Guess who emailed me tonight?

Lori!

Oh, the mighty power of the blog!

She was singing a jaunty little tune in the shower when I told her that she needed to hurry.  She slid opened the shower door and said, “Why?”

“Well,” I said, “Today you’re going to to the doctor for your kindergarten check-up.”

Water droplets dripped from her hair.  She smiled a tiny smile, said, “Oh!” and slid the door closed.

A moment later she popped her head out to ask, “Am I going to get shots?”

She accepted her fate without tears, but a lot of talk.  I thought that my 15-year old son was the chattiest person ever, but she ranks right up with the most verbose of them all.  I told her only twenty minutes before we had to leave, which cut down on some of the angst, but she informed me that she did not want to get shots and “why do I have to get shots?”

I told her that the shots were keep her from getting some bad diseases.  Like what, she wanted to know.  Like polio and mumps.  “And chicken pox?” she said.

Well, no, because I opted out of chicken pox immunizations.  But let’s not quibble over the finer points of vaccination exemptions.

She looked so cute in her pink-polka-dotted tank top and blue jean shorts.  She brought along a stuffed animal, “A leopard?” I said and she said, “No, it’s a tiger.”  But it really was a snow leopard no matter what she thinks.

At last we were ushered back to the doctor’s office.  She regarded the scale with some distrust, but stepped up.  Almost fifty pounds.  She’s in the seventy-fifth percentile for her height and her weight.  Perfectly proportioned, the doctor said.

She climbed onto the examination table with its covering of crinkly paper.  She answered the nurse’s questions and asked  an endless stream of her own questions.  I could tell she was just waiting for the shots, ready to get them over with.  So I explained that the shots would be last.  The nurse did her thing, the doctor came in and did her thing.  Oh, the nurse asked, “Do you smoke, Grace?” and Grace looked at her in silence.  Then she smiled, like it was a joke.  I guess they have to ask that question of all patients.  They also must ask, “Does anything hurt?” and I thought maybe Grace would mention that her toes are sore from dragging along the bottom of the baby pool.  But she did not.

Finally, after all the preliminaries and a long stretch of waiting while we listened to a baby crying in another room, the nurses returned with three shots.  I held Grace on my lap, facing me, and the nurse swabbed her arm, then inserted the needle.  Grace didn’t make a sound.  Then the second shot on the second arm.  Still, no response.  Then the last shot, which the nurse mouthed, “This will sting.  Hold her firmly.”  So, I did and after that, Grace cried.

I held her close and said, “It’s over.  You can cry as much as you need to.”  And so she did cry a little.

We followed up that milestone (kindergarten shots!) with an early lunch at iHop (we never eat there and the service was terrible so we probably never will again).  Then to GameStop to search for very old video games to go with the very old Nintendo Entertainment System we got at a garage sale.  Then to Target to buy a toy since Grace was so brave.  We returned home three minutes before I started working at 1 p.m.

Throughout the rest of the day, she commented about the diseases she will not get:  “Molio, and what else again?” she said.  “Polio,” I said, “and mumps and measles and the coughing disease.”  We will speak endlessly of diseases for the next few days, I’m sure.

* * *

Grace amazes us.  She dove off the diving board tonight head-first, a regular dive.  She can also swim underwater from one side of the pool to the other (the short side).  She’s turning into such a social creature, which is stunning considering how clingy and shy she was for her first three or four years of life.  Now, she chats with anyone she deigns worthy of her attention.  (And not everyone is.)

[Add your own brilliant concluding sentence here to tie up this blog post in a witty and entertaining manner.] 

I’m glad you asked.

It’s like this: I’m the Sherpa and my teenaged boys are the ill-prepared tourists with a dream of climbing Mt. Everest. I’m dragging them along, roped to them, and they are dead weight. And I’m trudging up, bearing their unwieldy bulk, pulling them up vertical slopes but not because they care anymore. Oh, no. I’m doing it because I care, because I am determined to get them to the summit. I’m doing it because it’s my job. They gasp for air, they stumble along and I strain to get us all up, up, up to the top. We will not give up.

And when we reach the top? I’m thinking about pushing them over the precipice and parachuting 24,000 feet to the valley below, free at last.

Okay, not that last part. But the Sherpa part? That is what homeschooling reluctant students in June is like. Grueling. Thankless. And almost over. Two finals stand between us and freedom.

The past few days have been grueling.  The twins are finishing their freshman year of high school through a virtual academy and all their assignments had to be turned in by Friday at midnight.  (Hello, overdue Research Report and math unit featuring polynomials, whom I haven’t really seen since high school.)  But, oh wait, I work, too!  On Thursday, I worked eleven hours and on Friday, I worked nine, ending my shift at 9 p.m.  We did math before I worked and after, ending the day with a long session of rewriting research reports.
The good news is that we are only three finals away from freedom.  And next year, we are going to be independent homeschoolers, no longer affiliated with the virtual academy we’ve used for the past four years.

My ten year old is done with school.

My five year old can’t wait until school starts.  Kindergarten beckons.

This morning, we slept in, as much as is possible with a five year old who is eager to greet each day.  She didn’t start bugging us until 8:00 a.m., however, and we managed to stay semi-conscious until 9:30 a.m.  I promised to take her garage sale-ing today and my husband joined us–the 5-year old, 10-year old and me.  (One teenager was still sleeping and the other had spent the night at a friend’s house and was not home yet.)

We only hit two garage sales due to our late start.  At the first, my son found a 23 year old Nintendo system, complete with four games.  The woman guaranteed him that it would work and gave him a price break:  only $5.  The woman and man had lovely lilting accents–I thought Scottish, maybe, but when the man gave me change, he commented that the money was so different here, all the same size and color–and I said, “Oh, have you recently moved?” and he said, “No, I’m here on holiday visiting my daughter.  She’s moving to California.”  Meanwhile, he is counting out dollars and I’m studying him and notice tuffs of hair in his ears and cat hair woven into his navy blue cardigan sweater.

At the next garage sale, my daughter looked through several dozen stuffed animals.  The woman at that sale pointed out a puppy in the “free” box with a broken leg, but she explained that it would flip over if you turned on the switch.  And then she pulled out an identical puppy, only without broken legs, a well-worn puppy with matted fur and a bald spot near its tail.  She extolled its virtues, told us that this puppy would walk and flip over.  She demonstrated this, but with the switch turned on, the puppy merely clicked and shimmied.

“Oh, weak batteries,” she said.  “But you can buy batteries at the Dollar Store.”

My daughter was sold.  I was skeptical.  This puppy was $2.00, which is a fortune in garage sale terms.  I said, “Would you take a dollar?”  And she said, “Well . . . it’s not overpriced.  It’s a really nice toy.  But, well . . . ”  And I said, “How about a dollar fifty?”

Which was about a dollar forty-five more than it was worth.  However, my daughter wanted it.  And I am a push-over.

At home, I put in new batteries and the puppy did nothing more than it did on that woman’s driveway.  It clicked and swayed, but did not walk nor flip.  I checked the bottom of that puppy and noted its date:  1985.

So, today, we bought toys from 1985:  Nintendo and a worn-out battery-operated puppy.  The Nintendo actually worked, however.  My son couldn’t wait to play the original Zelda game.

Later in the day, my husband took our son to a baseball end-of-the-year pizza party and I took our daughter to the pool where I finished reading The Same Sweet Girls.   I loved that book!  I have already passed it along to a friend who showed up at the pool.  My daughter swam for three hours, pausing long enough to eat a bag of M&Ms.

Tomorrow’s Father’s Day.  I have failed to prepare anything spectacular for Father’s Day.  I exhausted my efforts and creativity at Valentine’s Day (I bought him an iPhone) and managed only to purchase a box of Hot Tamales candies for him.  We’re going to spend the afternoon at the pool.  The sun is forecasted to shine and so we here in the Pacific Northwest canNOT believe our good fortune after several weeks of cold rain.

Of course, it will only be seventy degrees, so I’ll still be wearing a sweater at the pool, but it will be love nonetheless.

(Oh, and I filled the van with gas:  17 gallons, $73.  This is insanity.)

My husband’s forty-seventh birthday was today. We went to dinner and a movie. And my daughter wrapped him gifts: one purchased and three regifted from her room. (She chose a children’s Bible, a football and I can’t remember the last.) She likes to wrap gifts and uses the big scissors and wrapping paper and a roll of tape for each gift-wrapping session. Really, a whole roll of tape. I love her enthusiasm.

What’s weird about getting older and being married to someone who is also getting older is . . . well, getting older. My dad died three weeks after he turned forty-seven. My husband just turned forty-seven. It’s just so weird that my dad died when he was so young . . . and so weird that my husband is now the age that my dad was when he died. My dad seemed so . . . grown-up and dad-like when he was 47, so many miles and miles and miles ahead of us.

And now we’re there, sort of.  We’re getting old.  At least my husband is:  I’m four years younger than him.
Anyway, I am so glad my husband was born, so glad I married him almost 21 years ago and so glad that he’s not going to die in three weeks.

I tried to skip church this morning but my 5-year old would not hear of it. “How about if we go to church first and then the movie?” she asked. So that’s what we did.

I did leave the slumbering teenagers at home, which saved some aggravation until we returned home, ready to pick them up for the movie and found one 15-year old boy unshowered (and refusing to admit it until pressed on the issue). I insisted he shower and we arrived in our movie seats after the previews had started.

The movie (Kung Fu Panda) was entertaining enough, but of course, OF COURSE, there was a small child sitting directly behind me asking non-stop questions of her daddy throughout the whole show. “Daddy, why is he sad?” “Daddy, why doesn’t he want noodles?” “Daddy, what’s his name?” And Daddy answered her in a normal talking voice through every single scene of the whole movie.

Hey, Daddy, how about saying “shhhhh!” and how about warning your child, “In movie theaters, we must be quiet.” And how about not taking your child to the movies if your child is not able to sit quietly and watch without TALKING TALKING TALKING during the entire movie? Huh? How about that, Daddy?

A-hem. (And, sure, I expect kids to make noise during movies, but this was extreme. This child talked without stopping during the entire movie. EVERY SCENE, EVERY CHARACTER. I could hardly hear the dialogue. My own five year old turned around to see who was doing all that talking.)

When we returned home, I set about working with my teenagers on their research reports. I cannot adequately describe the agony of that task. So I will not.

After two hours, I took my daughter to swim. The temperature had warmed up to almost sixty degrees. Brrr. I am now reading The Same Sweet Girls. In fact, I stayed up much too late last night reading. Much.

Upon our return home (after her bedtime!), I exercised. I’m keeping a commitment to myself to exercise every day in June. (See the other blog for more gory details.) After that, I ran to the store to buy birthday cards (my husband turns 47 tomorrow) and a white shirt for my 10-year old’s school project. They are doing something with those shirts tomorrow, so I had to go out tonight.

And thus ends another exciting day. My husband was gone overnight on a retreat, so we now launch into another week having hardly seen each other this weekend. And it will be a doozy, too, with baseball play-offs, birthday parties and the baseball pizza party.

Then the school year is over. And I am happy to report that I did not stab anyone with a pencil, though at times, the temptation was almost irresistible. (Bet you haven’t heard a homeschooling mother admit that before!)

I love that my kids’ ages are multiples of five. I have a great fondness for multiples of five. As you know, I prefer to get up when the clock shows a multiple of five. So, if, for instance, I wake up and it’s 7:03, I will go back to sleep until 7:05. And if I should miss 7:05, I will stay in bed until 7:10. This makes sense to me. It has also made me late from time to time.

I thought today how great it would have been if we (our whole family) could have all been multiples of five at the same time, but that would have required a great deal of planning and my uterus was exquisitely uncooperative when it came to family planning. It’s something of a miracle that we have children at all, nevermind the fun fact that their ages so pleasingly share a common denominator.

It is tricky, though, because they are such divergent ages. Tonight, my husband dropped the 15-year old twins off at youth group and took the five year to swim at the pool. Speaking of the pool, I find it very amusing that I consider a fleece jacket an essential item for my pool bag. That says everything that needs to be said about our climate here in the Pacific Northwest. My daughter doesn’t care at all about the air temperature (55 degrees) because the pool is warm. Plus, she’s a fish. What do fish care about weather when they can swim?

I took my 10-year old to school for the Arts Gala. His class performed a sitting hula dance. They sang, they entertained. My son held a decorative class-made rainbow during the performance. He was also featured quite a bit in the video presentation introducing their performance. He is a boy who needs an audience.

I finished reading The Atonement today. I really enjoyed it. As it turns out, the novel and the movie mirror one another quite closely. I only wish I’d read the novel before I saw the movie. Doing so always enhances the movie-going experience.

Only a couple more weeks of school. Time skedaddles from one season to the next like a dragonfly in a hurry.

Summer 2002:

I spend the summer sitting in the shade, watching four year old Zachary somersault under water, swimming like a porpoise every afternoon. I hold a novel in one hand, a bottle of water in the other. I might look inactive, but I am busy growing a human being. On Labor Day, the last day the pool is open, I send my husband with the boys to swim. I tell him that I just need to rest a little and then I’ll join them. Instead, I go into labor, call the midwife and two hours later, give birth to a baby girl in a rented birthing tub in the privacy of my bedroom.

Summer 2003:

My baby girl hates the water. I purchase one of those complicated baby floating devices, dress her in a cute swimsuit with flouncy skirt. I wrangle her into the float and she is screaming before her toes even touch the water. She hates the pool. Every time I dip her into the pool, she screams her hatred of all things wet. (In contrast, a baby boy six weeks younger floats placidly in the middle of the pool, bobbing along.) By the end of the summer, I spend my time at the pool crouched over, holding her hands so she can practice walking her around the concrete. She still rebuffs my attempts to introduce her to the joys of the water.

Summer 2004:

She’ll be two soon. This is the summer she goes into the pool–as long as I am also in the pool with her. I spend a lot of time sitting in the baby pool, water at shoulder level. She clings to me, my own personal koala baby. One day, I’m in the pool while my husband sits on the side visiting with invited guests. Their two year old is also in the pool, but he loved the water and was unafraid. Meanwhile, I had to be in the pool with my cautious daughter. Suddenly, the boy’s mom called his name. His father splashed into the pool and scooped up their son who had been floating face down, only feet from me. (Yeah, way to let the kid drown without even noticing, Mel!) All the same, I had a moment of smug self-satisfaction–that was exactly why I was in the pool within arm’s reach of my daughter. A bit later, my daughter plunged like a rock underwater as I watched, only inches away. She screams, sputters.

Summer 2005:

She’ll be three at the end of the summer. She likes the pool, but it takes her a few weeks to warm up to the idea of getting in. She spends the summer cringing when other kids splash, turning her face away. She likes to sit on the steps of the big pool and likes for me to get in with her, but most of the time, she is content to play in the wading pool. Sometimes she begs to go come to the pool, then is ready to leave after twenty minutes. I don’t have to get in anymore, much to my relief. By the end of the summer, she finally dips her face into the water and shocking us all, plunges under the surface of the water completely.

Summer 2006:

She’s three and three-quarters. She picks up this summer where she left off the summer before. She occasionally dips her face into water–while pinching closed her nose–and she doesn’t mind the splashing so much. She’s become a big fan of the pool. At the end of summer, she’s experimenting with kicking and swimming.

Summer 2007:

She’ll be five by the end of the summer. She teaches herself to swim at the beginning of summer and learns to hold her breath so she no longer has to hold her nose. She becomes obsessed with the diving board and wants to jump but she is too afraid. She walks to the very end of the board, wearing a life jacket, peers over the edge and can’t quite get up the nerve. After several weeks of this, near the end of summer, she finally jumps. Her life jacket helps her bob right back up and she is hooked. From this moment on, she jumps off the diving board with great glee.

Summer 2008:

She’s five now, but will turn six at the end of the summer. Since the pool closed last September, she’s been asking when it would open again. A week after it opens, she insists she is ready to take the swim test: a swim down the length of the pool, then thirty seconds of treading water. (“Shredding water,” she calls it.) And so, yesterday, that’s what she did. She and her long-time buddy, a fellow five-and-a-half-year-old) both took and passed the swim test.

Now, my baby girl is a swimming fool. She swam for four straight hours today and tonight, when I said, “You look tired,” she didn’t disagree as she usually does. She loves to do various dives off the board.

And I sit in the shade, looking up from my novel occasionally, thankful that I am not seven months pregnant.

 

My husband dropped off a carload of boys. They appeared noisily in the backyard. I heard them before I saw them, as usual.

Then the phone rang. “Hey, I just dropped off the boys. You need to check on your boy. He wasn’t chosen for the talent show and he cried the whole way home.”

I peered out the kitchen window after I hung up the phone. Sure enough, my boy stood alone by the tire swing, clutching the chain with both hands, leaning his cheek on the metal links.

The other kids had all come bounding inside and were upstairs starting a video game. (“I call the green controller!”) I slid open the door and walked to my boy, this ten year old child with a broken heart.

“Hey, are you okay?”

“No.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I rubbed his back.

He turned a tear-stained face to me and said, “It’s just that when something really disappointing happens and everyone keeps talking about it that makes it so much worse!” His friends had tried to console him on the ten minute ride home and their very acts of boyish kindness turned my son into a sobbing mess.

I hugged him, told him I was sorry and that lots of times I wasn’t chosen for things either and that I knew how upsetting it was. “Do you want to stay out here for awhile?” Yes, he did.

The next time I glanced out the window, he was lying on his stomach on the tire swing, swaying slightly, weeping.

When I looked again, he was prone under the tire swing, chin propped on his hands, still crying.

A bit later, he’d rotated onto his back in the sandy playground mulch, still under the tire swing. His fleece jackets picked up bits of woody mulch. Now he not only looked sad, he also looked like he lived in the wilderness with Survivorman.

I thought wallowing in his sorrow was understandable and I’m all for feeling one’s feelings. However, after an hour of snotty distress, I suggested a bath. What better place to finish crying, right? He agreed and stood to his feet, so I brushed off the mulch from his front and back. I pushed his sweaty hair back from his reddened face and noted the snotty dirt clinging to the tip of his nose.

And so, while bathing, he finished mourning his lost dream of making his whole school laugh. When he finally appeared again, clean and in his right mind, all the neighborhood kids were gone. My husband had taken our daughter to visit a friend. The teenagers had gone to a movie. So, my boy and I were alone.

I baked brownies and when I brought him one, I said, “Shall we never speak of it again?” and he said, “Never.”

The problem with being optimistic is that from time to time, your expectations are crushed. When all your friends watch, the humiliation is almost more than you can bear. I know this because back in the day (before the Internet, IMAGINE!), I auditioned for music groups in college and was rejected. To this day, my writing is sometimes rejected for publication (when I manage to send it out). I know what it’s like to not be chosen.

The difference between me and my son is that he is still an optimist. Also? I have never wept while rolling in the dirt under a tire swing.

I wish I could protect my kids from this sort of distress. In fact, while he composed his comedy routine last weekend, I wanted to stop him. I wanted to tell him not to do it, not to try out. I wanted to warn him that being hit by a banana and saying “fo-shizzle” is just not funny. But his friends thought he was hilarious and furthermore, he thought he was oh-so-funny. Who am I to dent his confidence?

So I watched him go out into the world, figuring he’d return to me roughed up a bit. I hate this part of being a parent. Wouldn’t it be better just to keep the kids inside, remote control clutched in one hand, protected from what might happen out there?

Of course, it’s better to let them go, to be a safe place for them to return, even if they choose to cry while rolling in the dirt. Disappointment is part of life. I have better perspective than he does: I know that this is a small thing in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps next time I am a weeping mess, I will remember that perspective changes everything.

(And I must confess that I am sort of grateful that he wasn’t chosen because how much more humiliating might it have been if he performed his comedy routine and NO ONE LAUGHED in the whole school.)

Did I mention that my husband, a pastor, is leaving the pastorate as of July 1? After eighteen years in the ministry, he’s decided to veer off in a slightly different direction, one which does not require a sermon delivery every Sunday morning. And so, like a stage-coach turning into a pumpkin, I become a regular person, no longer a pastor’s wife.

Which is really fine by me. I never did take that class at Bible College: The Pastor’s Wife. I took Greek and Old Testament and even The Pastor and His Ministry because I never intended to become a pastor’s wife. For one thing, I don’t have the hair for it. For another, I’m introverted, not good at hand-shaking and wide smiles and inviting church ladies over for hot cups of tea in delicate china cups.

The sad thing, though, as I ponder our ten years in this church is that I’ve become close to virtually no one. No one really telephones me to see how I’m doing or to invite me to go anywhere. I put the blame on myself, of course. For one thing, there’s my pesky introverted personality. For another, my life since we’ve been here has been dominated by one clingy baby (my son) after the next (my daughter). And now that my daughter heads off to school, I’m homebound again because of my job (at home) working on the computer.

These outer circumstances cannot possibly tell the whole story. I have lived behind a moat in many ways since becoming pastor’s wife. Sure, there’s a bridge over the moat, but usually that bridge is in the upright and locked position.

I sense that people view me as a self-sufficient island, a woman who needs no shoulder to cry upon, no hand to hold, and in some ways that’s true. The older I get, the more confident I become, the less needy and desperate to funnel my sorrows into the nearest available ear. However, I think back to college when making friends was second-nature, the the inevitable drawing together of magnets with opposite poles. I miss that. I miss the immediate connection that I found with those friends so long ago. (Many of those friends are still dear to me.)

I don’t know. It just seems sad to me that I am leaving our church and I feel so disconnected already. I never let down my guard, never lowered the drawbridge and even though I am safe, I am untouched.

We’re not moving, so I imagine that friendships can continue to develop, but I mourn for what never was, for what never grew. I don’t quite understand it–I wonder if I’ve become so dull, so unapproachable, so glum that no one wants to hang out with me? Or is it that adult friendships among women with families and jobs and responsibilities are impossible to establish? I have tried–God knows I have tried–but nothing has caught fire. My attempts are like a pile of damp firewood, unable to respond to a spark, smoldering but never lighting.

I’m a fun girl, I really am. I was, at least. I hope to be again. Maybe that will be easier since I will no longer bear the title “Pastor’s Wife.” I’m passing along the tiara and sash.