Wordy Wednesday: Reality

Wednesdays are piano day. The piano teacher comes at 8:40 after already being at other people's houses much earlier than that. She breezes in, awake and cheerful, and the children gaze at her in their early morning stupor, clutching their massive mugs of tea and coffee, squabbling about who will go first. From 8:40 to 10, one by one, they sit and plunk out whatever it is, the teacher occasionally taking over and playing a snatch of something real, then back to the plink of Eye of the Tiger. I have to add Gladys in this fall, somehow.

I always think I'll do some kind of school work with one child or another while the lessons carry on, but I really just sit in the office with Matt, listening and not listening to what's going on in the living room. When the little girls start shouting and fighting I make them go outside.

My true new goal for this upcoming year is for my plans to reflect, as Matt calls it, Reality, or as I've been saying, Planning to do That Which we Actually Do. Nearly every year I make school schedules that include me waking up at some ridiculous hour and making a full homemade breakfast and then working with children, bla bla bla. What actually happens is that I wake up later than that and wander around in a confused circle, because I'm not a morning person, nor a night person either, and we start school at ten and drag long into the afternoon. I keep thinking there should be a balance between rigorous discipline and going with what works, but by default I'm more and more falling into what works. Just because I could or can do something, doesn't mean I'm going to. There is a great chasm between possible living and actual living.

I have been fretting, quietly, about this failure of mine to push us into some sort of dream unicorn goal of early rising and orderly school time that ends at noon or one or something, combined with me doing and being a completely different kind of person, a nice person who doesn't yell and who makes donughts from scratch when it rains and wears an apron, a person whose desk is clean enough to do work on, a person who goes over to church to work when she says she's going to, not five hours later than that or even the next day. Matt always says I'm being a Pharisee. I'm making a law for myself and then weeping disconsolately when I can't follow it, feeling judged by God for not following a law of my own making. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's just that I'm lazy.

Whatever it is, I'm working my school plan up and I guess it really will be different this year. The start times will be later on the paper. The chores will be assigned to the children who actually do them. The list of curricula will be a bit shorter, to reflect what we can do and do well, not what I wish we could do, or what I think we ought to do. Lunch will include bread bought from a store. My apron will remain jammed in the back of its drawer. I won't plan on painting the bathroom. And I suppose God will still be God, but I won't be pretending to myself to be super woman or Thor or whoever it is lately. And Matt can stop his little sermons to me about my Pharisaism. And I can be quit it with all the advice, because if I can't do what I think I ought to be doing, how on earth can I know what you ought to be doing? And on that note I will arise and heat milk for the tea and coffee, because, bizarrely, that never gets taken off any list, even though it's essentially a useless activity.