Just Getting Started

I might start school today.

I've been thinking I would every week for the last four weeks, but then…well…there have been all kinds of big tasks that needed doing. Things that I didn't expect. None of them, on their own, enough to derail my plans, but taken altogether, they would have made adding school into the mix a real stress.

And weirdly, and please don't judge me, I sort of enjoy the school part. When I'm not doing anything else, and I'm not drowning in guilt and futility, I like the actual doing of school with my actual children. I didn't want to ruin it by trying to do too many things at once and bringing my big piles of anxiety to the party.

I like it when the school room is clean and everything put away. I spent the afternoon yesterday dumping out buckets of toys and putting sets of things back together. I found nearly all the pieces of fruit that go in the Montessori pie. I rescued dollhouse furniture out of the knight bin. I separated all the cars away from the Lincoln Logs. I got all the tiny finger pupits and put them where they belong. It was over all a soothing, calming exercise.

As an extra birthday present, I let Elphine lie on the couch for the whole day and watch the rest of Pride and Prejudice while the little girls “cleaned their room” (those are scare quotes to indicate the opposite of what I just said).

She needed a day of being flat. I needed a day of order. Who knows what all the rest of the children needed. They got a day of squabbling and fighting and not enjoying themselves. Oh well.

At the end of the day Elphine wandered outside and discovered a shocking reality.

I've never actually had squash grow and so I didn't expect that it was and now we have some kind of major cooking to undertake. Gak. And I stupidly bought some small ones of these at Aldi, like an idiot. I had No Idea what was going on out there, right under my nose, all while I'm obsessively killing beetles.

So today we'll probably start school. And that will be just five things: the Middle Ages, Insects, English Grammar, Spelling and The Wind in the Willows. That's it. We'll get them totally done before September (cough) and then we'll take up another set of tasks. Like math, and Latin (violent coughing) and more grammar and more spelling. Just a few things at a time. I'm slow on the uptake. It's taken me years to discover that it's better to ease in gently, rather than bashing us into shock with fifteen subjects on the first day of September, that I need to budget a couple of months of extra time in case something goes terribly wrong, that you can't force a child to read until they're ready and sometimes that's age three, but more often it's age five, that if you don't feed them during the day they will cry, that not structuring every moment of every day is ok, better even. All of these discoveries violate my sense of order and my internal panicked drive.

God said to Ezekiel, this morning, well, not exactly this morning but that's when I happened to hear it, “They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay.” Yes, I thought, that's exactly how all my eating and drinking is. In anxiety and dismay, surely believing that God is so angry with me and that I deserve to be lying on my right side and then on my left (Ezekiel at 5 in the morning is kind of a trip) never having enough, because of my great sin, because of my poor time management and my false expectations. But that is not so. I measure out my bread in anxiety and my drink in dismay while all the time I could be putting myself in the hands of Jesus who came to take the sin, the result of the sin, the anxiety and dismay that go with the sin, so that I might not be anxious about anything, what I will eat or what I will wear or what method of spelling I will undertake. Which was God's point to Ezekiel and Jeremiah and everyone. Do it your own way and come up in poverty, sorrow and pain. Or, for a different idea, commit your way to The Lord because, and this is such a great shock to my system, his steadfast love never ceases, his mercies never come to an end, they never run out, they are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness.