lotus position, grinning as his classmates count out crunches in grunts all around him?  Shall I show you the couple, tracing the steps of the salsa, lips murmuring the count while their worried eyes watch their feet and the room?  Shall I show you another couple, hips swaying, spinning with all the bold color of the dance?  Or shall I show you the group that has given up on the salsa, and instead clusters at the back of the room, voices rising over the music, like magpies on a wire?

When I began writing professionally, I saw the occasional essay bemoaning the ease with which writing ceases to be fun once a paycheck is involved.  Intellectually, I knew that obligation often robs us of our joy.  But, I had waited so long to write; I love writing; it would (yes, you can complete the sentence) never happen to me.

Fortunately (from the perspective of my bank account), this has been an obligation-heavy few months.  Reality and I have always had a somewhat uneasy co-existence.  I earn my living through fact, yet my brain creates stories from nearly every experience.  But, since the world has been spectacularly reluctant to feed me for flights of fancy, my bread, butter, and magic beans come from sorting through piles of cold, unyielding evidence.

Caitlin prefers to work with facts.  She will happily devour the literary contents of someone else’s imagination, but she prefers the work generated from her own hand to have its feet solidly planted in consistency and logic.  The uncertainty of a blank page unsettles her.

Her class’s return to 8^th grade following winter break commenced with a block on creative writing – short stories, specifically.  The timing was impeccable.  My imagination had been feeling the cold hand of winter; words were looking less and less friendly by the day.  On a whim, one morning, I emailed Caitlin’s teacher to ask if there was any way I could help with the writing block.

Despite the aforementioned lack of editorial enthusiasm regarding my fiction, I still believe in my stories.  Sure, the catty critic inside my head jabbed me with a couple of needles – What can someone who can’t even get her own stories published teach about fiction – but, if I were in the habit of listening to her, I’d have been found, decaying in the fetal position under a blanket years ago.

The teacher invited me into the classroom last week to teach a couple of lessons on the elements of fiction.  Day One covered character, plot, and conflict.  I had typed out my lesson days in advance, with lots of writerly quotations and excerpts from my own work.  But, arriving early on Wednesday morning, I accompanied the class over to the multipurpose room for their morning movement.  In addition to calisthenics, the class is practicing ballroom dancing in preparation for the ‘big dance’ of their 8^th grade year, the Winter Ball.

Character, plot, and even conflict played out in front of me.  Each kid’s efforts, movement, or lack thereof described his or her personality exactly.  Conflicts, internal and external, played out subtly in the selection of dance partners, in the shifting and changing of action on the dance floor.  They were teaching me my own lesson as I watched.

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

No, those words were not spoken by an elderly politician complaining about texting, butt-hanging jeans, and the obesity epidemic.  Socrates said them somewhere around 400 B.C.

I’ve seen rude and/or apathetic teens, but I’ve also encountered more than a reasonable share of rude, lazy, apathetic, and intellectually-stunted adults.  I’ve never bought into the theory that the upcoming generation shows the incipient demise of society.  But, even if I had bought into the generational trope, Caitlin’s class would have shaken that conviction.

Okay, yes, there is a basket for cell phones and electronics in the classroom, and it seems to get fuller by the month.  Yes, these kids tease and joke with teachers and parents.  They chatter instead of, and during exercise, and well, I suspect that Socrates take on food derived from watching a horde of adolescents descend upon the early version of a pepperoni pizza like locusts.

However, if their teacher is tyrannized, he hides it well.  The class did indeed stand as I was introduced (despite the fact that many of them have known me since they were seven or eight.) And forget the stereotype of the bored, rude teen.

For every question I asked or point I made, hands flew up and the room buzzed.  Sure, I had to bring them back from the neverland of chatter, but they weren’t talking about shopping or game scores.  The chatter was more along the lines of “Oh, that’s like in such-and-such book.” “Oh!  Did you see XXXX movie, where the guy did YYYY?  That was totally man vs. himself.”

I don’t know for sure what the kids took away from my couple of mornings with them.  I hope that, if nothing else, something will have seeped into their heads that causes them to look at their books, movies, and video games with new eyes.  Maybe some of them will decide that this story thing is fun.  Maybe some will learn that if you get stuck when writing, you can just blow up a goat.  Maybe they were bored out of their skulls but too polite to show me.

But I know what I learned from them.  I took away memories such as a young man saying, with no trace of self-consciousness, “That’s like in Sense and Sensibility” when we talked about mis-direction.  I will remember the almost unanimous looks of confusion when I stated during a discussion of dialogue that they speak differently to their best friends than to classmates with whom they might not be as close.  “What do you mean?” they asked.  “We’re all close.”

They helped me remember why I write.  I write to better understand my own story.  I write to show myself the glint of light on broken glass, and to remind myself that others see it too.

Last Times and Letting Go -- Or, Parenting Perilously

Last weekend, my Facebook status read:

I've turned teenagers loose in my garage with spray paint and x-acto knives. #helicopterparentfail

This wasn’t an exaggeration.  Oh, and I also gave them a couple of saws and free range in my cluttered garage.  What could go wrong?  As it turns out – nothing.  No one stabbed themselves or anyone else.  No one mistook a thumb for a tree branch when sawing.  No one decided to explore the neighborhood art or chemical enhancement properties of spray paint.  They took the tools and the responsibility, threw in some creativity, and met and exceeded my expectations.  Of course, the threat that any amputated digits would not be packed in ice and rushed to the ER but rather placed in formalin jars and used in the class Halloween display might have added an extra layer of caution…

My oldest is in 8^th grade.  This is a year of last times and of letting go.  One of the unique side-effects of a small, K-8 private school is the evolution of a class as a living entity.  These kids aren’t shuffled from year to year between several classes and schools.  Yes, some students transfer out of the school and some transfer in, but over the years, the class develops its own personality and energy.  Kids, parents, and teachers learn each others’ strengths, weaknesses, and foibles.  As parents, we go from being asked to help in the classroom as they learn to read, cook, or knit to being asked to step back and let them develop their own projects and to let them travel for a week without us.

At our school, the magnificent (not an exaggeration; if you were dropped into the middle of it from the outside world, you would think you’d entered some utopian fantasy of a childhood Halloween) Halloween Festival divides the dramatic action into two parts.  Children in the lower grades are shepherded, with their parents, by “Angel guides” from room to room along a jack-o-lantern –lit “Protected Path.”  In each room, they watch a scene or vignette from a gentle story.  The rooms are decorated in gauze, twinkle lights, with soft, glowing colors and magical props.  Monsters and evil spirits do not enter this All Hallows Eve.

In the upper grades, Halloween takes on a different character.  Beginning in 5^th grade, students may pass – alone – through the “Perilous Path.”  Think of this as a combination haunted house and Disney ride.  There is a theme or a storyline, but the path is meant to be physically and mentally challenging.  This is a test of bravery and independence.  And here, the monsters, ghouls, and demons are the most frightening of creatures – adolescent humans.

The 8^th grade class puts on the Perilous Path, and this act is, in itself, a rite of passage.  Coming early in the school year, this is each class’s first real opportunity to make its mark upon the school as the top grade.  Of course, this isn’t accomplished without some heavy lifting (figurative and literal) on the part of the teacher and parents.  But, this is where the letting go, the sense of reeling out a line and letting the students run comes in. 

Hi.  My name is Christy and I am a control freak.

I generally don’t volunteer for projects that require input from other people.  Once I’m given a general concept – a theme or design – I like to do things my way.  And I typically only ask for help from people that I know will do those things my way.  Allowing the vision in my head to bend, to take on the ideas and flavors of other people, is not a natural condition.  Yet, once I stuck my hand in the air at the first parent meeting of the year for the new 8^th grade and volunteered to coordinate the Perilous Path, I realized that this was exactly what I was going to have to do.

Essays about the lessons of parenting are a dime-a-dozen.  And like most clichés, they are absolutely true.  In my 20s, I didn’t want kids.  I thought that becoming a parent would cause me to lose myself, that my world would become narrow.  I never guessed that having children would force me to become myself – to grow beyond the boundaries of my anxieties, to push me past my comfort zone daily, not just with my children but with other people.  And, it would teach me to let go.

I’m not good at letting go.  Of control, of people, of anything.  See previous posts.  But, this weekend reminded me once again, that the best things happen when I back off and let others do what they need to do in order to fulfill their visions. 

I watched in stunned and mildly stressed amazement as Friday and Saturday, other parents worked tirelessly to trouble-shoot, construct, and create.  They found ways to make my ideas work when I had no clue myself how to implement some of these things.  They took on various areas of the path and made them their own.

But the kids floored and humbled me.  I had written a rough “script,” that was based around plot elements or roles that they had brain-stormed.  Three boys want to “be seizuring?”  Okay, obviously a mass poisoning has taken place in that room.  Someone wants to be a zombie?  Great.  Zombies require no explanation.  They had a script, but I told them that as long as they stayed somewhat within the plot line (and appropriate) they could improvise.  And, improvise they did.

As we were in the countdown to set up, I was informed that a former corpse was no longer dead, the wounded man was now the zombie, and that the ex-zombie would now be dressed in military uniform and manning the check-in table.  I could sense other parents twitching a bit – “Are they going to know what they’re doing?”

They did.

For two hours, the 8^th grade kept up a frenetic level of dramatic energy, shifting and improvising throughout the night in response to the age and level of fear or disdain of the “mark” and in response to their own levels of boredom.  The boy who was supposed to fall dramatically across a doorway shifted to leaping out in a darkened corridor and at one point joined the “madman” on one part of the deck – the two kept up a demented and horrifying comedic descent into insanity.  Several of the poisoned victims got bored with seizuring quietly and either fell to the curse of madness or opted to leap from behind shelves and doors.

And, do you know what?  It worked.  This fluid, at times chaotic, approach to the plan produced a far better outcome than the tightest controls I could have enacted.

The “Serenity Prayer” is never a bad thing when one is facing peril. Whether the challenge is organizing an event, coping with relationships, or parenting, its lessons apply:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

That is my mantra for this year of last-times and letting go – “The wisdom to know the difference.”

 

Last Day Lessons

Today is the last day of school for my kids.  At the closing ceremonies today, Caitlin will stand with her class and sit down as an 8^th grader; Aidan will stand with his and take his seat as part of the new 5^th grade; Sierra will hand a red rose to her 8^th grade buddy, just as her buddy welcomed her at the beginning of the year, and will sit down as a second grader to watch “the buddies” leave the school the same way they entered in 1^st grade – under an arch of flowers.

There is a beautiful symmetry to the closing ceremonies, tradition and predictability.  The ceremony doesn’t so much provide false security and safety as it supports and embraces all that has been learned and all that is still unknown.

May troubles be less

And blessings be more,

And nothing but happiness come to your door.

And may you have luck

Wherever you go

Your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow.

 

May wind be at your back

And sun be overhead

May friends be at your side

Wherever you are led.

 

We sing this song at closing every year – parents, kids, faculty, and staff.  The words blend farewell, see-you-later, and I’ll-always-be-here.  And for all the well-wishing in the song, there remains a sense of journeying into the unknown where there will be troubles (hopefully less) mixed with the blessings (hopefully more), that the wind will blow and that friends will be needed. 

As the kids step away from school today, they won’t stop learning.  None of us will.  Yet, despite the work of teachers, parents, and peers, some lessons must be learned alone.  Here are some of the things I want (and try) to teach my kids, but that I know they have to learn on their own.

• Everything is a choice.  Every choice has a consequence.  Whether you do a thing or leave it undone, you will have to live with the result.
• Use your words.  When you speak from your heart, it has a greater impact than you can possibly realize.
• People who are “mean” are often hurting.  Sometimes if you can find their hurt, they can no longer hurt you.
• Someday you will be most grateful for the teacher you complain about most today.
• Don’t be so quick to brush off that kid who annoys the crap out of you.  You two may someday have more in common than you will with the person who is your “best friend” today.
• The “weirdoes” often become the most interesting adults.
• Everyone has pieces that connect – the punk and the cheerleader, the cowboy and the Goth, the bookworm and the skater – underneath the clothes, hair, and accessories, we have common stories, pains, and desires.  (The Breakfast Club should be mandatory viewing for all 14 year olds.)
• No one can fix your argument with your friend – no one but the two of you.
• Yes, you’re right.  You absolutely will not remember that homework assignment 20 years from now.  However, the discipline muscles that you trained in completing it well and on time will support you throughout your life.
• Yes, you’re right again.  It’s not fair.  Life is neither fair nor easy, but it’s that way for everyone.  So, do you think maybe that means it really is fair after all?
• When someone rejects you or says something cruel, they aren’t exposing your shortcomings, they are revealing their own insecurities or capacities.
• Sometimes you get the most out of the lessons or activities that “suck.”
• Yes, pushups really are important.
• You don’t know yet who you are or what you really like.  You won’t know for years, if ever.  So try everything and learn what you can from it before rejecting it.
• You are your only reliable mirror.  No one else can show you your true self.  Not your classmates, your teachers, your siblings, not even your dad and me.
• You don’t find yourself when you are doing the safe, easy things that you know well.  You find out who you are when things are hard, scary, or just plain crappy.
• The only feet you can stand on and still balance are your own.

Putting on Your Game Face

When things get tough or scary, it’s easy to forget what we are doing, and even why.  It’s pretty simple to say “Why bother?  This is just too hard,” and, in my case at least, then go eat something loaded with sugar, butter, flour, and chocolate.  It’s easier to turn on the TV, surf the internet, to read a book, or to just goof off than it is to really work at getting past the uncomfortable stuff.

I’ve said it before.  When I really need lessons, (ok, so that’s most of the time) all I have to do is look at my kids and their peers.

Last night was the school’s Spring Strings’ Concert.  In the Winter Concert, all grades (2-8) perform something.  The venue is larger, the focus is dispersed across the student body, and the pieces played are typically familiar and cozy. 

Everything grows in the spring: plants, kids, and musicianship. For the Spring Concert, the kids have to step up.  Only the strings players in grades 4-8 perform, the venue is smaller, the pieces are eclectic, and the 8^th graders perform their solos.  And, the audience is a bit more critical; parents and grandparents have learned to expect significant growth between winter and spring, and I think the kids realize it. 

Change and development occur under pressure, and it’s illustrative for me to watch how these kids respond to that pressure.  As anyone who’s read this blog should know by now, our school is not heavily populated with passive, docile, blindly obedient kids.  I don’t think it is a coincidence that a curriculum that emphasizes active, engaged learning is going to wind up with a population of active, curious, and questioning students. While these traits will probably benefit the kids in the long run, they make preparation for any sort of focused activity such as a play, concert, or game nerve-wracking for the adults involved.  Rehearsals and practices tend to involve a lot of talking, giggling, forgetting (of everything), and general goofing off.  For weeks.  You can almost measure the time until performance by the lines beneath the teacher or coach’s eyes and the set of his or her shoulders.

Yet, if you ask the kids how things are going, the response is typically, “Fine.”  Though, children who are a bit more sensitive to adult aura will generally add that they wish that their classmates would quit goofing around because it’s upsetting the teacher or coach – not because they think it will impact the performance.

The kids know something that the adults forget.  They know the difference between practice and the real thing.  They know that practice is for building the skills they need, for getting a little bit better each time, for failing, and doing it over.  They don’t express it in words, but I think that they know that when the chips are down: when the curtain pulls back, when the whistle blows, when the conductor lifts her bow – they will be ready. 

The kids have learned to play through the pains of learning.  While their approach can be maddening to watch, I can’t help but think that they may have it right.  They know the difference between the small, daily obstacles and failures, and the big moments where results count.  I’ve watched six years of plays, concerts, and games with this school, and I’ve noticed the same thing every time.  No matter how wound up and scattered they seem right before the performance starts, regardless of the running, shoving, joking, clowning around, as soon as they take their places on the field of battle, whether it be stage or court, something changes.

The kids put on their game faces.  The most distractable, goofy, chatterbox of a class clown will metamorphose as soon as he or she picks up a bow, takes a mark on stage, or gets in position for the tip off.  At the beginning of this year, we spent most of our Saturdays in a gymnasium in Fair Oaks, watching basketball.  During Friday’s concert, I recognized the expressions on several of the girls’ faces as they took up their instruments.  Even though their hands held bows instead of a ball, their expression said the same thing.  “Ok, it’s game-on.  I’m taking this to the net, and nothing is getting in my way.”

As adults, we sometimes lose track of the fact that one can have fun and even make mistakes while still holding an underlying seriousness of purpose.  We get so caught up in our small failures, that we forget how to put on our game faces when it really counts.  I wonder sometimes if this is an area where we need to quit trying to teach our children and instead to listen to them.  Does giving yourself an ulcer during preparations or berating yourself for moments of weakness or failure to make the right choice (every single time) really contribute to the end result?  Do stress and anxiety actually indicate greater meaning and purpose, or do they just prevent us from seeing the fun in the process?

I don’t know the answer, but I wonder.  What would happen if we learned to shrug off the smaller failures, to go play, and to come back with our game faces on, saying to ourselves, “This is what I’m going to do.  Nothing is going to get in my way.”

 

 

Just Let Go (of the plan)

My phone just sent me a reminder.  “Just let go,” it says to me every morning at 6:00.  Just let go.  I am a widely acknowledged control-freak, and some mornings I need that message more than others.

I ran across this photo yesterday morning on Facebook:

Obviously it’s pretty difficult and rather inefficient to go through life with no plan at all, but I think we program ourselves to believe that PLAN = SAFETY.  Our intellects know this not to be true.  We have a raft of sayings… “The best laid plans of mice and men…” “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.” And on, and on.  Yet, how often do we catch ourselves saying, “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

We treat our plans as though we were plugging ingredients into a recipe or numbers into a formula.  If I do A, B, and then C, I will get result Q.  Except sometimes, we don’t get result Q.  Sometimes the outcome is X or 42 or purple.

I’ve been working with a team on developing a student loan simulator designed to help give veterinary students and pre-vet students an idea of how their choices after graduation may affect their loan balances and repayment.  In the introductory text, we have a bunch of disclaimers to the effect that this simulator isn’t a way to predict your future, it’s just an illustration, etc.  And as I have worked on those sentences this week, part of me imagines the students who will be entering their numbers, their visions of their future, and hitting “Calculate.”  I’m willing to bet that they have plans.  Many of them probably have their future mapped out so clearly that they believe they know what path their lives will follow until they die.

I was one of those students.  Yet, at almost every turning point of my life, I have found myself saying, “This wasn’t in the plan.”  We were going to have two children, not three. I was going to own my own equine practice by now.  We were going to live in our old house until our grandchildren were grown.  I went to veterinary school because I would never be able to support myself as a writer.  And, the list goes on…

Yet – and this is the reason for the phone reminder – most of the best things in my life have come from letting go of the plan, from allowing my life to flow with only gentle guidance from myself.

I took a watercolor class taught by Caitlin’s teacher last night.  Rick Tan is not only a terrific teacher but an amazing artist in his own right.  Just check out his blog.  We were working with wet-on-wet watercolors in the method the students use in school.  This particular technique uses a lot of water, and as anyone who has swum or boated in open water knows, water doesn’t like human control.

In high school, I hated watercolors; the pigment never seemed to stay where I wanted it, so I moved on to oils where I could layer pigment and control my brushstrokes and even the thickness of the paint for texture.  The down side to oils is that they take forever to dry, so they aren’t very practical for a two week camping trip in a crowded car in the Pacific Northwest.  I took up watercolors as an adult in order to be able to paint on our vacations.  Very practical for a landscape painter.  Part of the plan.  Gradually, I learned to adapt my perfectionist tendency to work with the watercolors rather than against them, but I still used relatively little water so that I could maintain control.  This painting of the Awahnee hotel in Yosemite shows the detail of the leaves applied with a very dry brush.

Last night, Rick started by telling us that we were going to play with color for our first painting.  He had us begin “with a blob of yellow…”  Something seized up inside me for a moment.  All of the control voices started shouting at once.  “I’m a landscape painter.  I paint from life or photos.  I don’t do abstract.  I know how to paint.  I don’t need to experiment with color.”  I’ve had some practice with these voices lately and I’ve learned not to argue with them.  Instead, I left them to chatter in the back of my head and loaded my brush with yellow pigment.

As soon as my brush touched the meniscus of the film of water coating my paper, the yellow flowed from the bristles and began to tendril out along the page.  I moved my brush in swirls, back and forth, in S-shaped swoops.  I played with deepening color in some areas, and lifting it off in others.  As we added different pigments to the page, I could feel the layers of my emotions flowing with the color – swirling, blending, deepening in some areas, lightening and bouncing along in others.                             C. Corp-Minamiji,  original watercolor 2010

 

 

C. Corp-Minamiji,  original watercolor 2012

 The end result wasn’t what I’d envisioned when I first dipped my brush into the paint, and I think that’s a good thing.  A friend of mine fought with her brush strokes during the first piece, her struggles reminding me of my own watercolor battles in high school.  “I think most of the trick to watercolors is letting go of perfectionism,” I commented.  And as she relaxed into her second work, her painting shifted.

How often do we try so hard to cling to our concept of the way things are “supposed to be?”  How often do we say things to others in the hopes of forcing the response that we want?  And how often are we disappointed?  Yet, it seems, to me at least, that when we let go, let events, people, and feelings follow their own currents, that’s when the richness swirls in.

Try it: “Just let go.”

 

Shakespeare *and* Love

“Shakespeare is boring.”  I’ve heard the declaration throughout my life – from the agonized cries of my classmates in high school English to my peers (and even husband!) as an adult.  Shakespeare is boring and hard to understand.  Shakespeare is for intellectual snobs.

I’ve never gotten that.  For me, Shakespeare wrote life – the entire range of human emotion and experience in gloriously shaded pictures of words.  The man is called “the Bard” for a reason.  He wrote language that sings, not to professors in dim lecture halls, not to the elite in paneled libraries, but to everyone.  This week, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the actor giving us a backstage tour of the theaters in Ashland mentioned that it is estimated that in Shakespeare’s time, some 80% of London’s population crossed the Thames to see his plays.  Can you imagine Hollywood’s glee if 80% of a city, any city, made their way into a theater for the latest blockbuster?

But movies, for all of their polish and effects, lack one element that pulses from the stage in a good production and binds the audience.  Love. 

It is possible – we do it every day – to be moved to laughter, tears, or thought by a movie – but, moviegoers will never feel the connection to the work and to the actors and to each other that comes from seeing a play performed.  In Shakespeare’s time, people packed into cities in ways that made Manhattan look like an example of suburban sprawl.  You could literally reach out your window and shake hands with the neighbor across the street.  Today we fence off quarter acre lots in order to have privacy from our neighbors.  We connect via boxes rather than face to face or hand to hand.  Our entertainment is computer-generated, polished, censored, rated, and scrubbed.  Sure, barring an extreme disaster, most residents of developed cities are unlikely to be felled by cholera, but we are often left trying to purchase connection, trying to fill an inner craving for which we lack the words.

I love Shakespeare, and I love my daughter’s 7^th grade class.  Still, I’ll admit, I had some misgivings about viewing Romeo and Juliet with a horde of 12 and 13 year olds, particularly when the viewing involved herding them back into cars for a 40 minute drive after they had suffered through the 7 hour, technology-deprived caravan from Davis to Oregon.  As we took our seats in a matinee theater packed with junior high and high school students, I looked at the playbill and saw that the running time was over three hours.  I regretted not bringing duct tape.

I was wrong.  The production, set in the haciendas of 1840s California newly under U.S. rule, had the audience from the first breaths.  Caitlin explained it best last night at dinner.  “I was sitting next to Collin, and I looked over and he was just like this.” She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her mouth slightly agape.

Mike asked, “You mean because he was bored, or enthralled.”

“Enthralled.”

It didn’t hurt, of course, that these actors knew their audience.  I’ll admit it.  I love the bawdy parts of Shakespeare’s plays.  I love the raw sensuality of the double entendres that wink but are never coy.  I love the language that shows us just how prurient our modern notions of decorum are.  I love the sense, whether accurate or not, that there was a time when sex was considered as natural and complete a part of life as jealousy, anger, romantic love, or filial love.  For all of our modern fuss and bother about birth control, movie ratings, sexting, pornography, sexual orientation, etc., we have lost sight somewhere along the line of the fact that our minds and spirits are tied to our bodies, and that the enjoyment of the bodies is as important to our experience as the enlightenment of the mine.  Sorry, but it’s true.

But, “the play’s the thing.” (Yes, I’m mixing my quotational metaphors; deal with it.)  This production ramped up the bawd – in word, expression, and gesture – to so perfectly balance the equal power of the tragedy, that the audience of teens and preteens was left nearly breathless from laughter (and yes) a few tears.  For the parents, any brief hopes of the sort we experience when accidentally taking our young to a movie with more “adult” scenes than we would like, hopes that “maybe they won’t get it,” were quickly dashed.  Elizabethan language or not, there was no question that the kids “got it.”

Something happened in that theater, though.  Sure there were a few gasps and nudges and winks, but pretty soon, Benvolio, Mercutio, the Nurse, et al. had so caught the kids in the story, that the titillation of the forbidden gave way to honest enjoyment.  And the “grown ups” gave up decorum and laughed along with the kids.  And when Tybalt’s sword ran through Mercutio, we all gasped together.

Afterward, one of the boys – a kid who struggles with reading and language, and sometimes with the emotions not only of his peers but of himself – told me and one of the other chaperones, “I kind of almost cried.  When that guy, the funny one with the whip…” (Mercutio carried a bullwhip coiled at his hip.)

“Mercutio?” I asked.

“Yeah, he was funny.  I was sad when he died.  I really liked him.”

“It’s okay,” I said.  “I was right there with you.  I did cry. Mercutio and Benvolio have always been my favorite characters in Romeo and Juliet.”  He looked a little surprised – those were not the scenes that a grownup, a mom, was supposed to like.

That’s the thing about Shakespeare, and about theater in general.  It frees us from the “supposed tos” and gives us liberty to think, feel, and love.  Each of the plays that our group experience this week showed the range of lengths humans will go to in order to experience love – from the tragic (Romeo and Juliet) to the miraculous (the Chinese legend of The White Snake) to the madcap (the Marx Brothers vaudeville play Animal Crackers.)

And as we walked the sidewalks of downtown Ashland in the grey wind, rain, and snow, as we clustered in the wood-fired buildings of the farm, and as we drove from farm to theater and back, I watched my daughter and her classmates and saw the weird and wonderful ways in which they love.

Love is a loaded word for that age – a word of whispers and painful self-consciousness.  Love is a word they have almost outgrown telling their parents, and a word they are nowhere near ready to say to their peers.  But it’s there nonetheless. 

When a few of the boys emerged from the cars, after seven hours, speaking in British accents that they refused to lose over a four-day period and were not strangled, but were instead embraced, by their classmates, that was love.  As they raced each other, heedless of coolness and their usual social order, up and down the grassy hills on the farm, burning the pent up energy of that first long car ride, that was love.  Love showed in the off-beat, from the mixture of chagrin, irritation, and pleasure on the face of a kid hit in the face by a snowball from one of his classmates to the tattling for infractions such as climbing too high in a tree or the failure to brush teeth or wear jackets, to the silent and almost oblivious pairing off of introverts seeking a moment of solace from the mayhem.

There won’t be many more snowball fights for these kids as a group.  Next year will be their last together as a class.  There are only a few moments left before they begin to explore the more conventional definitions of love.  As parents, we only have a few breaths to go before we have to hold our breaths, wondering exactly how much of Shakespeare’s double entendres they truly understand and whether that understanding has a practical foundation.  The kids whose snow battles yesterday reminded me so much of their first snow trip together in second grade will soon find themselves increasingly bound by the constraints of society and expectation.  But, for now, they are more real in their connections to each other than many adults. 

We limit ourselves when we try to tidy the human experience.  Adult life is often constrained by definitions of love, friendship, sex, pain, and joy.  We use words that bind our emotions into tidy boxes – appropriate, inappropriate.  And, in doing so, we cut ourselves off from that connection with our humanity.  Shakespeare had it right – the human experience is a giant, sloppy mud pie of love, hatred, sexual tension, misunderstanding, laughter, and tears.  We can roll around in the language and emotion, laugh, cry, and get dirty, or we can stay clean and safe and watch life roll by on a silver screen.

Epiphany

Wikipedia has two entries for the word “epiphany” – epiphany (feeling) and Epiphany (the holiday.)  Deriving from the Greek epiphaneia, meaning ‘manifestation, striking appearance,’ epiphany encompasses that feeling of the “aha!” moment, the often fleeting instant when everything clicks.  In Christian tradition, Epiphany falls on January 6 and celebrates the revelation of Jesus to the Gentiles as the Christ, primarily through the visit of the Magi or “Wise Men.”

Maybe it’s the time of year, but my brain can’t help combining these thoughts into my own definition of epiphany – the visitation of wisdom.  To call me an intuitive thinker might be an understatement; my brain has a hard time tracing a thought from point A to point B in any sort of stepwise fashion – it tends to be easily distracted by shiny objects.  As such, I often rely overmuch on moments of epiphany as admittedly lazy intellectual shortcuts.  It’s easier for me to look for the flash of insight than to work my way stepwise through a problem.  Sometimes this approach works, giving me the perfect spark of creativity or a brilliant moment of clarity.  Often, though, it leads down a path of false conclusions.

As in almost everything else, it comes down to balance, leaving room for the moments of epiphany – the “Aha!” bursts of creativity and insight – yet still doing the work to verify the conclusion.  And, as in so many things, I’m beginning to learn this lesson from my children.

Waldorf parents often find ourselves in a perpetual state of justification – justifying paying private school tuition despite cutting every other corner of the family budget (a particularly difficult justification in a city like Davis with a renowned public school system), justifying why our 7 year olds can’t yet read, justifying the weird aversion to television and video games, justifying school festivals layered with incomprehensible overtones of both Paganism and Christianity.  Much of the time, these conversations hinge around the points that draw most parents to Waldorf education, the pieces from the beginning.

Nurturing, creative, appreciation for the arts, peaceful, wholesome, low-tech, age-appropriate – these terms and many more are thrown about when the parents of young Waldorf students gather.  Waldorf education is hugely attractive to parents who worry about their children being “taught to the test,” to parents who have read horror stories about over-scheduled, over-stressed children since the line on the stick turned pink, to parents who fear the influence of a fast-paced, “violent” culture on their sheltered darlings, to parents who bemoan the loss of arts classes in traditional schooling.

Don’t get me wrong, these pieces are all a part of Waldorf education, and for the most part, pieces of what our family appreciates and part of our justification for the seeming insanity of our family budget.  But, I listen to these phrases, hear sentences like: “Well, I’m glad they’ve had that creative foundation in the lower grades, but I don’t think it’s necessary as they get older” and I shake my head.  Something is missing. 

Maybe it’s the pastel-walled classrooms or the assignments that look way too fun and involve far too many colored pencils to be intellectual that make people see this curriculum as something designed for  young children, as something artsy and light, but hardly rigorous.  After all, if the upper grades students aren’t bringing home 6 hours of homework a night, they can’t possibly be learning anything, can they?

I think part of the problem most people have in understanding the Waldorf curriculum is that it is an education formed of interwoven ideas and principles, a complex model that doesn’t mesh with our modern “Insert Tab A into Slot B”  or educational menu thinking.  When Waldorf teachers talk about the curriculum being child-driven, this isn’t some sort of airy-fairy “let the kids do whatever they want and they’ll educate themselves” system.  The curriculum is child-driven only in that it has been crafted to link so inextricably to the physical, mental, and emotional development of the child that everything becomes part of the education.  Waldorf students don’t have a lot of homework because, if it is being done right, they are always in the classroom – or, rather, the classroom is always in them.

Believe it or not, I haven’t strayed that far from my original theme.  I’m coming back to epiphany.  Most epiphanies can only be accurately assessed from behind.  After time passes, we are able to review the evidence, to see if that flash was indeed truth or if it was fool’s gold.  When our children are in the lower grades, most Waldorf parents get only flashes of the whole picture – a form drawing here, the magic of the Michaelmas pageant, classroom songs sung around the house or in the garden.  It isn’t until our children are almost graduated, until our bank accounts are nearly depleted, that we see the pattern, the threads connecting every aspect of their education.

“Art,” “Creativity,” “sweet puppet plays” – I’ve heard the parts for years, and shook my head.  Nope, I thought.  That’s not it.  You aren’t getting it.  There’s more.

Two nights ago, our school held its annual Winter Concert.  Only grades 2-8 perform, but for the last few years, I’ve made it something of a crusade to invite the parents of pre-school – 1^st graders to the concert.  “It’s so good to see what your kids are working towards,” I say.  But, as the words leave my mouth, I know they are incomplete.  I know that the other parents will hear me and think that I am saying – “Look, someday your child will play an instrument like that.” or “Someday your kid will be able to sing a round in multi-part harmonies.”  But, these are parts.

Friday night, I listened and watched as Caitlin and the other 6^th-8^th graders played holiday carols as the audience filed into their seats.  A random observer dropped into the hall would never have guessed the degree of year-round grumbling about practice or the missed notes at home or emanating from the strings room at school.  Someone listening to a recording would picture a far more mature orchestra. 

On my left, my son and his best friend chatted before the performance started.  I listened to their conversation and something clicked.  “No, I don’t want to be James Marshall anymore,” said Aidan in response to a comment from his buddy.

“How come?”

“He wasn’t in the Bear Flag Revolt, and I really want to re-inact that.”

“He wasn’t?  Oh yeah, you’re right.”

The conversation then drifted to John Sutter, and early California.  I believe passports were mentioned.  School had just ended for winter break, yet these two 4^th graders were planning the details of the roles they will assume for their class trip to Sutter’s fort in February.  They were out of school, but school was not out of them.

The Winter Concert always makes me cry – odd, since I’m hardly the type to be overwhelmed by the Hallmark moment.  But, this year, I saw something different.  Yes, the 2^nd graders earnestly singing “O Tannenbaum” in German were adorable in their shiny black, white, and red outfits, but as I watched each class perform, something began to unfold.  As expected, the performances grew slightly more complex for each class.  3^rd and 4^th grade both performed pieces reflective of their curriculum, 5^th and 6^th grade joined in singing more complex choral pieces than the lower grades can manage.  And, then near the end – came two performances that blew me away.  ‘This.  This is why,’ my mind said.

I’ve written about Caitlin’s class before.  They haven’t been labeled an ‘easy’ class by even the most doting of parents.  Intelligent, active (very active), strong-willed, enthusiastic – this class has historically been shy on one leadership quality.  Discipline.  This state began to change last year.  Over the course of the year, the parents watched in no little awe as their teacher began to challenge them, force them to work together, and generally began to make them view discipline as something coming from within rather than imposed from outside.  Dr. Rick Tan has shown these kids, through his own example, the balance of brilliant creativity and disciplined work.  Friday night, it all came together as the class performed a piece written and composed by Dr. Tan, “Winter Angels.”

In Waldorf education, there is a philosophy that while not every child will excel at everything, all children are good at something.  As the 7^th grade performed “Winter Angels” this philosophy shone.  Some sang, some played the instrumental part, and some danced.  Yes, danced – a choreographed, beautifully timed performance.  These pre-teen and teenaged boys and girls worked together to perform not goofily or with shuffling embarrassment, but in a coordinated and professional manner I would never have guessed possible several years ago.  I always knew they had the talent, the creativity, and the pizzazz, but discipline?

As I wiped my cheeks after watching my oldest child and her class take their bows, the 8^th grade took the stage.  Their piece was listed in the program simply as “Mystery Song.”  (Caitlin later told me that the 8^th graders had developed this piece independently even of their teacher.)  Dressed in white shirts, blue jeans, and an assortment of geek-chic hats and glasses, with flags jammed nonchalantly in front pockets, the 8^th grade took the stage with their bodies proclaiming louder than any words – “We are teens.  We have come into our own.  Watch.”

K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag” began in the background. And the 8^th grade came into its own.  “When I get older/ I will be stronger/ They’ll call me freedom.  Just like a waving flag.” Singing, dancing, clapping overhead, drumming on plastic buckets, these kids showcased unity, discipline, and the raw power of youth.  ‘Here we are,’ they said.  ‘This is who we are.  This is what you have produced.’  These teens held an audience of parents, grandparents, and younger siblings captive, and they knew it.  They owned the stage, and in that moment, they owned us.

“Give me freedom/Give me fire/Give me reason/Take me higher.”

Fittingly, it took the 8^th grade, in a very non-Waldorfy (as my family likes to say) performance, to give that epiphany.  This, this is what it is all about – that balance of creativity and discipline that produces a moment of absolute confidence and power at an age where most kids feel lacking in both.

Winter Traditions -- Light and Song

In the Catholic faith, Advent encompasses the 4 weeks before Christmas.  A candle is lit each of the 4 Sundays; traditionally, there are 3 purple candles and 1 pink.  As a child in plaid jumper and navy knee socks, I was told that Advent was a solemn time of waiting, a time to repent and reflect (not quite as severe as Lent, but not party time, either).  The purple candles symbolized the sorrow of waiting; the pink candle, lit on the 3^rd Sunday represented the joy of the approach of the Christ child.  This all seemed to fit for me – Advent was a time to be good, because Santa knows, and there was definitely something purple in the waiting – waiting for Christmas baking, waiting for grandparents, waiting for Santa, waiting for snow, waiting for Christmas carols, waiting to decorate the tree, waiting to open presents.  Advent was definitely a time of waiting.

As I grew older, Advent came to seem less of a period of waiting, and more of a countdown from Thanksgiving.  Light the candle – 1 week closer.  Tick.  Next candle.  Tick.  Pink candle.  Tick.  Last candle, andohmigodIhaven’tdonemostofmyshoppingyet.  BOOM.

It wasn’t until my children started school (yes, this is one of those posts) that I began to understand the place of light in winter.  In the lower grades, the children make beautiful paper lanterns and attend a Lantern Walk to celebrate Martinmas.  As the fall air begins to bite, the line of lanterns woven through the dark is threaded with song. 

After Thanksgiving, in the first week of Advent, the school offers an Advent (or Winter) spiral to the children in the lower grades.  In a quiet room, a spiral of pine boughs is laid on the floor, punctuated with luminarias.  One at a time, the children enter the spiral, carrying a white candle in a red apple.  The child lights his or her candle from the pillar at the center of the spiral, then bends to light one of the candles along the spiral on the way out. 

This year, the Winter spiral was only offered for the children up through fourth grade.  As my son and his classmates each took their turn in the spiral, I could see why.  Something changed in their faces.  Unlike the few younger siblings that walked the spiral during this session, the fourth graders that exited the spiral were not the same as those who had entered.  While the younger children glowed with a round innocence even after their candles were extinguished, as the fourth graders blew out their candles at the mouth of the spiral, they blew out something else.  Fourth grade marks the transition from little kid to big.  The unquestioning faith of childhood has begun to fall by the wayside, shadows creep into the corners.

The first light of advent is the light of stones,

Stones that live in crystals in seashells and in bones

The second light of advent is the light of plants,

Plants that reach up to the sun, and in the breezes, dance

The third light of advent is the light of beasts,

The light of hope that we may see in greatest and in least

The fourth light of advent is the light of man,

The light of love, the light of thought, to give and to understand

This is the Advent verse my children recite at school.  To me, there is something deeper here, in this marking of points of nature, than just a lighting of candles to mark time.   The verse grounds the moment with the outside world.  It is easy in winter to experience a hibernation of the soul, to direct our thoughts and feelings inward, to protect ourselves from the outer darkness and to protect others from any darkness of ours that might ‘contaminate’ a season of joy.  Yet, as the kids light their candles with a verse, they are connected: to the stones, the plants, the beasts, and to each other.

Singing fills our house (and car, and yard, and grocery store) this time of year.  The English translation of the Swedish Santa Lucia song, the school Advent song, the dreidel song, “Channukah, Oh Channukah,” and a random assortment of Christmas carols (in English, German, French, and Spanish) float through our lives this time of year.  These winter songs have all been adopted by my children, regardless of festival or religion.

Light.  Song. 

The part of my brain that has studied other traditions, the part that remembers history books, or dusty lessons in comparative studies can trace the links between European pagan and modern Christian festivals without bursting any neurons.  However, it wasn’t until my children began coming home from school with songs and verses of light that the point of all of those Solstice candles connected with me on a visceral level.

Robyn Beaufoy, a good friend, wrote a piece in the school newsletter about Advent celebrations.  In this essay, she writes “Writer Annie B. Bond reminds us that ‘Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Christmas, Yule, Diwali, and the celebration of Buddha’s enlightenment all take place in December, the darkest time of the year.’ Despite these different leanings, our common searching for Light in the darkness of Winter unites us.”

When Caitlin was in 5^th grade, the mother of one of Aidan’s friends came in and talked to the class about Diwali, the Indian festival of lights.  As the class began their studies of world civilizations that year, they began to link the commonality of festivals.  In 3^rd grade, one of the other mothers had come into the classroom to teach the students about Channukah.  At the school, the 2^nd graders each year enact the Swedish festival of Santa Lucia.  The oldest girl in the class wears a crown of candles on her head, and the children distribute breads or cookies to everyone in the school – while carrying candles and singing, of course.

Winter has been especially dark the past few years.  When the economy began to flag, we first noticed the inadequacy of my paychecks in winter.  Within the last couple of years, we’ve been forced to tell the children, “Well, you know, Santa’s having a rough time, too.  There are an awful lot of kids out there who don’t have any toys at all, and he needs to take care of them.”  Two years ago, the last of my living grandparents, my maternal grandmother, passed away on Christmas Day. 

Yet, with each shadow, there is a spot of light.  Grandma lived a long and full life, yet her last years had been grey and shadowed with frailty and forgetfulness.  She was ready to move on.  Our economic challenges have forced the focus of Christmas away from elaborate lists and mountains of packages.  Though the bank account is not nearly so bleak this year, I have yet to begin or even fret about any Christmas shopping.  I’d rather inhale the Christmas tree and snuggle on the couch with my family.  There will be presents, but hopefully, they will bring joy, not stress.

Darkness comes.  In each of our lives, there are periods of long, black cold.  We all have our times of sorrowful or solemn waiting.  Rarely do we get to choose when that long Advent of the soul will strike.  But we have a choice.  We can approach these times with the joylessness of time marked, or we can hold moments of that darkness, be present in them, turn them over, and light a candle to move on.

The fourth light of advent is the light of man,

The light of love, the light of thought, to give and to understand

 

 

Why Dragons Don't Make Good Pets

playgroundsMichaelmas was last week.  For a more in-depth review of this somewhat obscure holiday and its meaning in the Waldorf schools, check out this post from last year.  Short version: on (or near) September 29, the feast of St. Michael, Waldorf schools host a Michaelmas pageant which tells the story of St. George and the Dragon.  At our school for the past two years – and much to the disgust of my children – St. George has tamed rather than, slain the dragon.  I think that my children are disappointed in the dragon for failing to live up to their expectation.  They prefer epic battles and generally feel that evil shouldn’t just roll over like a remorseful puppy.

St Michael and the Dragon -- Aidan Minamiji, age 9

Now, I haven’t talked to any of the faculty about this, so I don’t have any idea why the dragon has had a change of heart or why St. George is suddenly imitating Caesar Milan, but I know that my kids, at least, view the shift as part of a larger adult conspiracy to protect children from that which is scary and violent, and they aren’t happy about it.  And, I can’t say that I blame them…

Like I said, I don’t know anything about the circumstances of the school play, but I do know that elsewhere, there seems to be a trend toward protecting our children from things that are violent, unsettling, complicated, frightening, challenging, or dangerous.   Yet, strangely, while we are dumbing down fairytales so that the step-sisters turn nice in the sequel (Don’t get me started on Cinderella II), complaining about “darkness” in young adult literature, and making playgrounds so safe that they are one step up from padded cells for challenge-value, kids spend huge amounts of time indoors, playing first-person shooter games.  Huh?

I would submit that much of this child-protective movement speaks more to the fears of adults than it does to the risk of frightening children.  We all have different methods of coping with the fears that live deepest within us.  Certain fears also seem to make some of the biggest dragons: relationship/rejection, children, and status/finance issues tend to be such huge triggers that we aren’t even aware of the weird ways in which we face these dragons until the fire has scorched our eyebrows.  Continuing with our dragon metaphor, these are some of the methods I see (and have used, myself):

• Human Sacrifice – In the story, the villagers are offering up a maiden to the dragon in hopes of appeasing it when St. George rides in to the rescue.  This always seemed like a self-defeating plot point to me.  Who really thinks that one skinny girl is going to fill an entire dragon?  At best, it seems like she’d just be an appetizer for the village main-course.  Yet, we do this same thing every day.  And usually, the humans we sacrifice are ourselves.  Do any of these sound familiar?
  • “I’m going to give up my yoga classes; they’re taking too much time away from my family.” Translation: My spouse/partner doesn’t like me spending evenings out, and I’m afraid I will lose him/her, but I don’t want to discuss it.
  • “I’d like to have dinner, but I need to go on my child’s class trip.  She isn’t ready to be away from home yet.”  Translation: I am terrified that something may happen to my child if I am not there.  I am terrified that he/she may be frightened or homesick and need me.  I am terrified that he/she won’t need me.
  • “I can’t make the soccer game this weekend.  We have a big project at work and I can’t take the time away.” Translation: I need to be perceived as indispensible to the project.  I’m also afraid that I may not actually be necessary every minute.
  • Pitchforks, Torches, Mob – Sometimes, we tell ourselves that we aren’t afraid of the dragon, that we are angry, and righteous (or at least justified) in our anger.  We rally the village, stir up the countryside, and attack the dragon.  Unfortunately, since the attack is generally chaotic, and often not directed at the real problem, it usually fails and everyone limps home with battle scars.  For real world examples, think of “flame wars” in internet chat rooms; snarky, passive-aggressive social media status posts, the clique gossip that should have stayed in high school but somehow managed to cling to the heels of adulthood for many of us; workplace alliances and backstabbing – the list goes on.  No one wins – except the dragon.
  • Dragon Whisperer – This may be the trickiest fear-related coping mechanism to understand, probably because it seems the most sane.  Instead of running from or battling our dragons, we take them home, and train them.  Unfortunately, we often simply wind up nurturing the dragon, and in the safety of our homes, and with unlimited food, it grows fat and becomes all too real.  This brings me to the title of this post Dragons Don’t Make Good Pets.  Often, in trying to manage our fears, to prevent the circumstances that we most dread, we create those very circumstances.  Again, anything here sound familiar?
    • We fear that our spouse will stray.  Do we discuss our fears?  Do we bring the hidden insecurities out into the light?  Often no, we manage schedules, micromanage emotional interactions, even monitor our partner’s communications.  Why?  Because some part of us thinks that we can control the dragon.  And if we have control, the thing we fear won’t happen.  Well, we’ve all seen this made-for-TV movie…
    • We fear that our children won’t succeed in life.  Again, control becomes the means of coping with the dragon.  We arrange activities, sports, tutoring, lessons.  We check homework, draft schedules, and micromanage until two things happen:
      • Our children have no ability to discipline themselves.
      • Any joy they may have once taken in the task has been destroyed.
      • (For the record, I’m currently undergoing a reformation on this point.  My daughter and I have a pact this year – as long as she gives her schoolwork her best effort, I will give staying off her back my best effort.  So far so good, by all reports, she is much more focused in class.)
• We fear that harm may come to our children.  They may be physically injured.  They may experience rejection.  They may get their hearts broken.  They may face failure.  Guess what?  They will.  This is one of the hardest dragons to face: the knowledge that we cannot protect our children from life.  Nor should we.  I cringe every time I hear an adult say that they don’t want children to feel “disappointed” or to be “frightened” or to risk getting hurt.  If our children do not face these risks and learn to handle the fairly small wounds of childhood, what kind of adults will they become?
• Being St. George – This is the most difficult and most lonely way of handling the dragon.  And ultimately, I believe, is the only way that will work.  Gather the light from within and without, let that light of honesty, acceptance, and self-worth shine through oneself, and with one’s own strength and sword, ride out to face the dragon – seeing the beast for what it is, and slaying it (or, at least banishing it back to its cave.)

 

 

 

Inch by Inch

Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow,

Someone warm them from below, till the rain comes tumblin’ down…

--“Garden Song” by David Mallett

 

There was no rain last night, just warm dusky skies that filled the leaves of the mulberry trees.  But as the last chords faded, I thought how perfect a metaphor this song was for raising children, and how perfect as the original song for a school that has grown over a quarter century from seedlings planted in the living room of a private home, to a school of over 200 students in preschool through eighth grade.

Back-to-School Night is always one of our family’s favorite events of the school year.  It’s a chance for the kids to run rampant through their play fields – no one timing their mile or waiting with a bell to call them back to class.  It’s an opportunity for parents and teachers to catch up with each other after the long void of summer, to eat and chat as laughter rings through the dusk.  It’s the first unofficial strings performance of the year, a casual prelude to the Winter Concert.  The agenda is generally informal, with a few announcements, pleas for volunteers, and some fiddle tunes.

   
Aidan (right) playing cello in public for the 1st time.                            DWS fiddlers.  Almond House in background.

Last night was different.  Last night we heard stories.  Those stories were a sort of genesis tale, showing us the roots of the educational fruit our families reap – showing us where we come from, and where we owe it to those who came before us to go.  For the 25^th Anniversary of Davis Waldorf School, several of the founding parents and teachers of the school took the microphone.

They told us of opening the school in the living room of a private home when arrangements to set up house in Davis as a school fell through.  We heard about the donation of the land where our school now sits, at the northwest corner of North Davis Farms, and the trepidation surrounding building on that land without knowing how the capital would be raised.

But, I think the best line was when our administrator, Kelly Brewer, quoted one of the founding teachers, Clifford Monks.  When the school was preparing to move to a permanent site, Mr. Monks stated, “To build a school is to build a community.”

3rd grade classroom last year.  Rammed earth wall in background.

It’s a Hallmark card sort of idea: quaint, but out of place in a world of scheduled play and “virtual communities.”  And, yet, to look around the school last night: at the tables of parents, grandparents, children, teachers, and friends spilling across the lawn; at the Almond house, a farmhouse donated to the school in the early years; at the rammed-earth classrooms, architectural phenomena in 1992, that have housed 19 years of children; at the new kindergarten wing, completed just in time for school last year; and at all of the faces, so familiar, faces that have pulled weeds, moved fences, painted, cleaned, driven on innumerable field trips, baked, crafted, and worked, worked, worked to make something magical for our children – well, I buy it.

It’s hard to see growth when you’re in the middle.  Children sprout up by magic for family that see them only on holidays; to parents who feed, clothe, and nag, those same children often seem to be in a constant state of regression.  Sometimes the only things seeming to grow in a garden are the weeds.  Progress often feels like “one step forward, two steps back.”  For parents who have stretched budgets to cover private school, sometimes the requests for volunteers overwhelm – ‘You want me to do another thing? –Is this really necessary?  -- Can’t someone else do it? – Are all of our committees, meetings, and projects really getting anywhere?

Our eighth graders are nomads this fall; the portable building housing the eighth grade classroom caught fire on Labor Day.  Classes started one day later.  Until their new classroom arrives, the peripatetic eighth grade has divided their lesson time between the rooms of classes away on field trips and our new multi-purpose room, intended as a dedicated space for music and eurythmy classes, plays, and special events.  It would be easy to become frustrated or bitter – new buildings, a new basketball court, and no eighth grade classroom?  But, this is temporary.  A brand new room will be arriving soon, and besides, we know where we came from – we began in a living room.

Epilogue:

I’m not much of one for meditation or signs – I have trouble getting my brain to shut up even at my most peaceful, and my cynicism tends to take over in moments that are meant to be profound.  But, this week, I sat through a guided mediation at a fall equinox event.  The group leader gave us images of walking along a forest path, looking at the brilliantly colored leaves, the flowing stream.  “Bend down and pick up a leaf,” she said.  “Look at your leaf; what color is it?”  Mine was scarlet.  “There is a message on it; just for you.  What does it say?”

My leaf said, “Wait.” 

It’s hard to see progress from the middle.  In any endeavor: a work of art, raising children, building a school, planting a garden, sometimes all we can do is wait.  Wait, and trust that our seeds are being kept safe and warm until the rain.  Wait, and trust that we are moving forward – inch by inch.

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, because who can resist either John Denver or Muppets...

 

Beeswax Crayons and Recorders

At the beginning of this week, over on Facebook, I promised a back-to-school blog post.  Well, it’s now Friday, and I’ve been a little busy, well, getting the kids back to school.  This post may ramble somewhat as I ponder the evolution of that phrase in my own life.  Our kids have been in a Waldorf school long enough now that I no longer experience the  autumn new-erasers-and-Pee-chee-folders-so-sharp-they-cut-your-finger sensations that are the residue of my own education.

My kids mark the start of the school year with new or up-sized cellos, new rain pants and jackets, and the perennial ‘where did you put your sun-hat’ question.  It sounds weird to say that no, I don’t buy notebooks or pencil cases, that we don’t troll the Back-to-school ads for the best deal on reams of college rule paper.  “Their supplies are included in the tuition,” is the easy phrase.  And the explanation works well until someone asks: “which supplies?”  “Ummm, beeswax crayons and a recorder…”

By the time the kids reach the upper grades, I no longer feel compelled to defend our weird back-to-school routine.  Caitlin does have binders, pencils, and pens -- they just happen to be provided by the teacher.   And, no one who listens to her rattle off the conditions leading to the fall of the Roman Empire or watches her juggle fractions like beanbags is going to question her academic credentials.  Well, they can, but she’ll just quote Shakespeare at them.

And even Aidan, now in 4^th grade, can hold his own against any pedagogical inspection.  He multiplies double digit numbers in his head.  (I don’t know if that’s considered impressive or not, but I have a doctorate, and I can’t do it!)  And, though penmanship may be considered a dying art, his is truly art.  Perhaps he can find a job illuminating manuscripts with some monks…

However, it is in the 1^st and 2^nd grade years that parents find themselves stuttering and hedging at cocktail parties and family reunions.  As Sierra came home this week announcing that in her first days of 1^st grade they had practiced “drawing straight lines and wiggly lines” during Main Lesson, I wondered what some of the new parents in the class were feeling as their children made similar revelations.  I’m past the defensive evasion of the Waldorf parent.  I will say it aloud.  Yes, Sierra is six.  No, she can’t read.  No, we aren’t worried.  No, she doesn’t have any learning difficulty.  She will read when she is ready and that probably won’t be for another year or so, and that is just how it is meant to be.

Veteran Waldorf parents can translate “straight lines and wiggly lines.”  “Oh, so you’re doing form drawing,” my husband replied without missing a beat.  In 1^st grade, the symmetric, repeating forms give the children a feel for the shapes (lines and curves) that make our letters.  The form drawings also build a sense of symmetry and scale.  On a more esoteric level, the form drawings help the children to use and integrate both sides of the brain.  As the kids get older, the forms become more and more complex – by 4^th grade, the interlocking forms take on the shape and intricacy of Celtic knots.

“Great,” someone usually says about here “but what about reading?”  The kids will progress from the form block into the beginning of the alphabet blocks (side note: Not wooden blocks with painted letters.  Waldorf schools begin the day with a roughly two hour Main Lesson.  During that time period, one subject is focused on for a block of several weeks.)  Confident in their abilities to draw (what did you think writing was?) symmetrical lines and curves, the children will begin to use their ability to make letters.  The letters take on forms that represent the sounds in a way that makes sense to  the children.  A ‘D’ may be also drawn as a dragon; an 'S' becomes a swan.  As they progress through the year, 1^st graders learn not only how to draw and

recognize their letters, not only the sounds made by the letters, but also how those letters interact to form the sounds that we recognize as words.

 

 

Caitlin attended a parochial school for kindergarten and 1^st grade.  She began reading in kindergarten.  At the end of 1^st grade, she declared, “I hate reading.  Reading is stupid.”  I’m the daughter of a school librarian.  When we move, among the first things Mike and I unpack are the boxes (and boxes and boxes) of books.  Long story short: I cried, wrote a polite but irritated e-mail to the school principal, received a ‘this is how we do it; nothing is going to change’ response, and Caitlin switched schools.  Midway through 2^nd grade, she had inhaled the first 5 books of the Harry Potter series and never looked back.  The change?  Many of her classmates were still learning to read; there was no pressure to regurgitate the dry bones of plot points; and every lesson – from reading to math – contained a story.  Caitlin learned to love the story.

Children are individuals.  I do think some kids will learn best in a more traditional school setting.  Some learn by repetition, others by experience.  But the one thing I do know, and, looking back on it, have known since my own childhood – the age of reading onset does not determine the reader.  I picked up, and spontaneously read, The Cat in the Hat the Christmas before I turned four.  My younger sister, like Caitlin, rejected the notion of learning something “because you’re supposed to” and did not read fluently until she was eight or nine.  The title before both of our names  -- Dr.

The weird thing about parenting is that despite the volumes of books, magazine articles, lectures, and blog posts, there is no handbook.  This thing that humans have done for thousands of years is still entirely experimental.  Beyond some general guidelines such as: feed, water, clothe, clean occasionally, do not submerge for prolonged periods, do not leave near open flame, there is little about parenting that is hard and fast.  None of us has any way of knowing the value of the childhood we provide to our offspring.  Sometimes, we just have to trust the process and go with what feels right. 

Sierra (middle) with her 8th grade buddy.

For me, that ‘right’ feeling involves not hearing “I don’t want to go to school.”  It means shedding more than a couple of tears as I watch Sierra receive a red rose from her 8^th grade buddy as she makes her entrance into the school as a 1^st grader.  It means shedding another tear or two as I realize that next September, Caitlin (who is now never without a book) will hand a rose to some lucky 1^st grader and lead her new charge on a tour of a campus that has become a home.

Once upon a time, back-to-school meant, for me, the anxiety of purchasing the perfect supplies and outfits, the have-I-made-the –right-decision angst as I watched the classroom  swallow my kids, the worry about how other parents would view me, my family, our parenting, or even our car.  This week, back-to-school meant writing a newspaper article about the 25^th anniversary of a school my children love.  It meant reuniting with people I call friends after a summer apart.  It meant sewing placemats and crayon holders for the 1^st grade, organizing a camping trip for the 4^th, and critiquing an essay for the 7^th grader.  And, it meant hearing as I dropped my kids off in the morning, from Sierra, “You can drop us off here, Mommy.  I don’t need anyone to walk me to class.  I know my own way.”  Of course she does.  This is her  school.                                                

 

 

 

 

 

 

Circling Round

                                    Make new friends, but keep the old,

                                    One is silver and the other’s gold.

                                    A circle’s round; it has no end,

                                    That’s how long you’re going to be my friend.

 

Kindergarteners and parents circled the summer garden, hands joined and singing.  As we circled, the teachers tapped shoulders, and motioned for some to join them outside the circle.  We joined their chain, and coiled along behind.  As the last repetition drew to a close, the feet stopped.  Two circles had formed.  The inner circle held the younger children, now the “big kindergarteners,” who would remain in the sunlit rooms for another year, mentoring the 41/2 year olds who will seem so small in September.  The outer circle was formed by the children and parents who were moving on – to first grade, or to other schools.  Their year had come full circle.

“Good-bye, Sierra.  Good-bye, Sierra.  Good-bye, Sierra.  It’s time to say good-bye.”  The children sang and laughed, as one-by-one their friends were summoned to the teachers with their ritual dismissal song.  One-by-one, they hugged Teacher Karina and Teacher Kelly, accepted their small gifts and returned to the circle.  One-by-one, Little Ones (don’t call them dolls), the treasured small friends of the kindergarten, were placed in pouches, and also dismissed by name.  The Little Ones who had come for the first-years will return to Little-Land to spend the summer with Fairy Mother.  However, for the older children, their Little Ones will accompany them home, to support them in their new adventures.  Petal, Sierra’s Little One, had already gotten a head start on summer break and , like Stevenson’s “lazy little shadow,” “ had stayed at home behind [her] and was fast asleep in bed.” 

Nearly two years ago, Sierra was the smallest and youngest member of the Climbing Rose kindergarten.  Barely 41/2, she squeaked into the age cut-off.  A brand new kindergartener with a brand new teacher.  Yesterday, I cried as she walked with deceptive demureness toward her teachers then took a flying leap, anchoring herself to Karina’s lap.  My last kindergartener is now a first-grader, and her teacher, the teacher who has nurtured her with humor, discipline, and boundless love will be moving on to her own blessings.  Teacher Karina and Teacher Kelly will remain part of our circle, friends of gold, but Sierra has moved to the outer circle, on to the grades, to a teacher as yet unknown. 

In September, first graders are welcomed into the grades, the heart of the Waldorf curriculum, with the “rose ceremony.”  As they are greeted by the teacher who will carry them through the lower grades, each child is presented with a red rose by his or her “eighth-grade” buddy.  The eighth-graders, many of whom are Waldorf ‘lifers,’ will partner with their first graders throughout the year, leading by example, showing them the ways of the school, and giving them someone ‘cool’ to admire.  And, at the end of the year, the circle of the rose will be completed.

“That’s Bay’s class.  And Curtis’s class.”  Sierra, sitting on my thigh (and incidentally squashing my sciatic against the wood seat of the too-short chair), whispered as the seventh-grade recited their verse.  Something caught in my chest as they were dismissed, to “sit down as eighth graders.”

“Sissy’s class!”

I feel my destiny
My destiny finds me
I feel my star
My star finds me
I feel my goals in life
My goals in life are finding me
My soul and the great world are one

The sixth-grade’s song was familiar from their class play; their teacher had set to music one of Rudolph Steiner’s verses.  Yet, familiarity doesn’t prevent tears.  Sierra’s hair got very wet as I watched her sister’s class, suddenly no longer round-cheeked children, sing with the mingled poise and acute self-consciousness of adolescence and “sit down as seventh graders.”  It’s coming, the end of that circle, more quickly than I could wish.

“Zoe’s class!”  No, Sierra doesn’t have a sibling in fifth grade.  Her brother has a classmate with a sister in fifth (now sixth.)  But it went this way through the grades.  As the now fifth grade stood for the last time as fourth graders, Sierra proclaimed, “Tyson’s class.  Oh, and Nicole.  And Carpenter.  I know lots of people in that class."  By the time she said, “Aid-y’s class!” I was starting to get it.  The circle is a spiral, or maybe a Mobius strip. The close of her time in kindergarten isn’t kicking my child into an unknown world.  She is joining a larger circle, a circle in which she already sees herself as a link.  “I know everybody,” she said.  Not everybody, but she has found connections to each of the grades, and in doing so, has begun to picture herself in their place.  In the rhythm of the curriculum, the children find both predictability and adventure.  Last night, as we lingered around a picnic table with two other families, Caitlin explained her hatred of cauliflower, stemming oddly from a fifth grade botany lesson.  Tyson, the now-fifth-grade brother of one of Aidan’s best friends, broke his customary quiet to say, “I’m studying botany next year!” They make the connections, find the links, and draw upon each other to move from one point in the circle to the next.

Sierra’s hair was soaked by the time my son and his friends – when did they all get so tall and sturdy looking?—sat down “as fourth graders.”  They had completed their verse and song (in Hebrew!) with word and note perfection. And with grins and a surreptitious fist-pump or two, that class owned their new role.  They know exactly who and what they are.  Uncertainty and self-consciousness will come to them in a year or two as adolescence begins to shine its spotlight, but for now, they are nine years old and invincible.

“That’s Joey’s brother,” Sierra pointed at one of the eighth graders – the brother of one of Caitlin’s classmates and son of Caitlin’s teacher.  Each member of the graduating class was called up by full name.  Their years in the school were announced.  From the lifer with ten years behind her to Ricky (Joey’s brother) who joined the school this year, each has made his or her mark upon the school and has earned the right to stand before their younger peers as testament to the completion of the cycle.

And, then, the first graders were asked to join their buddies.  Sierra remained silent as the class she knows best – many of whom were the ‘big’ kindergarteners when she started school, and with whom she played and laughed – stepped forward to stand before their eighth graders.  I wish I had the words to the verse that the first-graders recited, but it began something like this: “When we were much smaller and you seemed so much taller…”  The first grade told in verse the tale of their year, from their first moments in that September rose ceremony.  And as they finished, each first grader turned and presented an eighth grader with a red rose. 

Scarlet roses clutched in their chubby hands, first graders enter their classroom for the first time beneath an arch of flowers held aloft by their parents.  They process beneath the stems and petals, are greeted with a handshake by their new teacher, and enter the classroom of chalk and wonder for the first time. 

Scarlet roses clutched in elegant and strong hands – hands that have learned to knit, to cook, to play recorder and string; hands that have drawn runes and written of the fall of Rome; hands that have joined in song, and dance – eighth graders depart their school beneath an arch of sunflowers lifted to a (finally!) summer sky by teachers and parents who must now stretch to raise the stems above the teenaged heads.  They bid farewell with a handshake to their first graders and to the school as they leave for a world of new wonders.

Epilogue:

Sierra was quiet as she watched her friends hand their roses to their buddies.  “Next year, that will be you; are you ready?” I whispered.  She shook her head.

As I pulled the covers to her chin last night, Sierra asked, “Will I get a rose tomorrow?”

“No, not tomorrow.  In September.  In three months.”

“I’m ready, Mommy.”

“I know you are.”

In September, Mike and I will watch as Sierra receives her rose and greets her teacher for the first time.  She doesn’t know who her “buddy” will be, but it’s a good bet that that eighth-grader will be known to her.  As spring morphs to summer, she will return that rose to the one who has shown her the way.  And, in that following fall, Caitlin will offer a rose to a child who seems impossibly small.  And the circle will continue.

Rap, River, and Rainbow

The calendar reminds me that we approach the season of chaos.  I’ve written before about the rhythm of the school year, particularly that of the Waldorf schools.  Though I’m not inherently a particularly structured person and my thoughts tend to jump from A to Q to 42, parenting has taught me to appreciate the value of structure and the discipline a framework provides.

Each of my children’s classes has had events or moments that bookended this school year.  The kindergarten began the year with their capes and swords of light, preparing to face the dragons of development.   They will close out the last week of school with a trip to the river, braving the chilly water and sailing wooden boats they have made with their own hands.  The third grade’s year has a more subtle rhythm: that of the season and of the harvest as they have tended their garden, learned to cook the food they have grown, watched the shearing of sheep, and learned to card and spin the wool.  (You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a 9 year old very seriously discuss fiber crimp while petting a sheep.)  But, even for them, the end of the year is a celebration, proof of their accomplishments – today, according to rumor, they will make cake and ice cream in cooking class.  And the sixth grade?  The sixth grade has completed the cycle with perfect symmetry.

In September, it was a rough and tumble class, pulsing with a fire of their own, that journeyed to Mt. Lassen to study geology.  In the fall, they were at the beginning of the metamorphosis of puberty, fluctuating wildly from child to teen at a moment’s notice.  Though they were a great and polite group of kids in the fall, there was, at times, an almost feral energy that mirrored the rugged mountains and geologic turbulence of the volcano.

We have just returned from another camping trip, closing the year with a visit to Cache Creek Canyon Regional Park.  Like the rounder hills of the Coastal Range, the children have matured.  Some of their rough edges have been worn away; the drama of their evolution has quieted.  Like the landscape, they are anything but static, yet rather than eruptions of steam, we saw the trickling cascades of miniature rock falls.  Meals and activities ran smoothly, even in the face of Wednesday’s rainstorm and subsequent flooding of a tent.  Changing the direction of the day was no longer (as Caitlin would say) like “herding cats with bagpipes.”

Were they perfect angels?  Don’t be silly; they’re 12 year olds.  There is still a wide range of maturity within the class and within each of the kids.  A few experiments in pyrotechnics still needed to be curtailed.  Two pairs of stray and sodden socks went unclaimed.  It was occasionally necessary to point out that rocks thrown into the river should be directed away from one’s classmates.  But something has shifted.

As a class, they have learned (thank you, Dr. Tan) to accept order as a natural part of things rather than a burden imposed by authority.  Their energy is (for now, at least) directed toward meeting challenges rather than resisting structure.  This will probably shift back in a year or two; eighth graders study rebellions for a reason.

Yet, on this trip, rather than whining about assignments, we saw focused work and rehearsals for their Talent program and “Zodiac Rap.”  Well, mostly focused – there were a few comments of “we don’t rap.”  But the talent performances were as engaging and as varied as the kids and showcased their uniqueness.   We saw a dance routine performed by a group of friends that almost always seems to function as a unit.  We were treated to an engaging storytelling set by a future Garrison Keillor or David Sedaris.  We saw a magic show accomplished with poise and panache despite an initial flub or two – and all the more impressive because of it.  A budding novelist gave a synopsis of her work-in-progress and displayed her fabulous illustrations to the delight of her classmates.  Forget American Idol: the song and acoustic guitar performance by one of the girls would put most of those wanna-bes to shame.  She even impressed the professional singer/songwriter that was the camp host.  And, of course, near and dear to my heart was the vocal/flute duet of “Rainbow Connection” sung by Caitlin and played by one of her friends.  Though they weren’t note perfect, I loved their performance for its sheer bravery: the flautist in question has only been playing for a year and I know for a fact that the music for the piece was only downloaded for her a couple of weeks ago, and to see my introvert daughter stand and sing solo in front of her class was a delight. 

They were all about bravery this trip, these kids.  Not the ‘I dare you’ sort of bravado, but a quieter ‘I can do this’ acceptance of challenge.  Tents were set up with minimal adult involvement.  Raps were written according to assignment and performed with a day of prep.  Even the least athletic joined in a volleyball game.  And currents were swum.

Our campground had an amenity one doesn’t expect in Yolo County – a beach, a real, sandy beach.  Bracketed by rapids above and below, our section of Cache Creek had a shallow, quiet bend near the beach, a moderate current one could cross to still water on the other bank, and a more intense current just downriver from the upper rapids.  Much of the trip was spent testing their strength, skill, and courage against the current.  A few of the stronger swimmers tried the crossing first, at the lower, slower current, adjusting their trajectory for the river’s flow.  Once the whole class had made the crossing, and a couple of the adults showed that even grownups could do it, they were off to a new challenge, swimming the slightly faster waters and even riding the current back to the slower waters.

The waters came from above as well as below.  On the second day of the trip, we were treated to a five hour deluge that resulted in one total failure of tent, and one failure of ground cloth (mine).  Yet, despite the clothing and sleeping bags spread on rocks and cars to dry, despite the hours in the tents in the morning, we heard few complaints, and if anyone said, “I want to go home,” they were well out of adult earshot.

Around 3:30, a rainbow arced over the hills to the east of us.  I yelled to my daughter, “Hey, Caitlin a rainbow!”  She looked up, shrugged, and focused her eyes on the net.  The child who said, “I can’t play volleyball.  I can’t do sports with balls.  I always get a bloody nose,” was ready to serve.  And, maybe, that was the real magic.

Plague and Cathedrals

Javelins and arrows, surcoats and swords, ropes and catapults, mud and mayhem – welcome to sixth grade in a Waldorf school.   In the fifth grade, Waldorf students explore the development of human enlightenment and culture through the study of ancient civilizations.  They typically begin the year in Mesopotamia and travel through India, Egypt, ending the year in Ancient Greece.  The pinnacle of the fifth grade year is the Pentathlon.  Modeled after the ancient Greek games, the Pentathlon emphasizes form, achievement, and reaching above oneself to perfect ‘beauty, grace, and style.’ 

If fifth grade is a stage of enlightenment, sixth is a year of contrasts.  Fifth graders mirror the “Golden Age” of Greece, inhabiting their own golden age between developmental changes.  According to Steiner’s philosophy of Anthroposophy, significant spiritual, mental, and physical changes manifest in the grade-school aged child at approximately three year intervals.  Note to future parents: this is a good reason not to space your children three years apart.  In our house, we are currently enduring simultaneous manifestations of the six year change (increasing independence coupled with commensurate rebellion), the nine year change (an awakening from the dream-self of the child into the frightening isolation of the real world – comes with shorter temper, smarter mouth, anxiety, and, in boys at least, an ever increasing delight in inappropriate language and humor), and the twelve year change.

My mother, a former sixth grade teacher, swears that regardless of physiological development, all kids hit puberty in the spring of sixth grade.  The twelve year change provides a sneak peek for both children and parents into the teen years.  Mentally, sixth graders seem to fluctuate from incredible independence, responsibility, and sharpness of wit to astounding forgetfulness, sloth, and sheer boneheadedness.  Caitlin – after 4 or 5 years of competent can-opener use and generally excellent cooking skills – last Monday morning “forgot that tin can lids are sharp.”  She has also ‘forgotten’ any number of other things this year: homework, a report, the location of myriad critical items, and how to clean her room.  Yet, she remembers how to argue.  There is no statement that can be made by a sibling or adult that Caitlin will not contradict.  Walking, however, is a bit iffy.  Like her mother, Caitlin has never been the most coordinated person, but the level of tripping and spilling has increased recently to toddler level.

These are the moments in which the parents of adolescents whimper and quietly bang our heads against walls.  And, these are the moments that make the study of the Middle Ages perfect for sixth graders.  The age that brought Europe the construction of the cathedrals and the code of chivalry also brought the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Black Plague.  Every time I open my mouth to harangue my formerly hyper-responsible child about her sudden and incomprehensible loss of brain-cells, I remember another adolescent accused of “spaciness”.  A discussion the other morning went something like this:

            Me: “Will you quit arguing.  This is how it is.”

            Caitlin: “I’m not arguing.  I’m protesting.”

            Me: hysterical laughter.

Thirty years ago, I was on the other end of the same debate.  Sorry, Mom.

Honor, courage, empire-building, empire collapse, centuries-long feats of masonry, bloody war, intolerance, intricate tapestry, and catastrophic epidemic: the Middle Ages were a distillation of the extremes of human nature.  Independence, intelligence, reason, rebellion, growth, hormones, moodiness, helpfulness: sixth grade is a distillation of the extremes of human development.

If the Pentathlon emphasized enlightenment in the form of beauty, grace, and style, the Medieval Games was something more primal.  Set deep in a dark forest rather than a sunlit stadium, these were challenges of courage, physicality, and individual achievement.  Though the ‘knights to be’ travelled in shires comprised of students from each school, and though a couple of the events such as scaling the wall and the tug-o-war were cooperative, the emphasis was less on competition or team than the efforts of the individual to overcome his or her dragons.  While remnants of the fifth-grade form lingered in the javelin toss, for the most part, these newly adolescent bodies were no longer capable of the innate coordination of youth.  Some of them are entering the arms-and –legs stage, moving through life like mutant octopi.  Some of them, particularly the girls, have experience a shift in center of balance. 

Rather than compete against one another in events that require precise form, the sixth graders faced challenges such as crossing a bridge of floating (and tipping) platforms, or scaling a rope ladder to a beam high among the trees and traversing a rope foot over foot.  In these events, the style was that of the individual.  Some struggled against the fear of heights, others ran the narrow rope, or clowned around, walking backward or hanging from the rope rails.  Some gave the deliberately impossible moat (a mud filled long jump pit) their best effort while others recognized the futility and wallowed in delighted porcine glory.

Yet, there is a reason sixth graders study the Roman Empire with its emphasis on military discipline and rule, and the Middle Ages with the code of chivalry.  As Peter Parker’s uncle says (Spiderman reference, pay attention), “With great power comes great responsibility.”  The churning forces within the twelve (or almost twelve) year old body require a structured channel for release.  Side note: sixth graders begin the year’s science studies with geology, exploring the fire that twists and shapes the earth’s crust.

Our current sixth grade has never been a passive class.  As a group, they are energetic, creative, intelligent, active, and contentious.  “Discipline” and “Teamwork” are words that have been muttered on occasion when the deficits of the class were raised.  “Manners” is another.  This year, the class has been blessed with a teacher possessed of quick wit, (slightly sarcastic) humor, and a strength of personality to match the kids’ own.  Without yelling, threats or Draconian rule, he has managed to instill discipline within the class simply by challenging them at every turn to produce their best, and to work together.

At the Medieval Games, each school presents a performance for the pleasure of the “King and Queen.”  Standard offerings include sword dances and recorder performances.  This year, our class produced something different.  Written and choreographed by Dr. Tan, and executed to the beat of his drum, the DWS 6^th grade presented “The Warrior’s Creed.”  In regimented order, they performed a martial-arts inspired set of movements accompanying a recitation of the knightly virtues.  They weren’t perfect; there were the slight asynchronies one would expect from a group of eleven and twelve year olds, but one thing was clear.  Each child understood the expectation of the drumbeat and of the orders of their leader.  And each child did his or her level best to meet the expectations of their teacher and of the group.

Next year, as they adapt to the turmoil of change within their own bodies and minds, our children will move out of the Dark Ages into the light of the Renaissance.  Re-naissance, a re-birth.  Entering their teens, our kids will go through their own renaissance, as they experience this re-birth into the beginnings of adulthood.

For now, however, they shift from the mayhem of a mud-fight to the reverence of a knighting ceremony: surcoats donned over clay-encrusted T-shirts, the perfect symbols of the tumult of early adolescence.

The Warrior's Creed (below)

Surcoats over mud.  Warriors kneeling to be knighted

Good Soil

In the Waldorf curriculum, 3^rd grade is a year-long metaphor.  Ask almost any Waldorf student to name their favorite grade, and they will say 3^rd.  3^rd graders learn to spin wool – transforming a chaotic net of fibers into orderly strands of yarn.  3^rd graders learn construction – building shelters, symbolic defenses against the storms of change.  They build a project for the school as well, an effort that channels their emerging, conflicted individual energies into a force for good –they provide.  They learn to cook – creating a whole from disparate parts.  And they garden – they become miniature farmers, tending the land, producing something from a kernel of nothingness, nurturing change rather than fighting it.  Through each of these tasks, they grow stronger, more confident, and more independent.

That last trait is the killer for parents.  Waldorf pedagogy references the “Nine Year Change.”  This developmental stage that often begins near the end of second grade, as a child turns eight (entering the 9^th year of life), reveals the awakening of the child as an individual.  Think back, when were you first aware of yourself as a distinct person – separate from parents, siblings, and friends?  When did the world of make-believe fade into the cold reality that tells each of us, “Guess what?  You’re on your own.”  This is the rough part of the Nine Year Change, that uncertainty as the child begins to perceive his or her own isolation.  For parents, the pain is intense – few things are harder than watching one’s child hurt or frightened and knowing that we can no longer kiss it away.  It is terrifying to wake up one morning and find that the sunny, wide-eyed, free-spirit in the next bedroom has become moody, rebellious, and downright insolent.  It’s hard to tell ourselves that the acting out is a quest for stability, that the boundaries they push are the very boundaries they are desperately seeking.  Our kids sense it, even if we have forgotten; those boundaries, the rules against which they chafe, are keeping them back from the abyss.

“The most important thing for you to remember is that in order to grow healthy crops, you need healthy soil.”  Our class just returned from 3 days and 2 nights at the wonderful Full Belly Farm in the Capay Valley.  The farm trip is integral to the 3^rd grade.  On the surface, the trip reinforces the lessons in gardening begun during the school year.  However, more importantly, it serves as a rite of passage.  For many of these children, the overnight trips of 3^rd grade represent their first experiences away from home.  And they work.  On the farm, the children play hard, running amok in the orchard, climbing trees and playing endless games of tag.  But they also work hard, harvesting produce that they eat with their meals, tending trees too small to defend themselves from choking weeds, caring for young animals, and packing the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) boxes that represent part of the livelihood of “their” farm. 

Each of these tasks reinforces the positive and necessary part of the Nine Year Change – independence and (if we nurture it right) responsibility.  Tending their gardens, cooking for their class and others in the school, spinning wool into yarn, building their snail bread oven, and building their shelter projects: each of these pieces of the curriculum have been small steps toward that independence.  And here, on the farm, they begin to see the connections between discipline and independence.  Throughout the year, 3^rd graders in Waldorf schools study the Old Testament, not as a religious text, but as a set of stories.  And each story reinforces the same lesson.  Without discipline, you cannot have freedom.  Moses (the subject of this class’s play) led the Israelites from Egypt, but their freedom was not without consequence and rule – Ten Commandments, anyone?  Lot’s wife lost her freedom, and became a giant salt block how?  By breaking the rules.  In the Old Testament, freedom comes with responsibility, boundaries exist and are challenged, but the willful ignorance or destruction of those boundaries has consequences.

Testing of boundaries reinforces security – is the fence still there?  The children learned at the farm that fences work two ways.  Yes, a fence keeps animals inside, confined to a specific pasture, yet the fence also keeps predators out.  On the trip, it was easy to watch the children test their own “fences.”  How strong is the fence?  How high?  Is the electricity turned on?  How far can I push without breaking through?  We could see this testing in the grin of a boy as his hand reached toward a forbidden knife.  “Is anyone watching?” the bright eyes said.  Yet, more importantly, the eyes were asking, “Is anyone going to stop me before I go too far?”  The need for boundaries was readily apparent on the face of a child “talking back” to an adult.  Beneath the defiance invariably lay a look of pleading, a look that said “I’m really not sure how to handle this, someone catch me, please.   Don’t let me get away with this.”

This is the delicate balance of parenting 3^rd graders – the imperceptible line between hand-holding and keeping arms outstretched to catch them when they fall.  They will fall.  They need to fall.  They need the black eyes, sprained limbs, burnt fingers, and bruised hearts.  The terrifying thing for adults is the realization that our children will be hurt, and that they need to be.  The non-fatal injuries show us our boundaries, and help shield us from future disaster.  If we never get into trouble, we never learn how to get out of it.

I sometimes joke, but truly believe, that parents undergo a Nine Year Change as well.  I think we must.  It is impossible to be present with these rapidly metamorphosing beings, to watch them push their way to the surface, to fight frost and sun, to blossom and wilt, and bear fruit without undergoing a transformation ourselves.  We must provide the healthy soil.  But, what we sometimes forget is that composting is a combustive, smelly process.  We have to let many of our old traditions lie fallow – our child may no longer want that goodbye kiss in the morning.  We have to churn our notions of protection and nurturing back into the soil – our kids no longer need us to hold their hands crossing the street, they need us to remind them to stop and watch for traffic.  We have to prune away the deadwood of our parenting – we cannot mend their squabbles for them anymore, we can only give them the tools to relate to others themselves.  And we have to constantly amend the soil, finding our own strengths and reevaluating our own independence.

By a fluke of scheduling, none of the other chaperones on the Full Belly Farm Trip were parents with whom I have spent a lot of time.  By default, as parents we tend to socialize most with the families of our children’s close friends – at least in the early years.  Now, as anyone who has read this blog should know, I am not by nature an extrovert.  Getting to know new people is not inherently joyful to me; it is exhausting.  But I learned something in that spring grass, around the “kitchen” set up beneath the walnut trees and in our rambles about the farm.  Regardless of our backgrounds, career trajectories, marital status, or lifestyle, many of us were on the same journey.  Perhaps it is age-related – maybe adults undergo some sort of sea-change in the years surrounding the dreaded 4-0.  Or perhaps it relates to the ages of our children, the glimpsed possibility that, as our children come into themselves, we will not forever be known as “so-and-so’s Mommy or Daddy.”  Whatever the reason, there seemed to be a common thread to our conversations, one of self-challenge and discovery, yet still tied into the underlying fears of parenting – how do I do this?  Am I doing it right?

Farming relies upon an intricate web of factors: skill, knowledge, discipline, work, and luck.  For every factor that the farmer can control -- soil amendments, crop rotation, time of planting – there are factors that are beyond control – weather, disease, market preferences.  Farmers know inherently something that is often forgotten by those of us tethered to our sidewalks and municipal plumbing: much of life is outside our control.  But, the most important thing we can provide is good soil.

Parenting -- Roman Style, or Romulus, Remus, and a Report

Well, at least I’m not putting her in a basket to be raised by a she-wolf. 

If that line made you say, ‘huh?’ know that today’s blog post is brought to you by my sixth grader.  Two major projects have occupied the sixth grade at Davis Waldorf this month.  In class, they have been working on their annual play.  Performed to great acclaim in two showings yesterday, it was an epic depicting the founding of Rome, written by their teacher, Dr. Tan.  At home, the kids have been working on their European country reports, due today.  Or, most of them have been working.

Our parenting style, especially with Caitlin and school, consists of monitored space.  Rules exist, behavior will be monitored, homework will be checked, but within that framework, Mike and I are largely hands-off.  With Caitlin and school projects, this approach has been primarily at her request.  We check her homework and keep abreast of her assignments, but she has stated multiple times that if she needs help, she will ask for it.  Despite her tendency to procrastinate, this has historically worked well.  We have trusted her when she says, “I’m on it,” and she has delivered.

“Is she really that serious?” a friend asked after the play.  “She seems so serious and focused.  She did in last year’s play, too.” 

Last year, in Demeter and Persephone, Caitlin played Demeter, and her wrath upon the abduction of her daughter was fearsome.  This year, one of her roles was that of Amulius, the wicked great-uncle of Romulus and Remus.  Amulius usurps his brother’s throne, killing his nephews, exiling his brother, and sentencing his niece Rhea to what he presumes will be a lifetime of virginity in the service of Vesta.  Caitlin’s Amulius was calmly, coolly, and suavely evil, in the grand tradition of Voldemort and Darth Sidius.  As her father pointed out, it was her ‘dream role.’

Serious?  With Caitlin seriousness is unpredictable.  She can switch from blasé to impish and back  in a flash of dimples or arch of eyebrow.  Focused?  “Aye, there’s the rub,” to quote my daughter’s favorite playwright.  Where her interest engages, Caitlin’s focus is a laser.  Where she is reluctant, the beam scatters into a dappled patch of sunlight.

For her country report, Caitlin selected Greece.  This choice derived from her love for ancient mythologies.  The situation began to deteriorate almost as soon as she learned (from her evil mother) that her report needed to be a researched,  factual paper on the modern nation of Greece, and that she couldn’t merely write and draw everything she knows or thinks she knows about Greek mythology.  This was going to be work, and the focus dissipated immediately.

Caitlin’s teacher, among his many talents, is a gifted composer.  Prior to the play, he spoke of the importance of studying the Roman Empire in the sixth grade, and how the study of Rome is the study of one’s boundaries.  Exceeding our boundaries can lead to war and destruction, yet pushing the boundaries leads to creativity and expansion.  Welcome to the paradox of puberty, the paradox of life.  During the play, the girls sang Rudolf Steiner’s “Destiny Verse” to music composed by Dr. Tan:

The wishes of the soul are springing
The deeds of the will are thriving
The fruits of life are maturing

I feel my destiny
My destiny finds me
I feel my star
My star finds me
I feel my goals in life
My goals in life are finding me
My soul and the great world are one

Life grows more radiant about me
Life grows more challenging for me
Life grows more abundant within me.

Caitlin’s voice sang from the group, clear, strong and confident.  I wanted to kill her.  At that point (6:30 pm the night before her report was due), her will had led her to the deed of a report that was scarcely 2/3 completed.  Her goals in life appear to be reading whatever she chooses and driving her mother insane.  During the next 14 hours, life would grow more challenging for us both.

During the first class meeting of the year, the hot topic among the parents was the country report.  Various parents and Dr. Tan brainstormed strategies for keeping the kids on task with a challenging project.  I sat smugly silent in Caitlin’s desk, reveling in the fact that my daughter is an independent worker.  Ouch. 

Even then, the mice of uncertainty nibbled at my brain.  I came home with a raft of questions for Caitlin.  Do you need help setting up a work schedule?  Do you know how to look up the information you need?  I’ll take you to the library.  You know you can’t use Wikipedia, right?

No, Mom, I’ve got it.  Yes, Mom.  Ok.  I know, Mom, you’ve told me like a thousand times!

Mike and I didn’t leave her completely to her own devices.  We pushed her to “go work on your report” every weekend, and as part of her nightly homework.  But, we didn’t stand over her, or poke our heads into her room to check her progress.  She showed us her map, and her lists of flora and fauna.  I helped her a bit with figuring out the definition of culture, and navigating the internet.  We discovered that the BBC’s world site is a great resource.  Progress seemed to be occurring.

Yet, Caitlin’s continued insistence that nothing of interest had happened on the Aegean peninsula in the last thousand years was a hint that not all was well.  Mike and I knew that she was behind the schedule we would have liked, but the years have taught us that while Aidan will work to direction because he wants to please, pushing either of our girls provokes rebellion and reversal.  We stayed out of it.

Fast forward to Thursday.  Driving home after school through sheets of rain, I asked Catlin, “What do you have left to work on for your report?” 

“Well….I’ve done…” The silence, punctuated by raindrops and the fluttering of her murmuring lips and counting fingers, carried us a mile and a half.

“Caitlin!  What do you have left to do?”

“Mom.  I’m trying to figure that out!”  More silence, more fluttering.

“What do you mean you’re trying to figure it out?  Don’t you know?”  So much for calm parenting.  At the red light, I looked in the rear view mirror.  Each hand displayed an equal number of fingers.  “You’re only half way done?  Caitlin, it’s due tomorrow!”

“IknowIknowIKNOW!”  Pre-teen cool had begun to crack.

I drew three deep breaths.  “Go home and work.  If it isn’t done, you get to explain it to Dr. Tan.”

She went home.  She worked.  But by the time we needed to leave the house for the play, three sections remained unfinished.  Against my better judgment, I fell into lecture mode as I backed the car from the driveway.  By the time we reached the school, Caitlin’s face had slumped into sullen mode and her eyes were black.  I pulled her into a hug.  “I’m sorry.  I’m really frustrated with you, but I love you.”

“Nice motivational speech right before the play, Mom.”

“I know.  Go do your play.  I know you’ve got that down.”

And she did.  Lines, singing, evil twirling of sword, every bit down cold. 

Rhea placed her twin babies in a basket, sending them down the River Tiber.  The choices we make for the benefit of our children are not always easy.  “Should we ask Rick for an extension for Caitlin,” Mike asked me during the intermission. 

“No.  She knew what she was doing.  She chose to goof around.  She needs to deal with the consequences.”

And deal she did.  In one thing, I am very proud of my daughter.  I fully expected a 9:30 meltdown that night.  It never came.  When the chips were down, Caitlin knew the deal.  She had goofed, and she buckled down and dealt with it. 

The report was completed and turned in.  I won’t vouch for the content, and if it is inadequate, I hope to goodness that her teacher takes her to task.  But, the lesson has been learned.  Caitlin pushed the boundary of time too far, and I think she’s learned discipline far more thoroughly from this episode than she ever would have from our words alone.

And, I am pleased to report: her brother escaped the episode un-slain.

Backstitch

The needle pierces the fabric, drawing the thread behind.  I pull the thread forward, and on the back side, reverse and bring the needle halfway back through the stitch.  What?  Wait?  Go backward?

There is probably a huge pedagogical heresy involved in drinking red wine and watching Battlestar Galactica while sewing placemats for a Waldorf kindergarten, but at the end of a mentally taxing day yesterday, this seemed like the best way to occupy my hands and ‘turn off’ my mind.  Of course, the problem and poorly kept secret, is that if my mind has an ‘off’ switch, I haven’t found it yet.  This, by the way, is not any sort of claim to intelligence, just a testament to my brain’s perpetual chatter.  When I’m tired it becomes even less regulated, as though thirty pre-schoolers have taken up residence inside my skull.

Sewing by hand calms the babbling hordes somewhat.  I think it gives them something to watch.  But as I sewed last night, I contemplated the backstitch.  As my career shift gets underway, I’ve been focused on forward momentum and rather obsessed about making some progress toward every goal every day.  If one piece gets left undone, I tend to believe that the day was a failure.  Yet, last night, I caught myself pondering the value of regression.

When I was younger, I always sewed seams with a straight or running stitch.  Always moving forward was faster, better, right?  While the stitches seemed more efficient to me when I was young, the seams pulled, twisting and puckering the fabric, and gaps appeared if stitches were too long or uneven.  As I’ve matured, I’ve taken up the back stitch – step forward, partial step back.  At first this regression frustrated me, but ultimately the seams lie flat, straight, and strong.

Pulling the thread straight through life, in a decades-long running stitch is human instinct.  We get frustrated by reversals in our fortunes, thought, feelings, and growth.  But sometimes we need that partial step backward – the regression – to show us where we have been, to anchor us to important moments in development, to hold our seam straight and strong.  We need the backward steps to teach us as we move forward.

Last stitch.  Pull the thread through the loop, around again to bind the knot, snip the thread, and flatten the fabric.  The placemat is an even rectangle, sage green print on one side, lavender on the reverse.  No puckers or holes mar the edges.  Done.

 

Solstice Shift -- Thoughts on the Davis Waldorf School Winter Concert

It happened again this year.  The metamorphosis occurs in a flash of light against pressed, white cotton, the dull gleam of black polyester, the light-swallowing glow of velvet, and sometimes denim.  They change in a quickening of mahogany and sinew, of nickel, brass, and uplifted voices.  Before the houselights dim, they are familiar, our children – boisterous larval forms of potential.

Something changes: not as they poke, giggle, and shuffle onto stage, not even perhaps in the glare of the footlights, as they wave with varying degrees of enthusiasm at smiling parents, or grin in self-conscious tolerance at the yells of a younger sibling, and as they correct each other with grins while taking their marks.  Something changes: at the uplifted finger of teacher, raised bow of conductor.  For the older children, we see it as they wrestled battered rental instruments into submission before their music stands.  The instruments change, too, in the borrowed glow of the stage.  My daughter’s rental cello, chipped and scratched by the erosion of years of students, with its colored tapes to mark finger position, and iffy bridge, gleamed against her black trousers.  With the older children, it changes with the first strike of a tuning note.

They shuffle in their seat as the prelude plays, yell to their friends as families wander in staggering herds to upright seats.  They slouch, slide, and sulk, tucking aggravating shirttails into submission and finger-combing hair mussed by contraband ball caps.  They giggle, whisper, and finger-shoot each other, run in packs to bathroom and drinking fountain.  Even the 7^th and 8^th graders playing the carols as the theater fills do not take this seriously.  They’ve been at this long enough to recognize an audience, and they don’t have one yet; they are background.  Then, the teacher hosting the evening takes his mike, low voice – the one that always has a grin behind it – carrying the room.  Restless grownups settle down, poising cameras and shooting one last whisper to a friend.  The first piece is introduced, and it’s on.

The same junior-high students whose pleasant holiday tunes accompanied the filling of the hall transform as their instructor raises her bow.  Around the semi-circle, bows meet strings, and in the breath before the first notes of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” sound, faces change.  The shift is in their faces; it is there, too, in the crook of elbow, arch of finger, but mainly in the face.  In the moment of performance, they are no longer children – no longer the rough, proto-people.  Idiosyncratic touches: Santa hats, ties, skater-inspired modifications to concert attire, Beatles haircuts, and varying posture slide into the union of purpose.  They are not children, they are performers, and in their faces, we glimpse the outlines of the people they will present to the world.

Something in this transformation is, I think, unique to their schooling.  The arts inform and infuse the daily curriculum of a Waldorf school.  Kindergarteners create “people-plays” from the stories teacher tells.  First graders begin playing wooden flutes in class, a year before they will perform on stage.  Lessons are acted as well as absorbed.  Complex songs and rounds are learned from early childhood on, and by fourth or fifth grade, Waldorf students argue as knowledgeably and casually about multi-part harmony as other kids do about movies and video games.  By the time they take the stage with their classmates in second grade, the performance grows from the child. 

I think this is the difference with this winter concert.  I remember the Christmas programs of my own youth, of the roles into which we had been jammed around Thanksgiving break, roles that fitted about as well as the polyester angel costumes and that, like the costumes, itched in all the wrong places.  It is this memory of awkward hesitation that cringes when my son refuses to tell me what his class will perform, or my daughter announces a few weeks before the concert that she finally has the music for the piece her class will play.  How can I help Aidan memorize his songs?  How will Caitlin be ready in time; she’s not the most devoted cellist.  Each year, I fret, bound by the shadows of my own stage frights, the memories of tolerant faces of pained grownups as instruments squeaked and lines were forgotten.  Each year, I forget what, by now, I know.  Aidan doesn’t need my help learning a song.  Caitlin will play whether she has the music for a year or a week.  This is what they do.  The words, the music, the performance comes from them; it flows outward, fitting each child.  They will have their share of rough rehearsals, of missed lines or missed notes.  They will display varying degrees of talent and enthusiasm, but, from earnest second grader through veteran teen, each will claim a spot on the stage without fear or irony.

The second grade teacher will kneel before her class, finger conducting and mouthing the words, but she will not carry the song.  Even for the younger children, when they open their mouths, the shuffling, muted shoves, and nose-wiping fade to the back.  They sing.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, the junior-high teachers needn’t worry about pranks or rebellion.  By sixth grade, art has become part of their physiology.  Whether they can carry a tune, regardless of level of home practice or private lesson, each face on stage says the same thing.  “Here I am.  This is what I do.”  And this is the gift that I hope my kids will take into the world: the ability to step onto the stage of humanity and to say, “Here I am.  This is what I do.”

Onions and a Novel

My alarm went off at 4:00 this morning.  Did I pull myself out of my turkey hangover and stumble into my car for a morning of mercantile mayhem?  Nope.  For one thing, last night we had home-made cream of tomato soup and grilled cheddar on baguette sandwiches; our turkey feast will take place tomorrow.  As far as Black Friday goes, I had a different set of numbers in mind.  I donned the navy blue bathrobe that predates three children and even my marriage. (It took some verbal gymnastics to explain to my mother on the morning of the first Christmas Mike and I shared how he knew I needed a robe.)  I brewed my tea (Peets’ Winter Solstice), made my breakfast, read the paper and deliberately repressed the urge to break routine and race to my computer.  But when I sat down to the keyboard, it was with a sense of delicious urgency.  This morning I reached the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words.  In the interests of literary integrity, I’ll refrain from putting the abundance of exclamation points and emoticons in my head onto paper.

Tomorrow is our family Thanksgiving.  This oddball tradition-nouveau of holding our celebration the Saturday following the fourth Thursday of November dates back several years to my first Thanksgiving on call.  Through the years, our family has discovered that moving our dinner to Saturday enables my sister and her husband to join his family on Thursday and to celebrate with us on Saturday.  This system is great for familial harmony, but a bit hard on Steph and Mike and their digestion – particularly since I’m not sure that my sister even likes turkey.

I spent yesterday chopping, slicing, boiling, sautéing, and baking.  Total production: candied yams – 1 pan, cranberry relish – 2 varieties, apple pie – 1, mince tarts – 11, bourbon-laced pumpkin cheesecake –1.  Also bringing olives, cheese, and a loaf of pumpkin bread from my freezer.  With all of this bounty, and with the anticipation of my father’s famous BBQ’d turkey, it may seem strange to note the one dish that calls to me every year.  The dish for which I accept no substitution or omissions.  Stuffing?  No.  Yams?  Nope.  And, no, not the bird.  I can’t comprehend Thanksgiving without creamed onions.

This is not something other people understand.  Even within our family circle, I think there are only four or five of us who like this dish.  Outside of the family, well, let’s just say that claiming that creamed onions are your favorite part of Thanksgiving, does not raise you in the estimation of the general public.  In addition to being pretty much devoid of nutritional value, this is a humble dish – our family’s equivalent of the hoary green-bean-casserole (btw, a favorite of my husband’s family and now the only green vegetable all of my children will eat.)  Here’s the basic recipe.

Pearl onions – frozen, 1 package

Bechemel sauce

Mix together in casserole dish.  Top with dried breadcrumbs, and place under broiler until breadcrumbs are golden and sauce bubbles. 

This is usually cooked and sometimes (depending on how tired Mom and I are) even served in Mom’s most humble casserole dish – a square, blue-flowered, Corning-ware pan that may be older than I.

As a family, ours tends toward culinary and intellectual elitism.  (My husband would say snobbery.)  My sister and I were raised with foods like calamari, fennel, and sorrel decades before they were trendy.  We once spent the better part of a summer scouring the foothills of the gold country in my father’s legendary quest for a sausage-stuffer.  When it comes to pop-culture trivia, we are abysmal failures, but references to politics, history, literature, and classical music wander into our daily conversation.  I am by far the worst offender, and the one crowned “snob” by my husband.  I hate fart jokes, buddy comedies, McDonalds, and Wal-Mart.  Peeps fill me with horror, and I am more likely to bring risotto stuffed baby bell peppers than chips-and-dip to a potluck.  I’ve been known to quote Shakespeare or Donne while sewing up a horse, and I believe that we should never elect politicians unable to properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”  If these things make me a snob, I’m okay with it.

For several years now, I’ve been struggling with the written version of haute cuisine, the literary short story.  As a self-designated over-achieving elitist, I felt it incumbent upon me to strive to produce exquisite works of Literature. (Note the capital ‘L.’)  Here’s the problem. I wasn’t having any fun, and it showed.  I read and review literary fiction, subscribe to several journals, and generally admire and even wallow in the works of great writers.  But, when I want to read for fun, where do I go?  Do I call upon Updike, Oates, or Franzen?  Nah?  I visit my friends: Rowling, L’Engle, Riordan, and Alexander .  I will say it.  Children’s literature, particularly middle-grade fantasy, is my fictional creamed onions.

So, when I decided to embark upon NaNoWriMo (an undertaking often excoriated in the halls of serious literature and publishing), I threw pretense to the winds.  This month, my characters have fallen through cupboards and into swamps, met a gnome, battled a dragon, suffered heat stroke, been kidnapped by a donkey, and followed a spontaneously combusting mountain goat.  There’s also a magic sword, a mysterious cape, and an enchanted necklace.  What a blast!  The novel itself is nowhere near done, but in honor of reaching my word goal, here’s an entire chapter.  Enjoy!  I’m going to go pack, and then it’s off to my creamed onions.

Chapter 17

Follow that Donkey!

Dylan’s first thought was that she was sitting in an oven, being eaten by a furry giant with a long, ugly face.  She jumped to her feet, but the oven door didn’t open, and no one turned down the temperature.  Dylan rubbed her hands across her eyes, pushing the tears back inside, and looked around.  The oven opened before her as a vast ocean of sand and beige rock, reaching almost as far as she could see, revealing itself to be a desert.  The ugly giant turned out to be a shaggy grey donkey.  Dylan scratched at her head.  The donkey must have mistaken her hair for a crop of carrots.  “Gross!  Donkey spit.”

“Is that your idea of some new bad word or something?”  Richard raised himself on one elbow, his free hand checking for his glasses, which had miraculously stayed on his face.  He looked at his sister.  “Oh, I see.  Hi, Donkey.”

“Do you think it’s going to answer?”  Sylvia sat up, pulling her robe, now no longer white, around her ankles and hugging her knees.

“The way things have gone lately?”  Richard squinted at her.  “Doesn’t seem too impossible, now does it?”

“Improbable, maybe,” Sylvia muttered, but she looked closely at the donkey.  So far, however, it showed no signs of turning into anything other than an ordinary if somewhat randomly appearing beast of burden.

“The ass will not speak.”  Abbletrotkin clutched the base of his razron as though fearing that it would separate from his head.  “Magic is not strong in this world.  Not that sort of magic, at any rate.  Here, you will find that the animals are merely animals.  The men, however…”  He shook his head.

“What about the men?”  Sylvia said.  She bent over Dylan, checking her arms and legs.  “I think you scraped your knee again, but that looks like the only damage.”

Dylan shook her head.  “No, that was from falling out of the tree at school yesterday.  Was it yesterday?  I can’t remember; it seems so far away.”

“I know.”  Sylvia wrapped her arms around Dylan’s shoulders.  “It’s going to be okay.  I wish we had a band-aid for that scrape, though.  It wouldn’t be good for it to get infected out here.”

“Maybe there’s something in the pack that George threw at us,” Richard said.  “Do you still have it, Syl, or did it get sucked into the ground in the earthquake?”

Sylvia looked around until she spotted something dark brown behind a pale rock.  “Here it is.  Do you really think there’s going to be a first-aid kit in here or something?  We just came from a world with a dragon infestation, where women die in childbirth, for pity’s sake.”  Shaking her head, she bent nonetheless to untie the leather thong that secured the neck of the bundle.  She cleared a flat spot in the sand and began to lay out the items one by one, inventorying them aloud as she unpacked.  “Looks like some bread, a couple of loaves.  Something squishy, looks like it’s filled with liquid; could it be the medieval version of a water bottle?”  She paused and Abbletrotkin nodded.  “Ok, water then, I hope.  Oh good, four of those.”  She handed around the water bottles.  “Tuck them into your tunics or whatever.  Each of us should carry our own.  But don’t,” she glared at her siblings, “drink it all right away.  Who knows when we’ll find any more.  Ok, what else?  Some…moss?”

“Poultice,” said Abbletrotkin.

“I guess that’ll work.  Here, Dylan, let me have your knee.  I wonder if there’s something I can use to tie it on.  What’s this yellowish thing?”  Like a magician performing a scarf trick, Sylvia pulled an increasing length of glistening fabric from the pack.

“Whoa!”  Richard blinked.  “That’s no band-aid.   What is that?  A cape?  Is it gold?”

Sylvia ran the fabric between her fingers.  “It feels like really heavy silk.  The threads kind of look gold.”  She looked at Abbletrotkin.  “I didn’t see anything like this in the village.  Is this one of those things that you know something about but we don’t?”

He shook his head.  “I am as bemused by this object as you.  I can tell you that it has great value, and is very old.”

“How are we defining old, these days?” Richard asked.  “Old from our time – world, whatever – or old from George’s time, or yours?  What is your time, for that matter?”

“Time is a construct, Richard.  You humans seem to look at time as a straight line, along which one can move only forward.”

“Well, yeahhh.” Dylan shook her head.  “Time is like a story, it goes from start to finish.”

“What if, instead of a line, you look at time as a tree, with many branches, some of which touch and cross each other?  Could you not move along the branches, passing between them at will?”

Sylvia dropped the cloak into her lap and stared at the gnome.  “The garden.  The designs in the garden at the castle.  They have something to do with time, don’t they?”

Abbletrotkin nodded.  “As I told you, the garden tells our story.  Did Dylan not just say that time is like a story?”

Richard shook his head in disgust.  “And that’s all you’re going to tell us, isn’t it?”

“For now, yes.”

“That’s a bad habit, you have, Abbletrotkin, this keeping stuff from us unless we weasel it out of you, or you think you need to know.  Not to mention distracting us.  Back to the cape.  What did you mean it was old?”

“Simply that the knowledge required to turn gold into cloth has been lost for centuries – in any of the worlds, as far as I know.”

“Can’t somebody just climb back to that branch and get it,” Dylan asked. 

Abbletrotkin chuckled.  “Trust you to make a complex problem seem simple.   Well, Dylan, given that the garment is here, it appears that perhaps someone did just that.”

Sylvia found a strip of cotton in the pack and bound the poultice to Dylan’s knee.  She stood up, stretching and took in their surroundings for the first time.  “It’s getting hotter.  It must still have been early when we landed.  We really need to find some shade, and do something about water.  Desert dwellers try to stay out of the sun in the middle of the day, and so should we.”  She looked critically at her brother.  “Richard, you’re going to burn like a lobster, come here.”  She rummaged through the pack again.  “Well, old and valuable or no, this is going to have to do.”  She fashioned the gold cloak into a sort of head covering for her pale-skinned brother, ignoring Abbletrotkin’s shudder.  Precious artifacts were all well and good, but if Richard died from exposure in the desert, what good would the cloak do any of them?

The heavy silk felt like an anchor dragging at Richard’s head and shoulders, but he knew better than to argue with Sylvia when she’d been having a bad day.  Since the day looked like it was turning into the better part of a week, Richard figured he’d just keep his mouth shut.  “I think that the most effective course of action would be to head for those palm trees over there.  There can’t be trees without water, can there?”

“I wouldn’t think so…” Sylvia looked at Abbletrotkin who shrugged.

“My people are miners.  Boldarkin is the only one of us so obsessed with trees and plants.  But, I suspect you are right.  At any rate, the trees may provide some relief from the sun.”  He picked up Dylan, setting her on the donkey’s back over Sylvia’s protests.

Dylan grinned from her perch.  “What do you think is going to happen to me up here?  It’s not like the donkey is going to take off or anything.”

That sentence seemed to Sylvia to be tempting fate.  She grabbed for her sister – a moment too late.  Right on cue, the donkey bolted into a rapid, bone jarring trot into the horizon.

“Well, at least he’s heading the right way,” Richard said.  He took the hand of his shaking sister.  “Come on.  He’ll stop eventually.  Let’s go follow.”

Sylvia thought her body would shatter from the shaking.  As she spun to scream at Richard, she caught the eye of the gnome, and realized that her brother was right.  Of the terrifying things that had happened this week, a donkey trotting away with Dylan across a flat, empty desert ranked pretty low.  There were no trucks, no cliffs, and, as far as Sylvia could see, no wildlife or people of any sort.  She sighed; she was getting tired of freaking out constantly, and she didn’t at all care for the fact that, on this adventure, Richard was turning out to be the one who had it together.  “Ok, follow that donkey!”

They soon realized that donkey tracking was easy.  The desert was like a giant sand table; the tracks of Dylan’s donkey were the only feature for miles.  On the downside, the tracks of Dylan’s donkey were the only feature for miles.  There was literally nothing to see beyond each other’s faces and a world divided almost equally in half – completely blue sky, and completely beige ground.  After an hour in the blinding sun, Richard would have given his arm or leg, or at least a couple of toes, to see a tree, or a house, or even a good sized pebble.  The only things that kept him moving forward were the string of hoofprints, Sylvia’s glare between his shoulder blades, and the faint promise of trees at the distant seam between blue and beige.  Even the trees seemed like a cruel joke.  “Do you think it’s just a mirage?” he asked, sipping a bit of water from his container and trying not to think about the fact that it tasted a little like medieval goat.

“Do I think what’s a mirage?”  Sylvia barely looked up from the line of hoofmarks.  Her feet had not broken stride since they had set out after Dylan.  If she was hot, tired, or thirsty, it didn’t show.  Nothing showed except a robotic determination to find the donkey and their sister.

“The trees.  Are we just heading toward something that isn’t real?  I mean what if there’s no point?  What if desert is all there is?”

“The point is to find Dylan.  Even if the trees are just a mirage, the donkey went that way, so we go that way.  Richard,” Sylvia stopped, and cupped her hand under his chin.  “Whatever else is going on here, we stick together.  We need each other, and the only way to figure out how to get home is together.  I know you’re scared and hot and tired and bored.  So am I, but we don’t stop until we find our baby sister, ok?”

“It is not a mirage.”  Abbletrotkin’s voice sounded like glass being ground over gravel, but his step was firm, and he looked like he could walk forever.  “If we are, as I suspect, in the World of the Book, there are oases in this world.  You should know that as well.  You know the stories, do you not?  You knew of my kind, and of St. George, and the archangel Michael.”

“Which Book?”  An idea was slowly unfurling in Sylvia’s mind.

“I do not know its name in your world.  It holds many stories of the balance.  The tale of the cloak of the colors, the story of the one who turned back the sea, the man whose wife turned into mineral for her faithlessness.  There are more, but these I remember.”

“Lot’s wife!”  Richard jumped in place.  “And Moses!”

“And Joseph and the coat of many colors.”  Sylvia looked at Abbletrotkin.  “We call it the Old Testament of the Bible, but there are other names for it in our world, too.”  She stared at the line of donkey tracks and back at the gnome.  “So, you’re saying that we are in the world of the Old Testament stories?”

“It would appear so.”

The two children looked at each other. “Gnomes and elves in one world,” said Sylvia.

“St. George and the Dragon.”  Richard nodded.

“And now we’re in the Old Testament.  Do you get the feeling that we’re moving through the grades?  Each of these worlds is like something from Main Lessons.”

“Ok, but why?  Is this some sort of test that no one told us about?  I’ve never heard any of the kids talk about it, and besides if it’s a graduation test for you, what are Dylan and I doing here?”

“I don’t think so.”  Sylvia shook her head slowly.  “I mean it is a test, or a challenge or something, but not a school test.  I think we’re looking at it backwards.  I don’t think the worlds are based on school.  I think school was teaching us about the nine worlds.”  She looked at Abbletrotkin.  “That’s it, isn’t it?  Our school is some sort of training ground or something.  For what?  What are we supposed to do?  And why us?”  She grimaced.  “Yeah, I know, that’s the question the heroes always ask.  But, seriously, why us?  We aren’t heroes.  We’re three kids with a screwed up home, from a screwed up world, who can’t even get stuff from an old classroom without it blowing up.  That’s not heroic, that’s accident-prone.”

Abbletrotkin trudged ahead, leaving Sylvia and Richard staring at his back.  For a moment, it seemed as though he would refuse to answer.  Then, his voice floated back to them.  “You are correct about your school.  The Guardians have always known that the ultimate battle for the Balance would take place in your world, the world in which Ahriman is most likely to manifest, where he has the strongest hold.  Thus, it was determined that those who would provide the final defense of the Balance must also be of your world.  And so, a system of schools was begun with the purpose of training those who would restore the Balance.”

“Okay, but Sylvia’s right, why us?”  Richard stopped walking.  “Don’t tell me this is where you say ominously, ‘There have been others,’ and allude to the terrible fates of other schoolers.  Or, no, wait – you said something before about a Prophecy.  Let me guess, it said ‘Lo and a Bossy girl with black curls, a super-evolved but near-sighted boy, and an annoying brat with carrot-salad hair will restore the Balance, and you all thought of us.”

Sylvia punched her brother on the arm as Abbletrotkin answered seriously.  “No, I know of no others.  Any terrible fate must be your own.”

“Gee, that’s comforting,” Richard muttered.

“And, as for Prophecy.  Yes, the Prophecy exists, but insofar as I am aware, you are not mentioned.”

“Insofar as you are aware?  What does that mean?” Richard asked.

“The actual wording of the Prophecy was lost generations ago.  What little knowledge we Guardians possess of the text has been passed between the Guardians of the words over time.”

“Your time or ours?  Never mind.”  Richard disavowed his own question.  “The time thing still makes my brain hurt.  Ok, so some idiot in one of the time arcs put the Prophecy ‘in a safe place,’ and now it and the Balance are missing.  Nifty.”

“Ok, but if we’re not the heroes of the Prophecy, what are we doing here?  Why did the stupid cupboard eat us?  Why didn’t it suck up the right kids?”  Sylvia twisted her hair up into a knot.  Sweat trickled down the back of her neck, and the donkey footprints seemed to go on forever.  “But really, could the cupboard be in the wrong school or something?  I can’t see any of the kids saving the world, or worlds, or whatever.  I mean most of us are lucky if we remember our homework and lunches.  Some of my class can still barely tie their shoes.”

Richard nodded.  “Yeah, as schools go, we’re not really a heroic bunch.  I mean, Josh can throw a basketball ok, and Amanda in Sylvia’s class plays a mean violin, but as far as world-saving skills, not so much.”

Abbletrotkin turned to face them.  “What makes you think that there are designated heroes?”

They stared.  “There’s always a hero,” Richard said.  “That’s how the stories go.  The guy or girl or whatever with the special destiny has all of fate resting on his hands, or hers.  There’s always a chosen one.”

Sylvia nodded.

Abbletrotkin shook his head.  “No destiny.  No chosen one.  What we know of the Prophecy speaks of the loss of the Balance and the rise of Ahriman in your world.  Our stories allude to a human child, but the allusion is general.  The decision to create your schools was one of prudence rather than a bow to destiny.”

“But then why did we fall through the cupboard?  And why did all of our teachers send us to that room at the same time?  And why has Mom seemed so worried lately?  And why did Mr. Loupe appear in the room if it wasn’t something to do with us?”  Sylvia’s head felt like it was spinning, and the tracks in the sand began to blur.

“I cannot speak for your teachers or your mother.  From what you say, I presume that your Mr. Loupe is one of the Guardians of your world, and I can only guess that he was drawn by the energies surrounding the Balance.  He may have been as surprised to find you in that room as you, yourselves were.  As for your trip through the cupboard, you were simply the ones who were present when the cupboard opened.  Nothing more sinister nor more grand.”

Richard felt like a fish with his jaw flapping.  So, all this craziness had nothing to do with some pre-ordained Fate; they were simply the victims of bad luck?  His head felt a little woozy trying to process.  So, the fate of the universe could have rested in the hands of Larry in seventh grade or corkscrew-curled Emilia in Dylan’s class.  Wow!  He looked over at Sylvia to see how she was taking the news of their insignificance, and bolted to catch her as she turned white and fell.   “Abbletrotkin!  A little help here!”  He lowered his sister on to the sand.  Sylvia didn’t look it, but she was heavy!

The gnome knelt by Sylvia’s head.  “I believe that the heat is affecting your sister.”  He joggled Sylvia’s full waterskin and shook his head.  “We see this in the mines with new workers who wish to prove themselves to their elders.  They neglect their own care in their eagerness.  Your sister has not stopped to drink or to rest, and now her body pays the price.  We must stop here, and provide her shade and water.”

Richard touched Sylvia’s clammy forehead and looked at the endless trail that led Dylan away from them.  “We can’t stop.  Dylan’s just a little kid, and she’s out there all by herself.  What if something happens to her?”  He started to shake, suddenly understanding the pressures Sylvia felt every day.  He was responsible for his sisters, and he had no idea how he could take care of both of them.

“If your sister does not rest and cool her body, she will die.”  Abbletrotkin’s face twisted as though someone had punched him.  “I am concerned about Dylan as well.  The little one should not be alone, but I fear that we have little choice.  If we continue to seek her at this pace, Sylvia will not survive.  I have seen that as well in the mines.  The body can be pushed beyond endurance.  When that happens, the spirit leaves.”

Richard stared at the distant, shadowy trees that seemed no nearer despite the passing hours.  “Okay.  Well, I guess this fancy cape might make a decent tent.”  He dribbled some water into Sylvia’s mouth and soaked a strip of cotton from the pack, placing it on her forehead.

“Wet her wrists as well,” Abbletrotkin said as he fashioned a low canopy from the golden cloak.  “There should be enough room in the shade for the two of us as well, if we remain prone.”

Richard groaned as he crept under the cape.  “Good thing we aren’t foreordained heroes.”

Abbletrotkin looked at him in question.

“When Syl wakes up, she’s gonna kill me.”

 

 

I Have a Title!

You may call me “Supreme Graciousness, Empress of…” oh, wait, not that title.  I have a title for the NaNo WIP (that’s Work in Progress – see my grasp on all this writerly jargon?).  Ok, so that title is: The Nine World Balance: Sword of Michael.  As those in the know, know, the colon indicates a subtitle, hinting at the possibility of further volumes.  Subtle, eh?

Anyway, at the moment, my fevered imagination pictures this creation going beyond the 50,000 words and in fact beyond a normal middle-grade novel length.  That’s right, folks, I envision a trilogy.  Of course, I remain undaunted by the fact that said trilogy may well never be read by anyone other than my long-suffering family and in bits by the long-suffering readers of this blog.  Onward!  Working subtitles for the as-yet-non-existent-in-this-universe-but-well-received-in-the-Christy-verse volumes two and three are, respectively: The Fall of Lucifer, and Ahriman Rising.  (More on the origins of this wackiness in the next post.)

For now, enjoy a bit of Chapter 3.

“I have some puppets stored in the old Strings room, and there’s a puppet stage in there, too.  I thought that it would be nice to do a puppet play next week when we learned about The Seven Swans.  Can you help me move the things to our class room?”

“Sure!”  Dylan grinned and wiped her cheeks.  She liked fairy tales.  She didn’t care what Richard and Sylvia said, fairy tales were cool – with their magic and witches and gnomes!  Dylan really wanted to meet a gnome, but no matter how quiet she was, and how carefully she peeked around dark corners or behind bushes, she never even saw so much as the tip of a pointy hat.  But puppet plays were pretty cool, too, and she loved the old Strings room.  It was dark, and just a little spooky with a cool slanty floor that you could slide on if there weren’t any teachers around to catch you taking off your shoes, and there were neat shadows from the tree outside the window.  Sometimes, in the Strings room, Dylan almost thought that she heard the whispering of gnomes, and she might have seen the triangular shadow of a hat.

“All right, let’s head back to the class room, shall we?  Would you like to ring the bell?”

Ms. Joy was pretty cool, Dylan thought as she picked up the bell, feeling the smooth, cool weight of the metal against her palm.  The clapper clanged, calling her classmates to the room.  Dylan felt important as she watched them scramble into line.  ‘Serves them right,’ she thought.  Then she frowned again, wondering if the boys really did think she was too weird.  But, then Gabriel poked her as he walked past.

“Lucky!  How come you get to ring the bell?  And where were you at recess?  We got creamed by the second grade!”

“Tell you later.”  Dylan kept her mouth closed as she forced the whisper past her grinning teeth.

The afternoon, in the manner of all good times, flew where the morning had dragged reluctant feet.  Mr. Loupe came in to help them with art while Ms. Joy went to a meeting.

Dylan whistled softly, mimicking the red-winged blackbird on the trellis outside as she dipped her brush into the red paint.  She swooped the brush upward on the paper, bringing the streak of scarlet to a point.

“Nice work, Dylan.”  Mr. Loupe laid a hand on the corner of her desk.  “Is that a gnome hat I see?”

“Yep.”  Dylan nodded.  “He’s hiding behind these bushes.  But the watercolor’s all smeary, so you can’t really see it.  It just looks like one big smudge.”

“I can tell that he’s a gnome.  It’s hard to get a lot of detail in wet-on-wet watercoloring.  You’re using your colors well, though.  That’s good.  It’s important to pay attention to balance.”  His voice dropped.  “Remember that, Dylan.  Balance is the key.”

Dylan paused her hand and looked up at Mr. Loupe.  His voice had sounded funny, and his eyes weren’t crinkled at the edges.  But as she opened her mouth, he moved on to Lina’s desk.  “Nice work, Lina,” she heard him say.  A splodge of red dropped into the middle of the green mounds of shrubbery on her paper.  She quickly turned it into a flower, and added a few more.  Rosebushes were good.  As long as you didn’t grab a thorn. 

Dylan waited for Ms. Joy to finish shaking hands with the last kid in line, skinny little Armin Ring, before she walked over to the teacher.

“Oh, good, Dylan, I’m glad you could stay.  Now, do you mind running over to the old Strings room and bringing back the swan puppets?  Oh, and we’ll need a prince and princess, too.  And a witch.”  Ms. Joy looked at Dylan’s face.  “You aren’t scared, are you?  I know some kids think that room is a little spooky.”  She lifted Dylan’s chin a little.  “Are you brave, enough, Dylan?”

Dylan shook her face free and nodded.  “The old Strings room doesn’t scare me.  I like it!”

Shivers marched along Dylan’s spine as she pushed past the giant rosemary bush growing across the walkway to the old temporary building.  Since the new wing had been built, the rooms were mostly used for storage and the gardeners seemed to forget that the old building was back here, huddling like an old man under a brown overcoat.  A tiny spider dropped from the eves on an invisible thread and landed on her arm.  Dylan lifted the spider gently and set it on the rosemary.  “Let the creatures be,” her kindergarten teacher had always said, and Dylan couldn’t see why people smashed spiders.  Spiders were good: they built cool webs, and ate the bad bugs.  Sylvia said that spiderwebs displayed “geometric precision”.  Dylan wasn’t sure what that meant, but it seemed to be a good thing, too. 

The butterfly necklace felt cold under her shirt.  She rubbed her palm across her chest.  She never took off that necklace.  Not ever.  The door moaned as she pulled it open.

 

NaNoWriMo: Day 1

Day 1:

NaNoWriMo officially began at 12:01 am.  As predicted by my husband, I caved and went to bed last night by nine.  So, my novel writing month began this morning at 5:00.  Pretty good so far, I’m a little over a thousand words into my middle-grade fantasy novel.  The plot is starting to take shape (in my head at least) and I’m beginning to be able to “see” my characters.  Only 48,000+ words to go!

Here are a few paragraphs from page 1.  Let me know what you think: the good, the bad, AND the ugly!

Thundering feet trampled the grass into the damp earth.  Smoke billowed from the creature’s nostrils.  The villagers cowered, shoving their sacrifice toward the beast.  With her cloak fluttering in the autumn breeze, the princess strode forward into her doom.  The dragon swung its scaled head from side-to-side as though pondering which bit of the maiden to bite into first.  As the gathered crowd hushed, trembling, a figure strode forward, pushing between the villagers.  The sun pried apart the clouds and fell onto the knight’s golden cape.  His sword held aloft, George challenged the dragon, stepping between the beast and its prey as he invoked the name of St. Michael.

The assembled throngs cheered as the first drops of rain began to fall upon the furled wings of the giant lizard as it slunk back to its cave.  The crowd dissipated, teachers herding their classes back into the earthen buildings.  Richard sighed.  The sixth grade’s dragon had been decent, though he was sure that in two years, his class would create a monster that would render the villagers catatonic.  Richard liked the word catatonic; he liked the rhythm, the bounce of the syllables.  Sylvia mocked him for reading the dictionary, but he figured that if you’re smaller than everyone else in your class and you have floppy blond hair and round glasses, a big vocabulary couldn’t be a bad tool.  Besides, his way with words had landed him the part of St. George two years ago.  Sylvia was just jealous because she had been stuck in the middle of the dragon’s tale behind Billy Langdon and his body odor.

Richard sighed again.  To tell the truth, he kind of wished that Sylvia had been at the head of the dragon that year.  It would have been nice to beat his big sister at something, even if only symbolically.  Symbolically was another good word; he filed it away to use at dinner.  His parents were sure to want to talk about the Michaelmas pageant.  Mom and Dad were “schoolers” and were kind of rabid about their refusal to educate their children in the pods. They seemed to feel that the best way to make up for their lack of conformity was to go as far over the top in enthusiasm about their children’s schooling as possible.  Richard looked toward the ring of oaks that had formed the “stage”.  Yep, there was Mom, unclipping the silk cloths from the line.  He shook his head. Even a cheap holo, the kind you get at the grocery store, would have made a better backdrop than green and brown silks.  Who was going to buy squares of cloth as a village?  Richard enjoyed school okay, though he sometimes suspected there would be advantages to the pods – no chance of making a fool of himself in Games and imagine the amount of information he could get in a dump.  But, he thought sometimes that School took the “minimal reliance upon technology” thing a little too far.  Not only did it seem cheesy to use homemade scene settings when there were perfectly good holograms available, Richard worried that the school might get into trouble with the Party.

 

What Color is Your Dragon?

Once upon a time, a dragon menaced the countryside.  The villagers cowered within their homes as the creature devoured the livestock and trampled the fields.  Soon, the country lay in ruins; the king sued the dragon for peace, only to learn that the dragon required the sacrifice of the princess.  A young man named George was chosen to champion the people.  For his prayers and piety, he was granted a golden cloak and a sword of light by St. Michael and was given the courage to slay the dragon.

Michaelmas, the feast of the archangel Michael, falls on September 29.  Fallen into obscurity since the 18^th century, Michaelmas is still used to delineate the fall term in British universities – and it is celebrated with full force in the Waldorf schools.  This slightly nutty preoccupation with rather obscure traditions is a hallmark of Waldorf education, but like most of the Waldorf traditions, has a purpose in marking the rhythm of the year, and the development of the child.

Michaelmas takes place at the beginning of the school year, as the children are gathering themselves to face the dragons of new challenges: new curriculum, new friends, and new projects.  It also falls in autumn, and it is no coincidence that a sword of light is wielded against the destroyer of crops and livestock.  Winter is coming, the days grow short, and soon we will be swallowed by the dark and the cold.

Though all of the grades celebrate Michaelmas, learning songs and watching the pageant, it is no coincidence that the grades in which the celebration of light and courage fall to those ages experiencing greatest change.  The second graders are the villagers, the princess, and St. George.  As they face the dragons of a scary world in which they are no longer certain that they believe in fairy tales or the magic of omnipotent adults (known in Waldorf philosophy as the nine-year change), they are given the courage to defeat the dragon before the entire school.  The sixth grade are a fearsome monster.  The hunger and unpredictability of the reptilian world of adolescence surges onto their horizon, and it is fitting that they should work together in lockstep beneath one skin as they are defeated or tamed by innocence.

The kindergarten has its own, gentler, and in some ways more meaningful, Michaelmas.  Kindergarteners make swords.  In the two-year kindergarten program, the older children, those who will brave the world of the grades next year, forge their own ‘swords of light’.  During the week in which they hear and enact the story of St. George and the Dragon and learn songs and verses extolling the virtues of right and bravery, all of the children dye their own golden cloaks and the second-years rasp, sand, polish, and paint their wooden swords.  These swords are stamped “by the blacksmith” with the symbol of each child, and are not seen as toys.  The children will wield their weapons against the dragons of imagination, but they leave school on Michaelmas-day announcing that their swords are to be used “only for the right./ Not for some silly quarrel or fight.”

Standing by the straw-mulched vegetable garden in Sierra’s kindergarten yard, holding my big girl’s hand, I was taken aback to realize that she, and several of her second-year friends, were struck with attacks of clinging insecurity just as they were to receive their golden capes.  As the teacher drew closer to our place on the ring, Sierra wrapped her arms tighter about my leg, her lip trembled, and she whispered, “I want Daddy.”  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong; Mike isn’t gone, away, or lost.  He was simply at work.  Sierra loves her teacher, and she had been babbling all week about her cape and sword.  Then, as I pondered my own dragons, it clicked.  Accepting the symbols of courage, binding oneself to the task of slaying the dragon is often harder than the act of facing the beast, itself.  And, I understood why the older children would receive their swords later, once the parents had left.  It is almost impossible to draw upon one’s own courage when given a hand, or a leg, to hold.

The dragons have been hungry in our countryside this year.  In the past twelve months, we have battled the dragons of disease, death, financial-difficulty, foreclosure, and injury.  My personal dragons generally have blanks to fill and official seals.  I have a deep-seated fear of authority which manifests as a complete inability to cope with officialdom.  I cower inside my hut of procrastination.  Earlier this spring, I received a fix-it ticket for expired tags on our pickup.  Did I mention that it has been a bad year?  We put the new tags on, and I promptly forgot about the ticket, and forgot to get it signed off.

Last week, the week of Michaelmas, the dragon knocked on our door.  I received a letter, forwarded from our old address, from the Superior Court of Sacramento.  Inside was notice that a warrant had been filed for my arrest.  I never even got detention in school!  The panic attack was immediate and violent – tears, hysteria, sobbing that we needed to just pay the $600 fine because going into court was not an option.  “I can’t go there!  I just can’t.”  As my children crawled, bewildered, into my lap, I realized the horrible example I was setting.  How can I ask them to brave their own monsters while I bar the door against my own?

The morning after I left my sobbing daughter in her golden cape clinging to her teacher’s hand, I walked into the courthouse and secured an appointment to appear in court.  I emerged uneaten, and by pickup time that afternoon, Sierra sang, swung her sword and swirled her cape with all her might.  My court date is today, and though Mike offered to come with me, I know that I must face this alone. I wonder if Sierra will let me borrow her cape.

What do your dragons look like?

Smoke, Fire, and Change

Scent ties to memory.  The campfire smoke will wash from my hair in another shower or two.  The memories will linger, blending with the smoke of other campfires, other marshmallows, other children’s voices, other tents rustling and pulsing with barely contained energy.  The smoke will fade; the memories will remain, tied with thousands of others to that smell.

Where there is smoke, there is fire.  Cliché, fine.  And mostly true, but fire exists without smoke.  Fire burns, but it also melts, cracks, ignites, and metamorphoses.  In the sixth grade in the Waldorf curriculum, our children study geology.  As the fires of change burn and erupt within them, they discover the shaping of the earth through fire.  For Waldorf schools in Northern California, this means a field trip to Mt. Lassen.  There were classes from one other Waldorf school and one Waldorf-inspired charter school besides ours on the mountain this week.

I wasn’t supposed to chaperone this trip.  I should have been working, set in my routine.  But, this has been a period of shifting for me as well.  Our move, the crack in my metacarpal bone -- the plates of our lives have jolted, reshaping the routine.  I was the working mother, the one who never had kids over for playdates, who never volunteered in the classroom, who rarely went on field trips.  My involvement with school came in bursts, projects that could be taken home, completed in my isolated schedule.  That has changed this fall.  This morning I looked at my husband.  “When was the last weekday that we had all of our children and no one else’s?”  “Monday.”  “No, last Wednesday.” “No. Wait.  That was the day we had…”  We finally realized that the answer was, ‘before school started.’  Years ago, when Caitlin was a baby, I attempted stay-at-home-motherhood.  I failed.  Trapped, bored, depressed, I felt completely inadequate – a failure.  But, the fires burn, the plates shift, the crust cracks.

This time around, things have changed.   I am surrounded by people living similar lives.  My children and their peers have progressed to stages of creativity, eloquence, and curiosity, making them entertaining companions.  And, admittedly, I have the luxury of knowing that my hand will heal, and that this phase of my life will pass into memory.

Though each of these moments with my kids – playdates, haircuts, watching small legs pumping the swing slung from the tree in the front yard – has meaning, the memories of this recent foray into the woods will linger long.  The sixth grade is, and always has been, a special class.  Even within a school of high-energy, bright children, these kids are well-known (notorious?).  I have heard them called a “challenging” class, with the tinge to the word that suggests an adversity in the challenge.  Challenging?  You bet.  Like the mountains in which we spent the last 48 hours, they are volatile, rugged, beautiful, and dangerous to take for granted.  And well worth the effort to explore.  This is a class of leaders; few in this group are docile, few are complacent, and few take anything at face value.

But this is more than a class.  Perhaps it is a result of the small class size, maybe it stems from their active and activity-based curriculum, or maybe it is just their nature, but these kids are family.  Even now, as the hormones begin to surge beneath the crust of childhood, my daughter and her classmates interact almost more as siblings than as friends.  The bonds, the rivalries, the name-calling, and the support against the outside all have the taint and glow of family.  Though the faces have shifted in the years that this group has been together, it is difficult in this class to tell the biologic siblings from the scholastic ones.

And yet, the dynamic is changing.  The make-believe games of a few years ago have shifted into “Truth or Dare” and “Would You Rather.”  On the second night of the trip, the dire phrase “spin the bottle” emanated from one of the larger tents.  (Further investigation revealed that the proposed game was “hug spin-the-bottle” because “the real kind is just gross.”)  Throughout the trip, the other chaperones and I watched these kids surge between childhood and adolescence – debating the merits of explicit vs. non-explicit downloads from iTunes one moment and finagling marshmallows for breakfast the next.  (If your child claims to have roasted marshmallows in the morning, it is a vicious lie; no responsible chaperones would permit that sort of thing!)  They are old enough to sleep in tents without an adult and young enough to need reminding to use the bathroom.  They set up tents with minimal supervision, yet can’t remember to wear shoes around the campsite.  They can hike up a steep trail of cinder and ash, but some are still confused about making (and packing!) their own sandwiches.  They are young enough to brave the frigid waters of a mountain lake, but old enough to panic at the scritch of a tent zipper while changing clothes.

Though many in this class have been together for years, this is their first year with this teacher.  Although the standard practice in Waldorf schools is for the teacher to matriculate through the grades with the children, through varying flukes of coincidence, this class has never been with the same teacher for more than two years.  Mike and I tease Caitlin that Voldemort wanted to teach her class, and so there is a curse.  It is a natural fit, though, for them to have a new teacher as they move into adolescence.  With this new expansion and turbulence of their minds and bodies, it is fitting, I think, for them to have a new guide, and one who can combine a love of the arts with the strong background in science that they need in order to make sense out of this chaotic world as they shuffle toward the edge of adulthood.  In their classroom prep for the Mt. Lassen trip, the kids learned the science behind the forces of magma beneath our feet, and then they created their own myths to explain the Pacific Ring of Fire.  From donuts to a god named Tim, we were treated to skits based on these myths on our first night camping near the base of a volcano.  There were no lectures while at the park.  We visited a museum and interpretive signs along the trails were pointed out, but the only school work was a daily entry into their “field journals.”  Geology will continue in the classroom, and the kids will bring to their studies the memories of their experiences – the smell of sulfur from the vents of Bumpass Hell, the crunch of the trail up Cinder Cone, and the smoke of the campfire.

Syncope

In music, syncope is a break in the rhythm, discordant notes that interrupt the monotony and provide interest or surprise.  These notes or phrases are musical non-sequiters.  Syncopation creates the underpinnings of musical forms such as jazz or rock.  In the right proportions, syncopation renders a musical composition more pleasing; it adds depth and emotion.  In excess, syncopation creates cacophony.  Ours has been a syncopated summer.

In the kids’ Waldorf schooling, we learn of the rhythms inherent to life: the rhythm of the day, of the seasons, of the year, of the growth of a child, animal, or plant.  As I’ve written before, we come to miss the consciousness of this rhythm during the summer.  At the beginning of summer, the break from structure is a rhythmic exhalation of its own – the release from schedule gives the sense of promise and possibility, the sense that anything can happen.  This sense is exhilarating at first – watch the kids on the playground in the last week of school, the energy and excitement that bursts from them.  However, like all freedoms, the freedom of summer soon overwhelms with unknowns.  How soon do your children begin to ask, “What are we going to do this summer?  Where are we going?”

This has been the summer of the great unknown.  Our rhythm, while seemingly chaotic, has possessed for years a monotony all its own.  Summer has been no exception: mom and dad work specific days; the kids attend camps, visit grandparents, watch too much TV, and complain about being bored.  Somewhere in August, we eke out a family road trip.

No summer camps.

Our older children decided that they really didn’t want to attend camp, to face a routine different from school, to build relationships with strangers, this year.  Perhaps sensing the oncoming storm, this May they were in hunker-down mode.  Even Aidan the outgoing and Caitlin the adventurous sought comfort in the familiar, the known.  Our bank account thanked them.  Though, as we face a more extreme end-of-summer-TV-detox than usual (thanks, Grandma!), I can’t help wondering if I should have pushed.

Bye-bye home.

In the last weeks of June, we received notice that the inevitable had come to pass.  Our home was foreclosed upon, and we spent from June through July searching for a rental.  Today is Monday, we move on Wednesday.  As of right now, we are officially squatters in the only home our children have ever known.

The sensible question to ask here, and the one, oddly, that no one has asked (at least not to our faces) is, “If you knew that you were in danger of losing your home, why are your kids in private school?”  Perhaps other people have simply been too kind, but rest assured, we have asked ourselves this question.  I think the answer lies in the meaning of home.  For many years, our home has been a house, a shelter, but despite our best efforts, not really a place of rest, solace, or community.  It is an old house, isolated, and requiring more maintenance, improvement, and care than we have time, energy, or money.  Every weed that springs through the gravel, every mouse that scurries across the counter reminds us of our failures.  Pulling into the driveway has been like pulling up to a giant billboard painted with the words, “YOU CAN’T DO THIS.”  On the other hand, Davis Waldorf School has provided our children, and by extension us, with the opportunity to say, “I can do this.  I can climb a tree, plant a garden, knit a hat, play an instrument, carve a pumpkin, and tie my shoes.  I can interact with other parents.  I can arrange playdates.  I can decorate for an auction.  I can participate in the school board.” As the responses to my pathetic ‘can anyone help us move’ e-mail have flooded in, I see how bleak our lives would have been if we had made the practical choice of moving the kids to the local school and trying to save the house.  The trauma for the children would have been greater, removing them from friends and a rhythm they call home to a vast unknown, and we may still have lost the house.  Regardless, our melody would have shifted to a dirge.  The comment made by almost all of our friends has been, “we’re so sorry for your situation, but we are so glad you are going to be close to us.”  Physical distance is real; ask anyone who has ever tried to maintain a long-distance relationship.  Proximity matters.  By moving to Davis, we are moving closer to the core of our lives.  We are gaining proximity to our friends and to ourselves.  We are going home.

Pop goes the hand!

My personal rhythm cracked this summer along with my fifth metacarpal on my left hand.  Lifting a horse’s hind leg in a maneuver performed thousands of times, I struggled with my reluctant patient, and my little finger was yanked sideways.  As two working hands are something of a requirement for a large animal veterinarian, I have been off work since mid-July.  I define my rhythm and myself through my work – the inevitable result of a life spent meeting goals and checking off boxes.  This summer I have learned to re-define success.  I miss my clients, my patients, and my co-workers, and I wonder what I have lost by being away.  I also wonder, a bit, if my nerve will suffer at all from this event.  Will I cringe the first time a horse moves suddenly?  Will I be less willing to take the chances that are a daily part of my job?  Working with horses is like flying a plane, doing surgery, or even driving a car – self-doubt is not an asset.

The greatest personal jolt this summer has been a positive one, and has come about through my writing.  (Ha!  You expected a cute little one-liner to break up the paragraphs there, didn’t you?  Wouldn’t be syncope if it was too predictable.)  I have spent the past year writing for this blog and for Blogcritics.org, and submitting pieces to web and print literary magazines.   And, collecting rejection letters for these same pieces.  When the final notices on the foreclosure were posted (yes, on our door), I told my husband, “I have to write about this.  It’s the only way I can deal with it.”  I wrote an essay and submitted it to a couple of publications.  To my shock, it was accepted – by Salon.com.  The publication of this essay in Salon led to a series for The Folsom Telegraph, and a couple of other writing opportunities have begun to poke their heads out of holes.

We move in two days.  School begins in just over a week.  Our lives will shift back into a breathing rhythm, but I hope, and I will work to ensure, that this rhythm is one of live, active breaths, not the snoring of a monotonous slumber.  I have learned to appreciate the value of the gasp, the interest of syncope.

Caitlin's Tree

It was her first friend at the new school.  Caitlin switched schools between first and second grade. 

Wait, that’s not quite accurate.  We yanked our oldest daughter from the ground of her elementary school, tore her from the soil into which she had been spreading roots over two years, and transplanted her to a new, and very different environment.  And we did it the day before she was to start second grade.  This was not a democratic parenting moment.  Our reasons for the school change were complicated, and due in no small part to our perception of inflexibility on the part of the administration of her previous school.  But, that’s no longer important; the old environment just wasn’t a good fit for Caitlin.  She drooped and faded, her attention was poor, and we spent a lot of time hearing “I don’t want to go to school.”  So, we decided to move her to sunnier ground.

At the time, our choice was not well-received by our little sapling.  She had friends, she knew the routine, she even liked her uniform. 

“But, you’ll get to do art all the time in the new school.”

“I can do art now.”

“Not like this; you really like art.”

“I’ll just do art at home.”

“There’s music.”

“I don’t like music.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I won’t like it there.” [To be fair, to this day, cello practice has been likened to POW torture, so she may have had a minor point.]

“You can climb trees!” Yes, this was my trump card.  Since we were dressing for an interview with her new teacher, I needed to hit Caitlin with everything I had.

“Trees?”  The dark cloud lightened by three degrees.

“Yeah, they let you climb them at recess.”

She found it when we stepped hand-in-clutching-hand from the car and walked across the play-yard lawn.  Yes, lawn.  The mulberry had a trunk that leant just enough distance between ground and lowest branch to give a challenge and was knobbly enough for footholds.  The branches fanned into multiple cradling V’s.  Caitlin looked at me.  “Go ahead; climb it.”

“I’ll get in trouble.”

“No, they want you to climb them.”

She touched the trunk, her small palm feeling the edges of the knots, a private handshake.  They hugged, and up she went.

Sixth grade waits for Caitlin this fall.  She’s grown into the ground of Davis Waldorf School, stretching her branches out through the school.  She’s the veteran now; she’s initiated two siblings into the mysteries of “Sissy’s school.”  We no longer hear “I don’t want to go to school, and she’s talking about continuing on to Sacramento Waldorf for high school.  She’s grown faster than her tree and made other friends.

And yet…

The winds shift.  Adolescence rushes our way.  Caitlin’s closest (human) friend has just embarked upon a journey of her own as she moves with her family to New York.  The tectonic shifts of puberty are shaking the social dynamic among the girls of her class.  A new teacher will guide the class through junior high.  And the tree…

Caitlin spends many of her free hours at school climbing trees or reading, or by preference, reading in a tree – in her tree.  You can find her there, face hidden by a book, screened by the veil of leaves.  Well, you could.  The school is undergoing its own growth this summer; construction begins soon on a much-needed administration building, and new kindergarten rooms.  Some of the trees are necessary sacrifices to the expansion.  Caitlin’s tree sits smack in the middle of the new building.

She said her goodbyes at the end of the school year, raising an eyebrow from her perch in the branches at my suggestion of a “Butterfly”—style tree-in protest.  No radical idealist, my daughter has a pragmatic mind.  However, we received some hopeful news this week.  The tree may yet be reprieved.  One tree was selected for an attempted transplant.  Caitlin’s tree.  If it survives the move, her tree will sit in the amphitheatre formed by the junior high classrooms; it too will move on to sixth grade.  Nothing is certain, but when we told Caitlin that her friend had a chance, a couple of quiet dimples replied.