Oh Friday, there you are.
One
Well, we did sort of start school. We straggled into the school room to see if we would all really fit, drew pictures of how we felt about school, and then they all went back to summer while I lagged behind to rearrange the furniture, again. My original thought turned out to be wrong and bad. I tried two more arrangements before I got it right—maybe. We’ve gone into a space half the size of the former attic school room (now office), and meanwhile everyone grew and got bigger, so there’s a subtle sense of Shoe Horning about the whole endeavor. Well, maybe not so subtle.
It’s very cozy though, and because it isn’t very often that everyone needs to be in there all at once I think it will be ok. When the large ones leave the smaller ones will spread out like Green Bay trees.
Two
That’s the wretched thing about having children—the unrelenting growing and changing. As soon as you’ve sorted something out you have to alter it because the child isn’t who he was yesterday.
But also, if he didn’t change and grow, you would be even more exasperated. You break him of his whistling habit only for him to take up clicking his tongue day and night. You outfit him in socks and shoes only to find he has stuck his toe through them both. But you can’t be angry because if he doesn’t grow you’ll be carrying him around in his fifty pound baby chair forever.
Three
The child, more than any other human person that I know of, and possibly because the change is so swift and unrelenting, is a devotee of the charms and sensibilities of nostalgia.
I’ve been homeschooling for a decade now and everything I have is broken and ruined. All the bright shiny counting blocks, the wooden letters, the board books, the sewing cards, the beautiful wooden puzzles are shabby, chewed by the dog, broken, missing pieces, falling apart.
The smart thing in a case such as this, especially when every child is too old for all these well used items, is to put them in a box and throw it in the Susquehanna. None of the items even deserve to be given away, they’ve been so used. But just try. Try filling the box and then closing it. Before you even can every child will wander over, rummage through the box, remove something she can’t live without, and put it back on the shelf.
“You can’t put that back on the shelf,” you said, “that shelf is for the actual books that you have to read this year. You have moved beyond the board book. You have to read On Obligations. Suck it up, Buttercup. A baby you are no more.”
But the heavy pall of nostalgia means that you end up with three boxes of school items shoved under the school table “just in case” for your oldest children who just can’t bear the loss of their golden youth.
Four
I mean, I sort of get it. I had a golden childhood—I’m pretty sure anyway. I had those little plastic seventies dishes, and a book of Paddington that some horrible person walked away with so that I will never see it again. I think about that book every now and then and mourn my lost youth, the golden dream of always being happy and never being sad.
Except for all the times I was literally sad.
Five
This is one reason why I always feel regretful about technology. I have two old well used tablets sitting in a drawer and a neat stack of dead laptops on a shelf that I will get rid of whenever I figure out how. There is nothing about them that so tugs at my inner person as to make me want to keep them for posterity. I don’t ever feel like opening the drawer and trying to boot them up, because they are slow and clunky and soulless. The stacks of books that I have piled up in every corner beckon me constantly, but the device that makes my world go ground? Nothing.
Six
The treasures of childhood are so diminished when they are contained in a black box, a shiny handheld device that dies after two years.
And yet, try prying the thing out of the grubby little hand and it’s like you’ve accidentally stumbled on the Apocalypse.
Seven
Go check out more takes! And pray for Kelly and her family this week!
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