A knock-down drag out kind of Day

Today was a knock down, drag-out kind of day.

I started with the best of intentions. My goals were aligned rightly with the things that matter to the heart of God. Thus, I declared battle. And I was caught unaware.

We began by reading the fictionalized biography of Mary Jemison; it's called "Indian Captive". The little white girl of the story was taken captive by Seneca Indians at the end of the 18th century. Ultimately, when given the choice, she chose to stay with her captors. (side note: if you are parenting a child from "hard places" this is a must for your reading list.)

We happened to be at the part of the story where Mary was talking with an Indian Woman who had taken her in. The woman was sharing how courageously animals of the forest dealt with hurt and misfortune. She challenged Mary, poor grieving girl that she was, to deal courageously with her hurt.

That was in the story.

In our house in suburbia chaos ensued. Tears. Screaming. Hysteria. Venomous words began to spew. They were totally out of proportion to situation.

Whoa! I was unprepared.

For I know a true thing: Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. We didn't have a mouth issue. We had an issue of the heart. Festering wounds. Bitterness. Ingratitude. The room fairly reeked of it. It was a nearly palpable evil.

While the rest of us talked about how deal with hurt and injustice this child REFUSED to engage - lost in rage. Nursing a grievance, holding in to the heart just as one would an infant. And the thing took on a life of its own.

It was an ugly few hours. I wish I could say I was a pinnacle of wisdom and kindness. I was not. Well at first I was, but as it drug on and on, and the Godzilla of Hurt marched through our living room, I eventually lost it. I said helpful things like, "What is coming out of your mouth right now is absolutely putrid.You're infecting all of us. " I used the highly effective parenting strategies of shame and guilt like a one-two punch. And the monster grew. It was the stuff of reality TV.

I'm not a big spanker, particularly with this child (for whom spanking generally does not resolve a thing). I try never to spank when angry. But holy hell did this kid need a whooping. And I delivered - mostly not furious. Mostly. Eventually, rage spent, this child could hear. Could receive.

"You will be hurt. Often, you will be inconvenienced and misunderstood. And when your heart is broken or wounded HURT fills those places. Then you have a choice. Will you allow the hurt to stay. Will you feed it, and watch it grow. Will you let it ferment, and mold and go rancid? Or will you take that HURT to Jesus and give it to Him? Will you let Him heal you? That is your choice. Because what I heard today was old HURT spewing out of a wounded heart. It was a little thing that caused it, but your heart was so filled with this poison-hurt it oozed out with the smallest opportunity. "

And this child says, "But I try, I try not to let those words come out of my mouth. I try to control it."

"How's that working for you?", I say, in my best Dr. Phil voice.

"It's not."

"Exactly. Heart work is God's work. Will you let go of your hurt and let God heal your heart?"

Pause. Sniff. Watery smile.

We've reconnected. The drama of the morning has been redeemed. At last, God may work. But this hurt, this bitterness it's insipid stuff. It can corrode a soul, a family, a church. It is a destroyer, and more lethal for its subtlety.

Oh God of Heaven, help us, for we are not immune. So prone to wander, so prone towards petty hurt, and long bitterness, that we can no longer smell its stench. Let us be sensitive to it. Quick to reconcile. Quick to forgive. Let the aroma of Christ be the sweet incense of my life.

Little Abby

Kids #1,2 and 3 are bright and creative, but they've never had imaginary friends. Kid #4 does. And to my great delight Abby has named her imaginary friend after.....herself. True, it is a bit narcissistic to name ones imaginary friend after oneself. But if you can't get away with narcissistic tendencies when you're 3, when can you?

Little Abby usually comes out to play when we are transitioning from one thing to another. Change stresses out my little one, and she's clever enough to know it's better to do hard things with a friend.

My big kids think Little Abby is a kick. They are always asking Big Abby about Little Abby because the answers they get are, frankly, amusing. Once on the ride home from Grandpa's Emma asked, "Abby, where is Little Abby?"

Gasp.

Shriek.

"Emma, you're squishing her!", Big Abby hollered. She was dismayed.

And my big kids died of laughter. Emma, being a considerate sister, did however move her foot.

Funny, charming endearing, that little girl of ours.

Unschool: why I wish I could and don't.

Unschool started in academia in the 70's as a rebellion against traditional classroom models. Back in the day it was called the "open classroom". Basically, academics questioned why kids were learning about trees from a text book in darkish classroom when directly outside the door there was:

a. real. live. tree.

With leaves that changed by season.
Providing shelter to birds, squirrels and bugs.
A living textbook in the truest sense.

It was a good question, that.

In fact, the best educators have been asking it for hundreds of years. Charlotte Mason understood, and wrote about it at the beginning of the industrial revolution in England. She waged war against "twaddle" (worthless worksheets and dry textbooks). She insisted that kids could learn from quality literature, and nature, and real life.

Unschooling is Charlotte Mason on steroids. It's child-led, interest driven learning that happens in the natural unfolding of life. It explodes the dichotomy of school vs. life. And in Derridian style unschoolers thumb their nose at production driven modalities of modernist education. Organic. Wholistic. Authentic. Diverse.

And the me who spent those years at CU and ensconced Boulder -life rejoices. Amen. Amen.

Insert my own personal schizophrenia.

Right-brained me and left-brained me wage war. Because, while making homemade chicken noodle soup with my children, my left-brained self is screaming, "Real math means memorizing multiplication tables. And cooking with kids is messy." The left-brained me longs to have a worksheet I can correct in the ink of a red ball-point pen.

Discipline.
Creativity.
Linear.
Inter-woven.
Curriculum based.
Interest driven.

The war wages. I cannot decide. And for unschooling to work you must trust it. Leap over the edge of the waterfall and let it immerse you. And the left-brained me cannot make that leap.

So I'm trying to find the middle ground. I ask:
"Will this worksheet help them learn?"
"Can it reasonably be taught another way?"
"If they fill in the blank correctly, yet cannot explain the concept have they learned?"
"Is it worth the battle?"
"Does it preserve or grow my relationship with my children?"

And those questions help to keep me on track.

It's the dance, after all.
Creative expression within structure.

Hunky Dunky

It's Mother Goose according to Abby. And it goes a little something like this:

Hunky Dunky sat on a wall.
Hunky Dunky felled.
And nobody could fix him.

The Dumbness of Robinson

Bear with me. This is homeschoolese. It may be so uninteresting to some of you that you should quit now and return another day. That being said...

I'd been investigating a curriculum and philosophy of education called "Robinson", as in The Swiss Family. Basically, it uses classical literature and Saxon Math to teach kids. A typical day of Robinson would be sans sugar, sans TV or screen based media. It would include liberal doses of park your butt and bust out some math. Approximately, 2 hours of that...plus 2 hours of reading..and some writing for good measure. Because, you know, most kids like to wake-up to a bowl of unsweetened oats, then sit down at a desk for 2 hours of uninterrupted math. Of course, parents shouldn't engage this process (except to be the enforcer) because doing 2 hours of excruciatingly boring math by oneself builds character.

HOLY CRAP. I was nearly snowed. I almost bought into thinking this is how school should happen. I was, however, saved by the director of a public school. I'm sure she is flagrantly pagan. Yet I had one of those moments (usually saved for church) when I felt that as she spoke God was speaking to me.

REPENT!

Turn. Run. Robinson, and his Swiss Family are not for you!

Lately, homeschool has SUCKED. It's no wonder really. I was sitting my kids down with a pile of worksheets and asking them to be self-motivated and disciplined and complete these worksheets in a timely manner, all with a good attitude. Robinson and his insipid philosophy and wheedled into my thinking and robbed my family of joy.

I am 34.

An adult, by every definition.
I would be grumpy about sitting down for 3 hours to complete a bunch of worksheets.
It would be like doing taxes everyday.
(Not that I would know, because I haven't done my own taxes in well over a decade
- but one could assume it would be similar.)

This Robinson stuff is crappy pedagogy. All the research in adult and childhood learning suggests this an exceptionally bad way to learn. Besides that, it's a joy killer. I got into homeschool because I was disenchanted with this type of "back to basics" education. I knew adults learn best when they:
-are ready to learn
-and can attach learning to their own life and interests
-are given opportunity engage and interact with others in the learning process

I figured that kids learn best that way too. And I was right. The research has my back.

So when we started this homeschool journey we played, and we read amazing literature, and we built, and painted and experimented. It was FUN. And I was a good teacher. Somewhere I got lost, though. Because my kids got older and their school got harder. It's easy to have fun learning to add. It's more difficult to create authentic, experiential learning around long division and multiplying fractions. Add in a regulating challenged baby and the whole thing goes to #$&%. So I started looking into things like Robinson (because if my kids were basically schooling themselves homeschool seemed doable).

But at what cost?

Back to that public school director I was talking about. She founded a charter for gifted and creative learners. Like I said, she's a pagan right out of the Republic of Boulder. Yet, her philosophy of education is far more biblical. Honor the child. Be humble. Smart is good. Kind is better. Allow for differences. Create safe places. Work together. Teach community. Strive for excellence. This world is a place of beauty; let children be in awe of it. Inspire. Encourage. Serve.
She said these thing, she and her Crunchy-Boulderite-Dansko-Wearing self, and I remembered. I remembered what makes me a good teacher, and what makes homeschooling beautiful. I remembered why I started.

Here's the thing: It is quite possible, probable even, that I cannot do home school like I believe homeschool should be done with my particular preschooler. Either she's going to school, or my "biggers" are. And if I'm lucky it's possible they all will. Because if I can get them in, they are gonna go to that school the Pagan started.

Enough with Swiss Family Robinson. We're done. God has spoken. Truly. And through a Boulderite, no less. So I went to the library this weekend. We're reading together again. And baking. And experimenting. It's messy. Not sure if its sustainable. But it IS better.

So you wanna adopt?

People have called me an advocate for orphan care. Maybe, I am. No. I am. Yet, sometimes I struggle to encourage people to adopt. Adoption is good; it can be God's amazing redemptive plan for a broken situation. But adoption is not easy. It is always, always, always a result of loss, trauma and brokenness. And the result of that brokenness doesn't go away when the adoption decree is finalized.

Best case scenario = birth mom relinquishes a baby she cannot parent to a loving family who raises that child well.

Sub-text = Somebody knocked that girl up, and didn't stick around to help her out. That girl will always wonder, and always have the scars of loss for a child she didn't raise. There is a reason that that mama couldn't parent...it's probably unjust. And that kid, that kid will wonder too. Even in open adoption.

More often than not adoption is far messier than the best case scenario.

Addiction
Abandonment
Poverty
Disease
Birth defects
Mental illness
Despair
Profit

These are woven into the stories of adoption.

Sometimes, love, and family and Jesus redeem the story in miraculous, and virtually painless ways. But sometimes, very often, the effects of a broken world (that made adoption necessary) do not quietly disappear. They linger. Sometimes they are inextricable from the stories of adoption. A lifetime cannot heal brain damage, and emotional damage, and physical damage. And sometimes adoptive parents spend their life trying to extract threads of despair, and addiction from their children's stories only to watch their own life unravel. It happens.

But God says he will place the lonely in families. He says he is the strong defender of the orphaned and widowed - a father to the fatherless. He is calling his church to embrace a culture of adoption. He is about adoption. Because he redeems. He restores. He makes beauty of ashes.

Yet to paint a picture of adoption that looks something like Barbie's Dream House, all neat with a Ken Doll and brown skinned baby is dishonoring to the reality. For just as Jesus laid down his life to bring us into His family the adoptive family must be ready to lay down their life on behalf of a child. That's how it works. So you wanna adopt?

See this great link.

grateful list.

-stacks of laundry neatly folded.
-Cherry and Orange Jam smooshed over toast
-10 year old who still plays pretend
-giggles
-making music on an antique piano
-Motrin and decongestant
-Having a husband that I miss
-Puppy, freshly bathed
-girlish play
-imaginary friends
-little boys with messy hair