Dining with Squirrels

So, school’s been in session for almost two months and, except for a small skirmish with a battalion of lice back in September, I’m happy to report all is generally well. Ben loves his new citizenship as a Bramanite, denizen of the classroom of Mrs. Braman, who liberally uses two of Ben’s favorite motivators:  candy and contests.  Lucy has actually said she LOVES literacy, she LOVES math!  Whuutt??  Ben started tennis lessons and the boy who once told me they just ought to call the YMCA day camp “Walking Camp” because they made them walk so much actually said at dinner last week:  “Mom, I don’t think tennis once a week is enough.”   Say whuuuuuuttttt?    After an excruciating return to piano [oh, the pain, the suffering, the total lack of retention], Lucy is back in the saddle and has already mastered that great classic “Firefly.”

I spent my first day alone grocery shopping.  You  know what I’m talking about:  long, leisurely strolls down every aisle, time to compare prices or ingredients, no coming home to find I’ve forgotten 3 things that I had written down but hell’s bells I cannot read the list while people are talking to me! My brain felt spacious.  And I needed spacious.  Because those little dudes can fill your head with the craziest crap.  Like right now:  Lucy is drawing at the kitchen table next to me and she is singing.  “Bifurcate, bifurcate!  Bifur, bifur, bifurcate!!” Over and over and over.   This is only a small improvement from this afternoon’s endless Chinese Praise Song Torture session when she sang “Jesus Is Lord”  600 times.  First line only.

But now, during the week, my brain feels a little too spacious.  I feel crazy saying this.  But you can see I haven’t blogged in ages.   I’ve been gnawing on this very entry for weeks,  updating references to “days” into “weeks” and “weeks” into “ages”  [see previous sentence].  I feel as if my squirrels went to school and the hamster wheel in my head is still spinning.  As Lucy would say, I’m having mixed feelings.  She really does say this, by the way, and it makes me want to bite a huge chunk out her sweet little arm.

Yes, I’m having mixed feelings.  I loved having Ben and Lucy around this summer.  They played a lot, we played a lot, and mostly I felt like a really good mom.  And I think I took a summer vacation with them. And I loved it.  But when they went back to school, I soldiered up and went back to my job:  Laundry, Menu Planning, Grocery Shopping, Cooking, Cleaning, Carpooling, Volunteering, and Picking Up Every Freaking Thing My Family Drops On The Floor.  And I am here to tell you, this will not bring eternal satisfaction, despite what Helen Keller said about accomplishing small tasks as if they were great and noble.  Helen says that “the world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”  Don’t mind me, just moving the world along as I clean this toilet…

When I am with my kids, I actually get it.  Every healthy meal I serve, every book I put aside to listen to some story or grievance, every smelly foot I scrub seems worthwhile.  I am rewarded by their growth, their being, their mere presence.  I am pushing their world along.  But the toilet I scrubbed today [and oh did it need it oh lordy lordy] will return to mold and scum within the week, the dishes will be dirtied, cleaned, and dirtied again, and the floor I wash will be dirty by day’s end.  It seems futile.  So I guess when my kids aren’t around to show the future, to show me possibility, then I start pinwheeling.

One of my dearest and by far  most spiritual friend over for coffee the other day.  She is the closest thing I have to a swami and the fact that she mothers a madcap family of 5 also makes her my own mother abbess.  Anyway, she’s not afraid to bitch about housework or parenting in the 15th hour so when she told me about the new work she’s doing and how her life suddenly feels so organic and that she finds she can move between scrubbing a toilet and this new work and back again to butt-wiping and not even mind it, I wondered if she’d read the first half of this entry that I’d been chewing on for a month.

The thing about my friend is that she’s been plugging away at this work of hers for years.  Lots of small steps.  Years later, she sees herself pushing the world along in a significant way.

Maybe it was a mistake to spend my first day in September without the kids grocery shopping.  The groceries certainly needed to be bought, but I might have staked a claim to that new time of quiet for something beyond chores.    The only other small steps I can think to take are these blog entries.  They’re the only things I do that seem engrossing and organic and they surely fit the definition of “tiny push.”  Teeny, tiny push.  Toward what, I can’t say. I do think I get hung up on the “pushing the world foward” part of Keller’s credo.  It’s a little overwhelming, don’t you think?  Gives a girl writer’s block.

So today I’ve menu planned, grocery shopped, done 6 loads of laundry, and yes, cleaned a toilet.  But I’m going to finally, after a month, hit the “publish” button on this entry.  I’m not thinking about pushing the world forward.  I’m just thinking about the push itself.