The Inexhaustible Variety of Life (or: School Choice/ School Indecision)

I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow. (E.L. Konigsburg)

In 2001 I got a tattoo.

I was not sober. My father had passed away the year before, I was bored and lonely and my best friend from college wanted to meet in Athens for the weekend. So we got a little bit drunk, and then we got tattoos.

According to the experts who study this kind of stuff, people with tattoos are 7 times more likely to die a violent death. If I had known this in 2001, after an itchy sort of week and God knows how many vodka cranberries, would I have gotten one? Would I have ever had the idea in the first place to walk through those glass doors, to turn through the pages of cartoons and roses and panthers (a surprising amount of panthers) and decide rather mindlessly upon a symbol that means something I cannot for the life of me recall?   

Of course I don’t actually see myself dying this way. I hope not, anyway. I mean, I live in the suburbs for goodness sake. But the odds are there. Apparently I am forever lumped in with the subset of the general population that enjoys living recklessly.

I don’t think of my tattoo very often. It is partially removed and usually out of sight. Every once in a while I’ll catch a glimpse of what’s left of it. Hanging on like the rumors of who I was before I met myself.

But I do think about it when I think about trajectories. The progression that becomes inevitable given the momentum we’ve gathered by the choices we’ve made. Those irreverent, yet benign, decisions that take us from point to point. Some by effort and others by oversight. A lifespan consideration of the forest and the trees.

An afternoon in 1950-something when someone asked my father if he wanted a cigarette. A choice. A path laid plain. And 40 years later he was gone. My brother walked me down the aisle.

I realize it isn’t nearly that simple. But if that is how it ended then exactly when and where it started becomes incredibly significant. And if you look at it this way, maybe every life event has an origin. A beginning. The point at which our choices will yield an outcome.

That is certainly the poster-emotion of parenthood; the feeling that no decision is unimportant, even when they are. Because when you are making decisions on behalf of someone else, it just gets kinda heavy.

Lately the confusing, confounding, head-aching decisions are relative to education.

Applications for magnet and charter schools were due a few weeks ago. The administrative offices needed paperwork that you would expect: immunization records, proof of residency, and a creative blurb about why you want to attend the school. We love our school and have had amazing teachers and a generally excellent experience so I really don’t know why I would want my children to go anywhere else. I’m not sure that I do. I think I just want to explore the options because I like lying awake at night thinking about things I can’t control.

Public schools, private schools, charter schools, magnet schools. Home school (probably not). If they must be in an environment for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 and a half months out of the year: where should it be and why?

It is thoroughly mind-racking. And I could make it about all the different offerings and opportunities: Constructivist classrooms. Field trips that require a passport. Whole-food lunch options. Coastal Environment focused curriculums. Charleston County’s Teacher of the Year! But these are just facts, rattling. Honestly, it’s about me and how scared I am to be responsible for this decision.

I am the product of 13 years of private, college-preparatory, fine arts education and I’m pretty sure I’ll have mixed feelings about it for the rest of my life. The education and the opportunities provided to us were truly remarkable but we were so far removed from the uncomfortable. Like if you only read the first fifty pages of Gatsby and believed you were prepared for the discussion.

If I could boil my primary schooling down to its (retrospectively) most significant moments, it’s basically just: a handful of great novels*, Mrs. Dukes, that crazy field trip to Jekyll where I tried to mediate a fight and ended up getting kicked in the stomach, and a million PB&Js.  I do remember loving our Audubon science project and the year after that, our Human Body project, but other than that I remember very little about what I learned.

So maybe the location of their education, at least for the time being, is not the big enormous thing I am making it into. At this point, nothing is static, nothing is absolutely immutable. There is no fixed trajectory.

There will be good years and bad years, amazing teachers and so-so teachers. Friends and frenemies. Days where nothing memorable happens and days where the world seems to shift underfoot. And I know that what I want for them most is the experience. Exposure to the ‘inexhaustible variety’.

Social-emotional challenges. Uneasiness that builds character. A shot at the gifted and talented program. A really really really good friend to sit with at lunch. A teacher they love that loves them back. The energy and wonder you feel when it all starts to click. That moment required reading ceases to be required.

I don’t just want them to observe life, I want them to participate in it, and that can happen anywhere.

(maybe that's what my tattoo says?)

*A Wrinkle in Time, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Anne of Green Gables, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler

Holiday Paraphernalia

This was our first year celebrating Christmas independently. And this year, more than any before, I tried to think about the traditions I loved most growing up, and how I could imitate (but not necessarily duplicate) them here, in my home. Mom reading The Littlest Angel and Daddy reading Dickens. Matching pajamas. A crackling fire. Pantyhose stockings. The Stingiest Man in Town playing on repeat. Oysters at Uncle Bill’s and Lamb with Mint Jelly at Uncle Charles’. Pastries and Ambrosia. The excitement of looking down at a Christmas party from the upstairs landing. My mother’s caviar tart and all the women wearing heels and golden jingle bells, tall men in ties clinking glasses.

But it was not to be. Our oranges were mealy and the logs were soaked wet from weeks of rain (not to mention the balmy weather that would make a fire truly ridiculous). Our children really only wanted to read The Grinch and at one point I vacuumed up a baby Jesus. Worst of all the one item our oldest daughter asked for- a calico kitten- died just two days after Christmas. And then everyone got strep throat. It was not so great. Oh and the aphids!

Our Christmas tree had an infestation of Giant Conifer Aphids this year. In almost 40 years of Christmas trees I have never heard of or seen such a thing. They fell in sheets from the limbs of our tree, tick-like creatures peppering our ornaments and gifts, leaving trails of honeydew on the felt skirt and wood floors as I swept them up daily along with the pine needles. It was at first alarming, then a nuisance, and towards the end almost morbid, their ashen exoskeletons literally everywhere.

This morning I dedicated myself to the sad task of packing up Christmas and found that the ordeal with the aphids had damaged several of the ornaments beyond repair. A few were from the house on Stanislaus. Most notably an old yarn doll. She rested on boughs deep in those magnificent 15 foot firs and surely saw the lights of a hundred trees before making her way to me in a floral cardboard box marked: “Little Betty Sweet- Christmas”. Her poor fate. Handled so gently for so many years but today, she was so thoroughly covered in sap I had no choice but to let her go.

It brought to mind something that I have discussed with my family on several occasions as we have gone through boxes and boxes of handed-down holiday paraphernalia: How can I make room for what is new and mine when everything old and theirs is so important?

And some of it really is:

Grace and Baby’s Christmas balls. I have exactly 13 of them. Each made with purpose and precision by their dainty hands. Styrofoam, velvet, sequins and pins. Plastic beads of all shapes and sizes. The one with the blue flowers: it hung from the brass chandelier for 12 years before it was wrapped in tissue and a Radar’s box and given to me on my 13^th birthday.

The “Merry Christmas” signs my mom and dad hand made in 1987. They must have spent half the year in the garage. I can still hear his band saw, see the pile of injured letters. My mother so carefully painted the good ones. I have the one they gave to my grandparents and it is arguably my most prized possession.

And of course just about every decoration my children have made in preschool and Kindergarten. Most involving handprints. 

And all the other stuff? Well, somewhere between the insects and the kitten and a general feeling of falling short, I came to this conclusion: there are the things that matter most, and those we hang a little higher and pack with more precaution. The rest of it is where you make the room. 

Sometimes there is family and champagne and singing (and dancing and lights and music and joy) but sometimes it’s just fog and empty roads. Sometimes it’s just you. And maybe an army of dead aphids. We are incessantly urged to press meaning into the minutes of our lives. But this Christmas I found more than a little relief realizing that it is okay to let some moments (and things) go. That not every second of life needs to be memorable, worthy of a soundtrack and a story. It’s okay to be a little mindless now and then, to get lost in the white noise of each day. To dry my hair and make-up beds and empty the trash  (even on Christmas Day) and then look up from these perfectly droll routines and get back to the business of a life less ordinary. 

To find peace in these plateaus and enjoy the in-between where there are no opposites…because it is in this exquisitely neutral pause that the new and ours finds its way in.

And just like that, the loveliest things that happened to us this Christmas were the things we hadn’t planned at all.

In our box: Everything that didn’t have sap on it plus or minus a thousand aphid carcasses. 2 out of 5 snow globes (6 if I count the one the baby threw on the floor at the Dollar Tree). A voucher from Pet Helpers for a free kitten adoption. Kind invitations and foie gras with neighbors. The hand cut notes on all the packages, written hastily at midnight, but not without humor and approximate rhyme. The decorations I glued back together as best I could; tokens of our mishap. The clear memory of our walk down a foggy pier on a warm winter night, the sweet and sour taste of a good wheat beer and that little red ladybug on the moulding just behind the tree, who seemed singly and simply content. Whatever her story may be.