sheep stuff

First to say, I have not lost the thread of the dream of raising sheep. It still lives in me. But unlike a lot of other manifestations, it feels unrushed and easy and I will let it unfold in its own time. We have a few other large projects around here that take precedence, hello sauna, and a little cabin for moo. Our aspirations for building a Vermont Family Compound are pressing in and near and while this may not be the land that it all unfolds on, there is plenty to do here and now. Five years is at once nothing and also a lifetime so making things work as best they can for who we are today and who we are leaning toward tomorrow is our very best vision. And so.

In the meantime, it is extra cool and interesting to make a study of sheep and wool and the people and places that tend them. And truly, most shepherds think that their sheep are the very best kind of sheep which may possibly be true but is also 100% impossible to sort through. I have narrowed things down a bit and am now clear on the farms I want to visit and the wool I want to hold. Also, I am now able to have more cognizant conversations around it, like I am standing on my own two feet inside the dialogue. Even though a shepherdess did recently tell me that I am a red flag in one breath and that she is a vegetarian life coach and that her animals are her therapy in the other. Ahem. I digress.

For me, dual purpose is important. Sheep for wool and lamb for meat. It seems like not only the most responsible but also the most rewarding way to go. And I like for our family to be up close to life cycles and animal husbandry continues to be one of the most daily/functional ways to be there. Plus, lamb is delicious. And fiber is variable and wonderful for all sorts of different things. But I want to spin it into yarn that I can make things with and so wool suited for insulation or rugs is probably not my best bet. However, I do not love slippery overly soft yarn very much at all. I like crimp and catch, and in recent years: the woolier the better.

So the first breed of sheep that set this more earnest investigation into motion is, interestingly enough, included in one of the three that I have narrowed my list down to in the last year or so. Last fall a sheepy friend of mine back in Viroqua shared a post about a fellow local to me here - yes the world is small and weird and forever more interconnected than I can ever understand- who was looking to pass a flock of Icelandic Sheep on to their next shepherd. This breed, if not this particular flock, was already on my radar because they are well-suited to cold, northern climes. Not to mention that they are absolutely gorgeous with so much variation and uniqueness in their appearance. They also appear to be a little trendy right now with cute spotted flocks popping up here and there. There is a really incredible shepherdess that I follow back in WI who is raising stunning animals and I kinda drool over what she is doing. Also, near to me here- on the farm that I got a tattoo at last spring: Vermont is funny and strange, did I mention?- they are raising some very beautiful and robust Icelandics. I would love to visit that farm again this fall or spring, along with the others that I will mention in a bit, and get a better feel for the care and keeping of these animals. Plus, of the three on my list, this is the only breed that I have not yet held a skein of their yarn in my hands yet. I anticipate that it will be extra wooly and maybe best blended with something softer, and this is the piece that gives me some pause with the breed. I do not mind wool blends, but I would also love the option of making a high-performing breed-specific yarn. Ya know, goals.

Alrighty, moving on. When we were down at Vermont Sheep and Wool a couple of weekends ago I met one of the owners of Junction Fiber Mill, who happens to also be a midwesterner. Bless. She is raising Corriedale sheep on her farm, and what is very cool about her is that she is super friendly and helpful and would make an excellent resource for me. It is kind of a neat connection with her being a midwestern transplant too, plus our local yarn shop back in Mount Horeb was co-owned by a woman raising Corriedale. It’s all connected. So, it is familiar in a pretty cozy way. I haven’t visited her farm or the mill yet, but hope to sometime this fall, maybe when we are down there for a swim meet. What I like about Peggy is that she is pretty smart about the whole thing in terms of business and economy. She is raising dual-purpose animals and the breed she has chosen produces a huge amount of wool, like 11 pounds per animal per shearing. To put that into a functional perspective, her mill’s minimum for processing a farm’s fiber is 13 lbs. So just two animals would do it. I am planning on beginning with more like 4- 5 animals and maintaining at hopefully under 10, but that is a huge amount of wool at that size which is great. And the carcass size for lambs is significant as well. Clearly, she divulged the most info on this with me out of everyone I have chatted with so far. She was practical and accessible in a way that I really appreciate, without dumbing it down or being judgey at all. Odd I know but yes a thing. In all domains, it would appear. The only thing that I am not certain of is how much I love the wool. I need to make something with it before I can know for true. It is their mill’s house yarn so that part will be easy. It has a nice feel, soft and easy, without being too floppy, but maybe not quite rough enough for what I am hoping. I gotta see.

This brings me to breed number 3, Cheviots. This is the one I am probably most interested in and also perhaps know the least about. Junction Mill has a farmer that has her cheviot wool milled with them so I did get to see and hold some while we were at Sheep and Wool. I liked it. It is sturdy and wooly in a way that I enjoy, but again, I probably need to see it knit up. This flock lives in Northern New Hampshire and making a visit to her farm should be relatively easy. And I can grab some skeins when we are down near the mill for the aforementioned swim meet. I really like the size of this breed and they have such a cool history. Also, one of my old Driftless buds EVL raises these animals and she is smart and practical and my most reliable mentor on the topic. They are dual-purpose, like the other two, and well suited to the cold and rugged north. Ahem. They are similar to the sheep living on islands off the coast of Maine;

worth an investigation for sure.

I think that is what I’ve got for now friends. Maybe a little bit more of my checklist might be useful to share so I’ll wrap this up with that. Here we go. Breed size is important, I want to be able to handle them with relative ease myself. So, while larger is cool in terms of production, I also do not want to gas myself by not being able to tend and move animals around mostly, if not entirely, on my own. A consideration. Also, for a hot second I was looking at Finn Sheep, popular in this area as well. But they are known for many lambs, like 3-4 per ewe and no thank you very much to that. One or two is great, ok? I fully anticipate that I may not even want to breed every ewe anyway. Keep my pace steady and my size smallish. Wool is key, as I have mentioned, but also I want animals that are robust and as EVL says: not too fussy. I do not want anyone who is parasite prone or has soft hooves here. A lot, if not all, of sheep management, and herd health, has to do with the land they are on and so that is really our starting place in terms of moving in the direction of the vision. I want shelter, water, electricity would be ideal, and several permanent paddocks to rotate them through. I have done moveable netting before when we had goats and honestly, I rather not. And because I want this level of infrastructure- rare for me, I know- we are taking our time and being methodical and clear. Maybe we have sheep in the next 2 years, or maybe it is more like 5. I am ok with that. It is nice to have a dream with a steady and solid pulse, and this feels like that.

That’s it for now. Hope it was interesting!

xxx,m

unsolicited

In the spirit of leaving breadcrumbs for my future self, who, if she is anything like me at all is wide-eyed and forgetful, always thinking she is fresh and new to something, I am heaping together some of my thoughts as they live in me today regarding childhood and learning and school. I want to lead with this because I have a sense it may come out as definitive and prescriptive, and by all means use it that way if that works for you, but the intent is my own line in the sand at this moment. I am at the great exhale pause in my life of home education and it is affording me this beautiful space to look both back and ahead and parse through what I have learned thus far, what has worked and what can be discarded, what I want to repeat and where I want to steer anew, pitfalls and peaks, and hopefully a few anecdotes here and there.

So, here we are. Part judgey opinionated mom shit, part what I have learned thus far. As much as I try to stay open, and honestly, I think I do a decent job, I still have some preferences. While mistakes and wrong turns are inevitable, I would love not to repeat too many. Plus, news flash, every kid is different. Lord knows all three of mine are. What works for one by no means works for another and keeping that in mind my hope here is to make the broad brush strokes of patterns, behaviors, and outcomes, that have been true for not just my big kids, but many of the other home educated children that I have had the pleasure to know and observe.

Ok. To begin. I do not understand Unschooling as a philosophy well enough to know if that is our approach or not. It seems like it might be if I am just parsing out the word- we are all conditioned to the compulsory school system from the very beginning and to choose to leave that a good degree of deconditioning needs to take place. I have mused about that a time or two before… However, I do think that some participation in preschool is important and from what I understand is a pretty significant indicator, more so than K-12, of whether or not an individual is going to pursue higher education. This is a really good reason for us to be paying attention to legislation regarding free and affordable preschool options. And yet, not all preschools were built the same and I am incredibly picky here as well. I want a preschool experience that is primarily outdoors and prioritizes open-ended play versus an abundance of narrative-specific (predominantly plastic) toys. Here I like Waldorf or Montessori or Reggio Emilia, and my top choice is going to be something similar to the Forest Preschools that are becoming more and more popular. I especially think that preschool plays an important role for folks who are home-educating more than one kid because it can be extra helpful to have the little one out of the house when it is time to do more focused activities with the olders.

As for kindergarten and the early grades, I tend to think that activities and experiences are the very best way to go. I wouldn’t really stress early reading or writing unless there is an interest or unless you think you might have a neurodivergent learner in which case beginning earlier is probably a good plan. I have dyslexic kids and didn’t really know anything on the front end of that, just kind of figuring that they would learn to read when they were ready and so took a more relaxed Waldorf approach to literacy. In retrospect, I should have started helping them find the tools that they were going to need to support them in learning to read and write because it was nowhere near to being an intuitive process for them. I will approach things differently for Wilfred. But I still won’t push it. My favorite way to engage literacy in general through all ages and beginning at the very start is by reading aloud. There are a ton of resources and support out there from Brave Writer to The Read-Aloud Family Revival that simultaneously gently and overtly teach a love of narrative and the written word and a love of exploring fiction and non-fiction alike. You can never read too much with your kids. I promise.

I gotta take a quick pause here to say that I am a secular educator through and through. I cringe at anything that feels remotely dogmatic even if I align with its messaging. I am cautious of cults and the insidious ways they reveal themselves in all avenues of life and learning. It is hard to parse out what the boundary is between making connections and becoming indoctrinated and I suppose that is in big part why I love life on the fringe, piecing things together as is right for me and my people and seldom adhering to a fixed curriculum. I am skeptical of standards and assessments. I take the yes/and approach to all of it, as well as the not this/not this. Seems straightforward, right? gah.

Anyhow. I think in general kids in K-5 should have some time spent in literacy, some time spent learning math, and that the rest of their lives should be chock-full of all of the experiences they need to begin to discover for themselves what they like and where their passions may lie. They also are well served by time to be bored and the opportunity to figure out how to deal with that on their own. They should get to be just a little bit (or a lot!)feral. After all, they are only little once and it doesn’t last all that long. Let them be little. This is in part why I knew that the 7-hour school day 5 days a week was not an option for me. It took too much time away from being a kid. And yes 100% I am saying all of this from a place of immense privilege to even have these choices to make for our family. It’s real and I know it.

I also think that having your kids with you every day all day is pretty unsustainable, especially if you are on your own as their primary educator and/or if you also need to work. This is where I think outdoor programs and homeschool co-ops are invaluable if you can swing it. Plus, kids need community too and time away from their main caregivers as well as plenty of opportunity to be mentored by other adults and educators. This is so huge I cannot really emphasize it enough. Our kids need mentors and there are incredible ones out there and you will absolutely know them when you find them. When Maple and Eider were both home, we had lots of contact like this in our weeks. They were both gone one day a week at forest school, they had another full day of the week with the other area homeschool kids and then the rest of their weeks were built out with sports, activities, and time with their Orton Gillingham tutor. I expect it will be even more scheduled for Wilfred, with 2-3 days at preschool and then when he is older a few days each week in the outdoor and local co-op programs. He will be the only one at home during the day he is a social little fellow, so I will most likely keep him a bit more busy than I did the other two. But for real, formal academics can wait til they are older, like 5th or 6th grade. Let them follow their interests and you will be stunned by how much they learn. I know I was.

As for if or when to start school, that depends. Maybe your kid will never want to and then you go from there. In my experience, there is a natural social desire that has kids leaning toward school once they reach the middle grades. Lots of kids decide to begin in eighth grade as a way of kind of getting ready for high school, and from what I can tell, that tends to be an incredibly difficult time to begin. Especially in public school. I would say either start in 6th or wait til 9th or find some alternative option if they really want to head to school before high school. Beginning in 7th or 8th grade is initiation by fire and a home-schooled kid who has an established love of learning and a strong sense of agency over their own education doesn’t need to deal with the shit storm of middle school. I probably do not need to tell you this. You remember. Except let me tell you: it is 1000x worse now than it was then. For real.

And maybe your kid won’t want to ever go to school anyhow. It is kind of a shame when they do honestly. Home school really does get good as they get older and have more interests coupled with more independence. It’s awesome. But it is also lonely, in part because the other home-educated kids got lonely too and went to school. The home school kids tend to disappear beginning in 6th grade. By the time they are 12 it is kind of like the last kid standing sort of a thing and well, I guess some kids fare better through that than others. For mine, especially Eider, that loneliness was devastating. For me too. It is sad and hard y’all. And no kid is the same. If you have more than one chances are they are gonna need different things and wouldn’t it be great if lots of options were available? From public schools to independent schools of varying sizes with diverse offerings. As I get older and spend more time on this path, I am very interested in what kind of learning options are accessible to kids, especially middle and high school kids who are ready for both community and comprehensive educational as well as extracurricular opportunities.

Ugh. Ok. Is this helpful? Did I say it all? I don’t think I did but I also think I have to stop for now. Maybe I will an addendum at some point. Maybe not. I know there is more to say especially regarding high school and after high school. We shall see! Cheers for now.

yes/no

One of my very favorite things about living near to Madison, and one of the most difficult things to say goodbye to, was the Suzuki Strings program there. We were fortunate enough to somewhat accidentally arrive into the program during our first year in the area. Maple wanted to take violin lessons and after a playground convo with a mother of a child in Eider’s preschool class who happened to be a violin teacher, we found ourselves in a surprisingly rigorous pre-enrollment gauntlet of observing four private lessons and four group classes. Eider was not quite four at the time so of course, he was lugged everywhere with us, and by the end of these weeks of observation, it was clear that Maple was gonna be lukewarm on the whole thing and that Eider was 100% enrolling. It turned out they both did with Maple only lasted about six months. Ten years later, the violin continues to be an important and committed part of Eider’s life.

There are endless ways that parents are making and keeping long lists of the pros and the cons of where is best to live for their charges. Town v City; Urban v Rural; and on and on. I knew that moving to Northern Vermont would mean leaving the big, established, vital music opportunities that Eid was having in South Central Wisconsin. But I also had heard that Violin and especially Traditional Fiddle programs are vibrant here, I just thought they would be a little more in range. After some misses we found a great Suzuki teacher locally, and he began playing in the Green Mountain Youth Symphony our first fall here. I was sad to not have access to any Suzuki Group Classes nearby, but with the arrival of Wilfred and all of the adjustments we were making in our new home, I figured it wouldn’t hurt for it to wait a season or so.

Then, of course, Covid. And the derailing of all things. He kept his weekly lessons up during that two-year dead zone via zoom, which I am thankful for. Music programs across the country have reported that they have experienced enormous attrition over the pandemic; so many kids stopped playing. And I really get that. It was fucking hard to keep up interest in practice when you only ever had yourself to play with. Music is, in my mind, in big part meant to be made together. It is a unifying force. Music joins and connects and moves us, together, through the darkness and into the light. Tragically, it seems that perhaps the darkness was too long and too deep to carry everyone through.

I kept up some communication with the director of the Burlington Suzuki program during the pandemic, planning our return to group classes once things opened up again and Wilfred was bigger - and ready to begin his adventure into the brilliance of Dalcroze himself. And when we were planning for this year’s activities, I was excited to have this one penciled in along with lacrosse and orchestra, skiing and mtb. I have shared time and again over the past few years how hard it has been to get life here to work for our Eider Bear, it has been difficult on repeat and it is his resilience, far more than my own, that has made it possible to not lose all sense of optimism. Making plans for activities ((for belonging)) that might take hold has been a cornerstone of my personal survival strategy. I have missed and also longed for the sense of connection and belonging that we all found in the Suzuki Strings of Madison. So getting back in the mix was something that I had been approaching with anticipation and thrill.

And then a couple of things happened. Mostly inside of myself, but even so. Once I knew the date and the time that group classes would fall this year, I began to make some familiar internal bargains with myself. Classes would be in Burlington on Mondays after school. And it would be just for Eider; Wilfred is just a little too young yet for group classes. But one of my buds in town has been offering a fantastic 26+2 in a perfectly hot space in Stowe, also on Mondays, and I had made a rhythm of attending every week I was around over the course of the summer. It was the first time in years that I was taking a class with any regularity and I gotta say, I wasn’t excited to give it up. I knew that I would anyway, without even considering it a choice, because that is what I have always done. I mold myself around my children and the contents of their lives. And in many ways, I think that is the right call as a caregiver. I made the decision long ago to raise these people and support them in living the very best childhoods I could make available for them. I try to follow their lead and affirm their interests and make it possible for them to explore their passions. Most of this approach involves cueing off of them. Which can be the tricky bit.

When I was sitting back and considering letting go of this hot class and taking Eid into the big city every week for some group music, I realized I needed to reconsider the cues. He was excited about the classes, but in the way where maybe he is excited because I am or because he thinks that that is what I want for him. He does have the lived experience of knowing that the group classes are amazing and that playing, especially playing the repertoire that he is working on with his private teacher, with other young musicians is priceless. And yet, his life is by all measure so much more full than it has been since we moved here, with school and mountain biking and orchestra and lacrosse. He doesn’t have the big empty spaces that he has been carrying for the past three years. Perhaps, this choice between the strings program and a sweet and sweaty class for me, was actually mine to make, and not his.

So that is what I did. I made the call and chose class for me over class for Eid. And he is fine and I am psyched. He will help with Freddy so that I can leave the house on my own and fill my own cup all on my own versus vicariously through my kiddo. It is a little sad, especially when I pull on the thread of “what we lost”, but I am also overly sentimental in all ways, and letting go of an era is fucking painful. Plus I am being dramatic. No doubt. There is music still in our lives and there will continue to be. It just looks different than it once did and it will continue to evolve. As it should. As it was designed to do. And I get this sweet little piece for me right now which means a ton, especially without the moments of Freddy in preschool that I had been counting on.

This is some practiced discernment though. It is an imperfect equation at its very best. I have to get out of my way enough to see my kids as they are which is nearly impossible when they are so easily distorted by the view through my own lens. Recently, we were pressed with a similar decision that went the opposite way.

I was pretty pumped to see that Christina Sell and Desiree Rumbaugh are teaming up to teach together for a weekend next Spring. They are my original teachers and some of my most long-term influences, in yoga and also in life. And as far as I know, it has been years (maybe a decade?) since they teamed up to offer something to their very overlapping communities. So, obviously, I am there. Right? Even Chris was like 100% we gotta make this happen for you meggy. I mean, it is a total dream to think of a weekend with them and so many other folks that I have shared this long yoga story with for over two decades.

However, when I looked at the calendar to block out the dates, I realized that something was already penciled into that place. On our most recent trip back to the midwest the big kids and I agreed that visiting in the summer is so tight and busy; every place we love to be, we love to be in summer. This makes for a hectic season to say the least. So we began to discuss using the latter of the two spring breaks and take the time to visit the places and our people in the parts of the Upper Midwest that are hard to reach on our quick flights into and out of Southeastern Wisconsin. A road trip to Minneapolis and Viroqua began to take shape in our minds’ eyes, to visit our dear hearts, family by blood, and family by choice that reside in those harder-to-reach locales. Maple and Eider, my long-time ride-or-die road trippers, both responded to the barely hatched plan with an enthusiasm and optimism that made this plan as firm as it can be seven months out. We also reminisced on the big road trips the three of us would take together when we lived in the middle of the country. It has just been back and forth to MDI for us for the past three years.

And here is the real deal: when your almost 17-year-old daughter, who is less than two years away from her explosion into her own wide world, wants to take a road trip with her ‘ol ma and her two bb brothers, the answer is yes my buds. It is yes and it is yes and it is yes 1000x over. My priorities are clear in this domain and they probably always will be. It was the very same this summer when Maple was planning on an entire summer on Islesford and said she would prefer that I be there with her as much as I was able. I make and will continue to make, that shit happen for as long as my girl, or any one of my children, asks. That is just how it is. I sure as shit didn’t want extra time with my mom when I was her age; I am acutely aware of the contrast. So I make my choice even when it means missing a “once in a lifetime collab” with some of my very favorite yoga teachers. And honestly, when I parse it all out, I think that is probably a value I acquired by virtue of their teachings and a lifetime of practice. So it goes.

So late next April, I won’t be in Bellingham, I will be on the road to or from or landed in the Upper Midwest with my little duckies all in tow. Making memories together and reminiscing the ones made in those same places and with those old friends ages and ages ago. And on Mondays for the foreseeable future, you won’t find me sitting on the floor in a corner of a music room with knitting in hand. I’ll be in the hot room wearing next to nothing, sweating and staring down my reflection in the mirror all while doing the good and never-ending work of getting right with myself and reaffirming my priorities. That’s how it goes. Onward my dears.

2 more tales

One of the very best things about keeping a blog is how my friends will reach out to me after I post. Usually via text, but sometimes I’ll even get a Facetime call, which is super fun. Both happened after my last post and it was so great to chat and catch up and in each instance I was reminded of a couple of other antics that I want to share here. One for posterity, and the other as a way keep on processing. This is honestly another excellent thing about keeping a blog. This is often the case for me when I haven’t written here in a long time it can often feel like I have a backlog of shit I wanna get out and then when I finally do, well, the proverbial dam does indeed break. All I wanna do is write. It is basically like a one-sided coffee clatch between me and all of my dearest dear-hearts. Except that it isn’t often one way at all cuz y’all send me those messages and sometimes even (yippie) ring me up. I love it.

I recently began working with a longtime friend and student of mine for some nutrition and fitness and wellness coaching- love love love this turning of the tables - and one of the tools that she has me engaging is a tracker. Yeah yeah yeah I have used a tracker before and it is not my favorite, even if it is extra effective in noticing patterns and staying accountable and collecting data. One of the things that we have determined is an important part of my self-care, and worthy of its own tracker column, is “personal writing time”. This is a priority for me to be sure, but like a lot of things that are just for me or that do not have any sort of tangible pay-out, I tend to push them to the very end of the list or lord the time over myself like some sort of reward for getting all of the other crap on my list checked off. Which is why it so seldom seems to be happening. Or at least much more seldom than is my perfect world preference. So! It has a box of its own now with the intention of checking that box at least once every week. Or, once a week. Which feels like a massive accomplishment and win given the current motion of things. And should help with my word back-log and keep it flowing which I gotta say is one of the truest feel-goods in the “tapestry of shit I do to feel good for myself” protocols.

Ok. So. 2 little tales to tell. One is so that I do not forget and the other is so that I can keep up with my processing out loud strategies and hopefully continue to disseminate and integrate my understanding. The first is about poop. The second is about education. Here we go.

If a story about a poop incident is not for you (maybe you are not a caregiver dealing with poop, or puke, or some other such human substance on the regular), no shade and no hard feelings if you just skip this one and get down to the other tale. I get it. If you are here, I will keep it brief, but detailed enough that it holds up to posterity and I won’t have to worry about remembering any of the ridiculous details.

I have already shared a little bit about the poop owies happening over at our place. It is no joke. And continues, at least for Wilfred. However, last month when we were in Wisconsin visiting I started to think that we were through it when toward the end of our trip he began pooping more regularly. But of course, it wasn’t a resolution unfolding it was the tummy troubles that slowly built up until we were all the way at our departure gate at O’hare about to board for Burlington. One minute he is playing, and the next he is waddling over to me telling me he has a “poop mess”. Which is usually what he says when he goes poo, mess or no. But this was a mess. Before I could whisk him to the bathrooms he does this funny head dive to the floor to position himself for me to change his pants and as he does so liquid shit splashes up the entire back of his shirt and into a puddle on the floor. Oh. My. God. Oh yeah and we have no wipes because why would we? I am basically brand new to parenting. Maple is on it- what a star!- and dashes off to the bathroom to grab as many paper towels as she can and once she hands those to me she is on a sprint through the airport to track down any wipes she might find. Meanwhile I am doing my very best to clean this shit up and simultaneously be invisible to everyone around me. I am not sure if that worked or not other than I can say with 100% certainty that Eider, who was sitting 6 feet away, didn’t notice a single thing so maybe… Who knows?

After throwing his shirt away- no saving it thank you very much- and doing my best to wipe down the area with airport bathroom paper towels, I grab some clean clothes and we re-group. Maple returns with all of the wipes she can find which is to say makeup remover wipes and anti-bacterial wipes. She smiles and says we can clean Freddy up with the makeup wipes and then get ourselves with the others. Good grief. The whole thing was brilliant and terrible and hilarious. And hands down the single most epic Poop Incident of my near 17-year parenting career, and I have seen some stuff my dudes. But nothing like that shit splash at the departure gate in O’hare. Nothing. When we got back home I tried my best to relay the tale to Chris in all of its severity which I think was only made clear when he came upon the strange assortment of wipes in the bag. What an ordeal I tell you. And now aren’t you happy that it lives in perpetuity here? I sure am.

Ok. Second story. And I am sorry if this is too long or if it should be two posts, but, once a week personal writing time ya know? This is what I got. Maybe go grab yourself a cuppa and come back.

Alrighty here goes. One of the biggest challenges I faced when we transitioned from school family to home education family was becoming aware of all of the inherent assumptions alive inside of me regarding education and schooling. I have been reflecting a lot lately, as many of you know, on the thoughts I think that aren’t my own or did not originate with me and this is a huge topic area for that for sure. The first way I noticed the presence of this perspective was actually in Maple who at the time was 8 years old and already very much plugged into the belief that there is a right and a wrong way to do things and that there is very much what you do to stay “on-track” or “get ahead” so as to avoid “falling behind”. These narratives are what dominate the world of compulsory education. We have a very strong internal metric to which we are holding up our children to such a degree that we actually have to weed through the layers of this in order to even see the learner that lives inside of them. And it is a fear-based metric to be sure. From what I can tell it is the bar to which we hold up all success or failure in education and it determines the pressure we apply to the child. At no point does it measure the capacity for true and engaged learning in any individual or does it acknowledge the ability to think freely, make connections, cultivate discernment, and draw conclusions.

All of that took a long time for me to understand on my own. I had a whole lifetime of compulsory education to detox. It was uncomfortable to move through because we had no model of what it might look like to be growing ourselves as learners and free and critical thinkers outside of a standardization of benchmarks. We were on our own. Especially because I knew right away that my own anxiety about how my kid “measured up” against an irrelevant (maybe even false) average was going to be one of the most harmful ingredients to allow into our homeschool. We had to give time to the task, acknowledge when we came up against input that challenged it, and also be really clear on working toward what was best for our individual learners and not cultural and social assumptions.

So why am I thinking about this now? Well probably for a couple of reasons. I have a few friends who are just starting out on their home education journeys and are pressing up against the discomfort of these realizations for the first time. I am also around more school parents more regularly than I have been in years and I am aware of all of the ways in which we are not necessarily on the same page when it comes to education. Their assumptions are no longer my own. And I will not pick them up again.

This week at yurt school the kids were doing assessments. (I gotta say this is kind of a gross term but I am just gonna breeze over it for now and let it sink in as it will) Because they are a mixed age group, fifth through eighth, they are all in different places academically and this is the moment where their educators begin to map a path for the year. And I gotta just say, I would never have known that this was happening this week if I hadn’t overheard it from some other parents. Eider would not have told me on his own. For two reasons: the first is that that is his personality; he doesn’t really sweat stuff like that- why should he- he’s never gone to school! And secondly, he thought of the entire thing as just a way to figure out what they are going to be working on this year and not any type of judgment call on his or anyone else’s intelligence. Which of course, is exactly what it is if you can weed through the rhetoric from some of the parents (and kids) regarding being at “grade level” or “on track” or "ahead”. Many of the parents were reviewing at home with their kids in hopes of advancing their outcomes and making sure nothing had slipped over the long summer. When I asked Eider if he wanted to review anything at all, he said no. When I asked why he said that if he doesn’t know it on his own at this point he rather not fumble through as though he does when he could instead give an accurate assessment of his knowledge at this point and be better, according to him and maybe me too, set up to learn well this year. Because that is what matters to him as a learner. Not if he can test well, or memorize something well enough to be able to regurgitate it on demand and then dump it later. He wants to know. He wants information that he thinks is necessary or relevant or compelling to come to life inside of him in a way that allows him to interact with it and develop and grow his own understanding. Otherwise, what’s the point? He is not convinced and frankly, neither am I.

This metric is so arbitrary. It lives during the school years and then it is gone. After high school, the significance of test scores and placement virtually evaporates and we are left wondering why they ever mattered to begin with. Because here is the real measure: the kid standing right in front of you. Do they know what they need in order to learn well? Do you? Because it is not the same for all and it is certainly not something that is learned from the outside looking ever more outward. It comes from looking inside. And trusting yourself. And knowing that you are good and capable beyond any external criteria or criticism. It takes a long time to get there, to that level of self-worth as a learner. And from what I can tell, most compulsory school systems, public or independent, aren’t very well positioned for this because of how established our assumptions are around how we measure achievement and success.

Eid has it now, but he hasn’t really had to test his resolve yet. Not really. So how we proceed right now in relationship to all of this new input matters. Maple has it, it has been tested, and it looks like it is sticking. She knows her brilliance and also knows what she needs to support herself as a learner. That is why it is so cool that she is now gearing up for the testing process required to get a 504 plan in her file. She is ready for the data that this is going to make available to her. It is not information that threatens her knowing of her intelligence and capability, it is rather the details around what makes her mind unique and clues as to how best to meet and support all of that in perpetuity.

Alright. That is what I have for now. It is a little clunky as I begin to engage these ideas more, so thanks for bearing with me. If these thoughts land with you in any way or another I’d love to hear. Or some sharing of your own journey with how we educate vs how we learn. I’m here for it!

Lots of love, m

poop owie

found photo. by freddy.

So much has elapsed since I last had a stretch of moments to sit down and try to piece everything together in a way worth sharing here. It is hard to know where, or even how, to begin. What to omit and what to include. Sometimes the map of things makes all the sense in the world, and other times I am lost inside of the jumble of unresolved threads that tangle up my mind space. So it goes. I actually feel a bit in a jumble right now, but I have the time this morning so I will see how patient and thorough I can be with the untangling.

We are just on the other side of the crashing wave that is back-to-school energy and we are beginning to settle into the new shape of things. Even as homeschoolers this was always a time of transitions as activities and sports started up their schedules again. But this year, with Eider in school full time for the first time in his life, the shift into this season has felt even more immense. And I know that I should know this already, especially when it comes to parenting, that most things never go as planned, and the way I imagine what will unfold is often just a flimsy hologram distorting reality. Oh well. I am a slow learner to be sure.

There were a few threads of our intended trajectory, back in the mid-summer, that I could see or was beginning to notice were a little rough or loose or poorly placed. I knew that the changes ahead for Eider were going to be big and unpredictable and honestly I spent quite a bit of time fretting over that to varying degrees. That is a bit of an unfortunate habit of mine I think, especially when it comes to Bear. Three years of not really catching any breaks has me ready for some working wins for that kid, and well, I worry. I also knew in the early summer that Maple has some pre-work for an AP class that was looming large. As for Wilfred, who was enrolled to begin Forest Preschool this fall, I was aware that even as he began to really potty train - a requirement for FP- that he was also beginning to resist and hold his poops. Ouch and Owie. In fact, his chant of “I have a poop owie” became a constant for much of the summer, so much so that we began to incorporate it into our family vernacular. Each of us was working through our own metaphoric poop owies, some bigger and more uncomfortable than others.

My own Poop Owie of the summer came in the form of my continued feeling of displacement as a yoga teacher in Northern Vermont. I just couldn’t land anywhere that felt right or true. The new local studio in town that I had begun teaching at in the early spring began to show immediate signs of inconsistency and questionable management. But desperate to teach, I pushed through my doubt and overrode my instincts time and time again. In retrospect, I am a little sad and disappointed that I didn’t heed the truth that lives inside of my own first impressions. It took showing up to teach and interfacing with the studio owner and realizing that she was completely hammered, for the lights to turn on in my own awareness. I was giving a person and a situation the benefit of a doubt that I had transformed into believing was simply me being an asshole and in so doing had become dull to all of the warnings written all over the walls. And seriously no shade ever in a million years for anyone struggling with addiction, which she clearly is. However, I will remove myself from the equation and will not consider return until radical honesty is restored and recovery is engaged. At the very minimum. I know enough about the 12-steps to know she is nowhere in the ballpark of any of it, and so, teaching there is not for me.

I began to explore other options for places to teach this coming fall and started to think that doing things independently was perhaps a little more my style- big surprise. There was a beautiful space in Hardwick that was run as an incubator space for teachers and I respect and admire the woman who conducts that effort. She is clear and conscientious and connected to and passionate about her local community. It seemed like a perfect fit and I was getting excited about teaching there and within that particular format. However, when I visited to get a run-through of using the space, I realized that the studio had been moved from the beautiful third-story light-filled historic building to a dark basement off of the main street. Ughhhh no. I have been teaching and practicing in a basement for three years and it has been killing my soul. I cannot get it together to leave my house and my family for an evening away in another dreary basement. I cannot. Poop owie.

So I paused my efforts to find a local yoga home and moped. Redirecting my attention back to online teaching and summer teaching in Maine and putting a few events together down the road. Blergh what a bummer. I have a bit of distance from the ordeal now, and it doesn’t feel quite so tender, and I have a few other irons in the fire so my disappointment is muted now. I have hope. And in my transparency about the whole shit show of teaching yoga in Northern Vermont, I have begun forging a few friendships of my own that are indeed the silver lining that was previously absent. Plus, I have other shit to think about. Literally.

I reflected in an earlier post about noticing and sorting through thoughts living inside my head that were not necessarily my own. And while it was kind of jokey and just about swimsuits and what I tell myself I can or cannot do, there are far more insidious beasts up in there. At least through my lens. As a home educator, there is a big muscle that I worked hard to build around sorting what is real and what is just the constructed narrative created by the compulsory education paradigm. If you have educated at home, you know what I am talking about. There is a detoxing and a deconditioning that has to happen in order to teach and respond to the child in front of you, versus shaping them into the form of some messaging implicit in the culture of education as it exists in current time. There is lots of deconstructing around concepts such as “ready for” or “falling behind” or “delayed” or “age appropriate”. Each of which are fashioned after a child that never existed to begin with and are pressed forward into reality by the sheer will and autopilot unchecked belief structures of many parents and educators. I want to say all here, but I will say many out of respect for people who I am sure were more self-aware than me when they got going parenting and/or educating.

In specific, I had been functioning within a belief structure that my child was ready to go to preschool because he was three and because he loves to be social and play and engage with other kids. And I was ignoring this very big owie that was building inside of him. He was constructing this wall of resistance that became the obstacle between him and gaining entrance into preschool. I was also beginning to believe that the time I was longing for for myself could only be granted through his entry into nursery school. Yes, I understand that is somewhat ridiculous for a person who has been home-educating children for almost a decade. But when Maple and Eider were little, we had family nearby who gave me a few hours every week to myself. And some incredible in-home care providers who filled in any gaps. None of our life is set up for that now, and I was looking for conventional solutions. Of course.

dinner by the garden. and a fire.

However, Wilfred was not able to start Forest Preschool this week. He still has a poop owie. We are working on it with each other and with the support of our family md. The Nature Center where he is enrolled has offered to hold his place for him for a period of time which is wonderful. But after a week at home together I am remembering a number of things: the first and most obvious being that there is no time frame for resolving a poop owie, at least not in a peaceful and sustainable and growth-oriented way. Secondly, and even more profoundly, I remembered how very much I love to spend my days with a three-year-old. It is just us most of the time and in the absence of my guilt and stress over not being able to give my attention to educating a middle grader, we are free to do whatever we like most of the time. Yes, we are still driving the bigs around, a lot, which sometimes he likes and sometimes he hates, we are also making playdates, visiting playgrounds, heading to storytime, going on walks, crafting, and playing and playing and playing some more. We ar also resting together each day which is the very sweetest part of my day and one I am in zero hurry to give up. Basically, it is the best and in my remembering, something around the “should” of things is untangling in my heart and mind and I am able to more and more be with this little amazing nugget in front of me. Which of course, is just enough of a drop in tension for the poop owie to be easing.

So, no real time frame. I am not going to hold a spot for him in Forest Preschool. I will check in with them in the new year and hope to enroll him again for a couple of days next fall. In the meantime, we will greet what is and practice having fun and discovering our surroundings and our communities and one another. As for Maple’s poop owie, she didn’t get that AP prep work done. But she landed herself in another AP science class which is probably a far better fit for her anyway. Atta kid. I freaking love her. She’s already busy making costumes for the fall musical, and co-running the fiber arts and GSA clubs that she started last year. What a badass, that one.

Eid has had an amazing first week at yurt school and in the re-commencement of activities: mountain biking club, fall lacrosse, and orchestra. Watching him this week has been such a massive joy for me, it’s like getting to see him be a full-on kid for the first time in years. What comes after eighth grade still feels like a big unknown, but I think I am interested in yoking some of my energy and efforts to help this little independent school of his find the funding and resources to anchor themselves into the framework of Vermont Independent Schools. And who knows? Maybe that will help it expand into high school in time to serve Eider. TBD.

maybe the last swim? hope not. image through moo’s eyes.

My own owies are slowly resolving as well. I am appreciating my capacity to say no to what isn’t a good fit for me, versus shaping myself into something else. There are some exciting things ahead, even as simple as finding a weekly class for myself to enjoy attending and integrating myself into the yoga framework that functions right now. As ever, this practice feels relational and I am in the phase of building some compelling relationships and that is wonderful. I know that I am an endlessly broken record in this space when it comes to identity and perception of self and roles and all the rest of the internal matrix, but I am seeing myself as of late simultaneously in high relief and from a bit of a distance. Two images of me as who I am and how I feel in and for myself, but also a bit as how my kids might see and experience me: which is as their mother, no doubt; but also as a woman of my own. Funny and fun, stern sometimes, gentle mostly, quirky and independent, forever nostalgic, and honest to a fault to be sure. Who knows really? It feels like a bit of a moving target, but in their differentiation from me, this new aspect is being revealed and I think I like what I see so far.

Ok! This was a long one so thanks for reading so far if ya made it through. I am really hoping to find a couple of hours to gift myself with time to write every week. I am not sure when that is just yet but the intention is clear and the desire is certainly big enough. Writing is like an itch that needs to be scratched and such a central part of my own self-care. I want to show up for it. Even if that means part of a morning spent with Freddy watching Cars and me hammering it out with a Lightening McQueen soundtrack in the background. More soon lovies. Take good care. (And don’t believe everything your mind tells you. Sorting. Sorting.)

snake skin

I decided this morning, or really last night, that I am not going to offer a weekend yoga retreat in Stowe this fall. And as with most decisions, arriving there was not without substantial difficulty, and being here is no big whoop and also a massive relief. It was extra tempting, ya know? But I think that is due almost entirely to the offer presenting itself right in the midst of the most regular and rewarding in-person teaching I have done in years. I got caught up in all of those good feelings and just really wanted to keep it all rolling.

Teaching on Islesford this summer; more than I thought I would by popular request; was such a treat to my whole system.  A buried part of me got excavated and dragged back up to the light and I feel myself in, at once, a new and wholly familiar way. I think it was kinda like that for folks that came to class too. So many people shared such similar feelings to me along the lines of: “oh my god it’s been forever since I’ve done any yoga” or “I have only been practicing by myself, alone and at home, in virtual classes” and “I just feel so much better in so many ways after class with you and everyone” and “I am moving and breathing and thinking and inhabiting my whole self with so much more connection and ease.” I mean, it was all the way wow. And I could sip on sentiments like that: and those kinds of affirmations and encouragements, all the live long day.

I got carried away. And why shouldn’t I?

But something I also know is that the time spent planning and prepping and filling a retreat in Costa Rica this past year took up so much of my bandwidth, mentally and emotionally, and the cumulative anxiety that I experienced putting the retreat together was nearly debilitating at times. It was a lot. And it didn’t leave much left for anything else. So, in a complete turn of events, I am choosing less for myself as a way of choosing more.

That is hard for me y’all! With Eider going to school this fall, and Wilfred in nursery school twice a week, I feel giddy and overeager at the possibility of what I can accomplish with some unfettered, untethered, undetermined time on my hands. And yet, also I think I am making some efforts to numb my feelings around this whole change. That may very well be real too. This will be the first time in 8 years that I haven’t been homeschooling, and while I plan to homeschool Wilfred, the reality of that is still a ways off in terms of how I approach things. Anything other than place-based play before age seven or so isn’t of incredible use in my experience and opinion; other than addressing any literacy challenges that are presenting themselves. But that seems like another post for another day… So, I am loose right now in a way haven’t been in what feels like an entire lifetime. And in that looseness, I am releasing and shedding a skin that I no longer need to wear, that no longer fits as well as it once did. I am churning inside the story of my own becoming; my own evolution. I am as ever, my own agent of change. 

But do not doubt that in my quiet moments I completely circle the drain regarding our decision for Eid to head to school. I am so nervous. I want it to be amazing, or at the very least: great enough. I especially want his love of learning, which was the entire point and purpose of homeschooling, to begin with, to remain intact. It must. It has to. Right? But I am still nervous about the shift. He will be primarily in the hands of educators other than myself. And yet, what I have known to be true for a long time and continues to be true for the duration of my children’s education, is that the people most accountable and responsible for our kids’ learning are always going to be Chris and me. Most other educators and mentors will come and go, but god willing, the two of us hold the space and provide the ground upon which it all takes shape, develops, and thrives, throughout. This revelation landed us in home education to begin with. Not without some struggle and resistance: it is not what we are taught to believe about school and learning. And yet, to believe or trust in anything else is in my mind another version of magical thinking.

And boy do I know a thing or two about magical thinking! And it seems to be all for the most part pretty well documented throughout the seven-and-a-half-year life span of this blog! Part of that thinking is even just the sometimes thought that maybe I am passed it and am now inexplicably firmly rooted in the reality of being in the here and now. As it is. Secure in my truth. Alas, I continue to be a permeable blob of easily influenced cells and sentiments. I hope to at least believe that I am becoming more aware of the times when something other than my own voice begins to infiltrate my thoughts. I have an example, and it is my hope that it serves to highlight something under the service for perhaps more folks than just myself.

Here it is: early in the summer I spent a lot of time taking Freddy to the beach to meet up with other moms and kiddos. And listen, I love heat, I love water, I love skimpy swimwear. Over the last few years, however, I have been making sure I have a few more modest suits so as to “protect other people’s feelings” or some such shit. So in one of these instances, I was standing on the beach and found myself deep in thought regarding whether or not I should just get some sort of black swim dress for these mom and kid beach outings. I traveled down the path of this idea for quite a while before I grabbed hold of some stronger aspect of myself and was like: who the fuck’s thought was that inside my head anyway??? It certainly was not my own.

After that initial noticing, I stuck with it, paying attention in that way. When I can, as I am able. What thoughts am I thinking that may not belong to me? What are the things that I am telling myself that really do not originate with me, but with someone, or something else? What are the ways that various aspects of the dominant culture have seeped into the space between my ears and then parrot themselves via my internal dialogue are external speech? It probably comes as no real surprise, but the list is endless. The swimsuit example is of course beside the point, however, it has served as a catalyst of sorts for beginning to travel this particular path of self-inquiry that I find myself on now. Because, obviously, it doesn’t end there. Especially as it has to do with self-image, self-worth, and self-respect.

In an effort to hopefully circle back to the beginning of this post, I think that this is one of the places in my life that I am interested in cultivating a little bit more slowness and space around. Doing less as a way of seeing and sensing more. I am especially interested in feeling into the parts of myself that are populated with the belief that I am a fake or a phony or who do I think I even am anyway, etcetera times infinity. I am curious to see what happens when I do not just auto-pilot fill all of the space in my days up and instead take a little more time sitting with what is and looking for the source that lives inside of what I think and how I feel and maybe even who I am.

In terms of teaching, which is something that supports me in feeling very much like me, beginning in September I will offer one in-person class a week at Open Space in Hardwick (up above Front Seat, so cute!) on Wednesday evenings from 5:45 to 7 pm. I am also running a virtual class series again beginning Tuesday, August 30th, and running for 5 weeks. Those classes are 45-minutes each and feel just right in terms of time spent in screen-based yoga as well as my continued desire for community touchstones with everyone who lives away.

So that is it for now. Kinda fluid, kinda curious, and as ever working on feeling ok in my own humanity and cultivating ease of mind and heart. How we do. Love you. m

ps a quick note on this image: I LOVE it. I see me like how I feel me right now in this image. It is in support of the whole of me. And I am certainly feeling myself right now. Beyond any one part: not just mom, not just meg, not just teacher, not just friend; but Meg on the whole. Integrated in a way that has felt distant for some years. Like I am both domesticated and feral and it feels like the truest paradoxical truth of me. Islesford gave me a lot this summer and this is the very heart of it. Both/And as it lives in my very marrow.

to rest/not rest: a savasana post

Tell me that it wasn’t savasana that ignited your initial love affair with yoga asana… I mean, you can try. Or, it is ok if you say no, that wasn’t it and I will put some effort toward believing you. As someone who has always loved, but mostly hated, being high, savasana after the first class I ever took catapulted me into a state of being that I had no sense that I could really access without some plant or chemical assistance. I mean, it is this amazing thing that we just never do. Or, I had never done. Structured rest. Communal, quiet, nothingness. Conscious letting go. Every altered state that I had ever found myself in up to that point was like a random crap shoot. Even now, when I experiment with that just right amount of edibles looking for a relaxation that doesn’t tip over into stoned, I am far too uncomfortable with the unpredictability of it. I mean, yes please but probably, no thank you.

It is profoundly organized in its simplicity. If you can stay and be still and relax your control: body, mind, breath; then right around the 6 or 7-minute mark, the nervous system switches from sympathetic to parasympathetic and the deep rest, reset, renew, takes over. It is so good. Clear and crisp yet also diffuse enough to get a true sense of the expansiveness, or emptiness, of consciousness.

And yet. How many times when I am practicing on my own do I skip this opportunity for a deep reset? (ahem, most, cough, cough). Or how many times, in the more modern shorty-short classes do we get completely short-changed on savasana? I think again, the answer is most. Ok yeah unless the class is something like “yin” or “slow flow” but maybe not even. And, it probably goes without saying, but the draw for me to an “easy” practice is not very strong. I need my body-mind to be throttled a little bit in order to deactivate the constant thrum of noise between my ears. I like to work my body hard so that my mind gets too tired and has to shut the fuck up for a bit. And please don’t come at me about it. I know it is good to rest. But sometimes rest without any inherent expenditure of physical effort looks a lot like me spinning my wheels and building anxiety where I had hoped to build ease. It took a really long time for me to understand- in fact, it really took watching my own family and their tendencies for the past 17 years- that I am the sort of person who could work my body hard for 2+ hours every day and be better for it. I have never really been one to go after extreme athleticism; like really, at all; but I have it in me I think. Not speed and power perse, but a whole lot of endurance and strength.

Also, can we talk for a minute about the actual name of the pose to begin with? It is The Corpse, after all. The only moment ever where we are invited to invoke the practice of death and decay. Of retreating back into the earth and into the all that is. Beyond the body, beyond the mind. That seems maybe like it is the heart of practice, doesn’t it? As in, the part of practice that I will carry with me for as long as I carry anything at all. To the very end, whatever that is. And isn’t rest always better and deeper and more profound when we are tired and worn out? I hope to be tired and worn out at the end of my life like I left nothing on the table and played all I had with my whole heart and my whole mind, and my whole body. For as long as any of it lasts.

None of this is to say that I am not interested in practices like Yoga Nidra. I definitely am, I just don’t have the surplus of available time or wherewithal to prioritize such practices at this moment in my life. I gotta worked first I guess. That sounds funny and maybe came out wrong but I think you get the gist. I’m just trying to get myself to meditate 10-20 minutes a day, and after that, I need to move. And breath. And hopefully sweat some too, ya know? BUT! I am committed to securing time and space at the end of my asana practices for a decent savasana, and at the close of my classes as well. Enough time to go there if you can. To practice dying, or at the very least to practice resting.

In the very early days of my indoctrination to practice, I was living in Prescott Arizona and working at the Coffee Roasters for Christina and Kelly, and practicing and dipping my toes into teaching at Prescott Yoga. On Sundays for some period of months in there, I would hop on my bike, cruise across town and up a massive hill to Casa de Sell, and Christina and I would practice for roughly 4 or 5 hours. We would do all the poses. But at the end, we always did this super-supported savasana. Christina called it “a Cadilac savasana” and we’d be there for at least 20 minutes, astral projecting and having Shaktipat visions and revelations. It was its own sort of training and edification. The whole thing was a whole lot of wow. My boyfriend at the time (hi James!) was totally grossed out that I wanted to practice for such a long stretch of time. Like, why? Bahahahaha.

Fast forward to about a year of the pandemic and once again practicing with Christina (via the zooms of course: love em/hate em) for hours upon hours every week. It was both incredible after 20 years to still share this connection with her as well as profoundly unsustainable. It was an era too it turns out. But I love to work hard like that. To travel out onto the skinny branches of some curiosity or fixation for a period of time. Besides, I am old enough to know well enough that nothing lasts forever and it is extra fun and maybe extraordinarily necessary to get it while the getting is good. Make hay while the sun shines. And so on. For me, movement is the prerequisite to every creative act, mandatory or otherwise. I try to, at least for some moments of every day, give thanks for this body that breathes and moves and for the most part feels good. It is a wonder and it is a gift and may I never take any of it for granted.

I think this entire savasana riff is really born out of the stirring of this kind of focused attention to fitness or physical pursuits beginning to roil inside of me again. Maybe because of the shift in our home rhythm coming this fall, like what do I want to do with all of the time that I won’t be spending being solely responsible for my 13-year-olds education? I’m gonna move my body, is one thing. In some big ways, I think. And write. I’m gonna write. And hopefully, I am going to work so well and so hard at all of it that I am gonna rest. Real deep.

decision relief

It is funny, and also maybe wonderful, that I haven’t blabbed all about what the what is happening for Eider with school this coming fall. After having deliberated and sweated and stressed over it for the whole gd year you’d think I’d be quick to announce any kind of determination we might have made. I guess relief is funny like that. Once the stone is out of your shoe, you forget all about the stone. Or something like that. I did mention school for Eid in my July Newsletter so there was at least a nod in the direction of that, with a link to the joint included no less. Or more.

Anyhow. My friend Liz’s newsie landed in my inbox this am- one of my favorites btw, simple and lovely and full of fun links which I have decided is basically like touring someone’s mind or house and I am 100% here for it. Bring on your curated link lists! She shared that she was experiencing some sweet sweet decision relief after stewing over whether to send her little girls to school this fall or not- they are staying home and beginning their home ed adventure- yay Liz!- but I was like omg that is it exactly: Decision Relief! That is what I have been delighting in for the past 2 weeks ever since we landed on a plan for Eider for eighth grade. His first choice, no less. Thank goodness. Like I said: R E L I E F.

After 2.5 years of sluggish and lonely homeschooling, I have been searching and searching for a solution that honors him, his needs and desires, where he is at as a learner, what the gaps and strengths are, and how best to support him across the board. Is it with me? Please, no. I am so tired of juggling a toddler and a middle-schooler and feeling a lot like I suck at both. I’m tired of multi-tasking when I should be focusing on him. Tired of feeling guilty about choosing to meet my own needs when I “should” be working with him. Tired of wishing that he were more independent or self-motivated to meet his schoolwork and less dependent on my effort and energy. To say it has been a lot these past few years is a gross understatement.

This spring I announced, that after some visits and exploration, that we were planning on having Eider attend The Mountain River School, a small, alternative, private, place-based, mixed-age PK-8 school just outside of town. It is an excellent fit for someone like Eid and could serve as an ideal bridge between homeschool and public high school, if that is indeed the route that he chooses. Or if this particular school expands to offer high school- something our area needs access to in my opinion, and no, I am not talking about yet another high school ski academy- it could be even more ideal. Classes are mixed grade, with the current cohort of fifth through eighth graders making up just under a dozen students. There are two teachers that work with this middle school age; one offering science and maths, and the other humanities; and each teacher holding down the fort in side by side identical green yurts. When the kids can be learning outside, they are outside. I mean, for an adhock educator such as myself, this place appears to be a dream.

However, I am not one to eagerly fork over cash for private school education. It is not really something I believe in and honestly I would not ever have begun to consider it as an option if I had any intention of paying for it. Our money has, and I can only imagine that for as long as we have children at home, will always go to activities: music, sports, and enrichment. We live in a very small town that only offers K-6, and we have a tuition voucher to cover the remaining 7-12 years. We call up the town offices sometime over the course of the summer to let them know where our kids will be headed come September and they redirect right around $18,000 of tax dollars to that school. I was naively under the impression that MRS was licensed to accept the voucher. They are not set up to accept the voucher at this time. Which is mind-boggling really. Especially in an area where there is a clear need for some kind of alternate at the 7-12 level and with a $13950 middle school tuition which is extra freaking steep- you’d think being able to take that $18K as a small private school start-up would be written into the business plan.

My dreams were temporarily dashed to be sure. But I immediately got my shit together to figure out if I could be the one to begin getting this paperwork together on behalf of the school for the state. I even went so far as to make a formal proposal. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that that was not going to be a remotely expeditious undertaking and would require someone’s effort who is far more savvy than I. So I began to work on potential pivots. Could I homeschool him for another year? Please dear god no. Could he suck it up and go to Peoples even though his experience taking classes at the middle school sucked last fall? An option for sure but certainly not a great one. Could he go to Stowe? He would be with kids from his lacrosse team but oh wait Stowe is fussy about taking the voucher so no dice. What about the private catholic school in town? Could he suck it up? Lots of kids love it there and honestly, it would have probably been a better fit for Moo in 8th grade than Peoples was. Meh, too much emphasis on homework for my taste, or Eider’s to be sure. How about the alternative middle and high school in Montpelier? They take the voucher and seem great. It could be a good fit for this year and beyond and he liked it a ton when we visited. But the drive every day would end me and I am really not sure if that level of self-directed learning is gonna be an environment where my kid would thrive. See commentary above… Blergh.

Clearly, I was spinning. For months. Churning and churning and crafting ways to compromise my kiddo left and right. I knew from the outset that paying for it ourselves wasn’t going to be an option for all of the reasons. Principal as well as financial. I also knew I could ask my mom for help and she would move heaven and earth to make it work for us- if there is anything my mom excels at it is helping out however she can when the going gets tough. But she has helped us countless times over the years: purchasing our first house, co-signing on our second, helping with kids’ activities and sports and camps over the years, and just general generous grandmotherly stuff that in my opinion has always gone above and beyond. Help from Chris’ folks has never been an option, and my dad is a similar case. Every time I’ve even gotten in the neighborhood of asking him for cash help, he has reminded me about all of the money that he gave my mom for us… by which he is referring to the $200,000 in back child support that he owed my mother for which she literally had to take him to court and sue him in order to get. And, excuse me for disagreeing, but that is her money, not ours, even though she uses it mostly on her kids and grands.

But I asked him anyway. I sobbed about it for a day and a half and then I wrote him this long ass fucking email asking him to pay for school for Eider- not the full amount, just whatever I couldn’t get in scholarship or financial aid. Which was up to half. It was a good email. Not desperate, but certainly earnest and clear. I felt both horrible about it and also somewhat surrendered. Like I had done my due diligence and tried my hardest to figure this shit out for my kid rather than throw in the towel too soon and either have to suck it up myself homeschooling with him for another year or make him suck it up and have a shit 8th-grade year. It will not be a surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time to hear that even though I wrote to him in the very beginning of June I have yet to get a response. Of any sort. Just crickets. I am not surprised, just disappointed. I suppose it was one last effort on my part to see if he has any shits to give over me or my children and the answer as ever is a resounding NO.

I spazzed inwardly (and outwardly, sorry Chris) over this for a week or so before finally letting my mom know what was going on. It was around this time that my financial aid application was approved for the full amount possible, that is to say, half, or $6900. And of course, she offered to pay for the remaining half. And of course we gladly accepted the gift. Contingent for her on Eider himself assuring her that it is what he truly wants, and it is. And he does. He is over the moon about it really. And why shouldn’t he be? It affords him another year of childhood coupled with learning in earnest before being shoved too soon into the muck and mire of late middle-school teenage posturing. Blegh. He knows what it means and he is glad for this alternate path. And I am still fingers crossed that something similar emerges for his high school years. We shall see.

One of my closest buds, when we first moved to VT and were starting to slowly shift our family school paradigm said that she hypothesized that because Maple was going to school that year, that Eider would be soon to follow as well, and that Wilfred would likewise probably end up going to school in its entirety. I have thought about that often in the years since. It is an interesting consideration. And yet, as Freddy has grown and I have learned more about this place that we live now, I am only more and more excited about what home education could look like for the two of us together. I am pumped for it. Sure, he is going to be attending a forest preschool this fall, for a day and a half, and maybe he will go there for more days as he travels through his time there, but home ed was never anything I said I would do all by myself and I am big believer in preschool to be sure. Plus boy do I ever look forward to some time on my own this coming year. OH. EM. GEEE.

So that is the update. And the plan as it stands currently. I feel great about it. Like all of my children will for the first time in years have a sweet thing going in terms of their learning communities and I will meanwhile have some space to reflect and gather myself for the next phase of living. I can hardly stand it and even though I am tempted to say that I won’t even know what to do with myself, that is bullshit. I most certainly do.

xxx

a new note

In the spirit of taking note… I am feeling happier than I can remember in a long time. I think ok-ness has been my own baseline/status quo for forever, all that I can remember. Whether it is due to worry over the world or worry over my children, I have hovered for so long in a persistent state of good enough is good enough and so long as the steady thrum of anxiety doesn’t tip into full panic, then I am winning. Of course! I mean that is a win, right? But these past couple of weeks I have eased my way into something different but familiar, like a well-worn and beloved pair of pants that finally emerged from the pile of cast-offs they were buried under for so long. A refreshing find. Bright and in good repair and made just right for me. It is hard to let myself say that I have felt something close to happy these past few weeks, it feels tone deaf to the very real shit storm blasting the larger national and global reality right now, and yet… I think I am. 

It is a huge relief to have a plan for each of the kids this coming year that feels solid and right. The enormity of the burden of trying to sort that out these past few years has been so much to bear. And yeah this next version of us will have its hiccups or not wind up being the right fit but for the moment we are right and good with what is coming. What a relief. Also, a plan for them opens up the possibility of a plan for me too and I am enjoying the growing idea of my own time and space opening up and unfolding into something this fall. I like making a plan to do more of my own work in some larger, uninterrupted, and focused stretches. I am setting a few things in motion for teaching and mentoring and my own study that is exciting as well as measured and reasonable and all of that is something I look forward to. 

It is also an immense relief to be on Islesford this summer and in full enjoyment of everything that it is to get to spend time here. Days are full of deck hangs with either a book or knitting or bubbles in hand, blueberry picking and bike rides, chats with friends in the middle of the road and on the beach, looking for lucky rocks and rowing out to the Sea Sauna with friends, delicious naps and afternoon yoga on the deck. Plus, I am so thrilled to be teaching yoga on the island again this summer for the first time in 4 years. It feels like such a reunion: with all these folks who have taken classes with me for years as well as me to teaching here and in general. The same and yet also older and wiser in this really excellent way. I have been teaching gentler/softer more than I ever have in my life and it really feels like the just right offering for people right now- at least the ones that I am finding in front of me. We are all worked, for obvious reasons, and seem to each be ready for the reminder to lean in the direction of greater ease and compassion. I have always had an identity around being a difficult yoga teacher and it feels good to shake that off a bit and teach to what is. Not to say I do not have it in me for challenging practice and helping people grow their yoga in that way too- I just think that maybe I am becoming more adept at not superimposing my agenda over anyone else’s. 

Another excellent lived reality of the Islesford summer experience this year is having an almost three-year-old with me. Last summer’s adventures were difficult with a fresh two-year-old. Managing the sleep changes he was going through was difficult away from home and he wasn’t quite so ready for adventure last summer in the way that he is this one. I have been remembering all of the play and adventure we had with Maple and Eider on the island before they were old enough to explore independently. Bike rides and picnics and tide pools and beach afternoons and games and all the rest. Somewhere between 5 and 8, they start taking off on their own and in a place like Islesford, you often don’t see them again til meal time or when someone needs to go poo. So getting to play here with a little one who is discovering all of the magic of this place with his big beautiful fresh eyes and heart I think may be what this place is actually all about. It is the mood of everything here. The adults who live here for all or part of the summers are all crafting activities and projects and days to touch again and enjoy the wonder that is being a child on an island off the coast of Maine during the summertime. It is the central tone of everything we do here. Children and adults alike. I love that so much and I really love being back in the very center of the magic of this place with my own little one and with a deeper and more embodied understanding of the what and the why of it. 

Anyhow, that’s it. I’m feeling good and also feeling good about feeling good. That’s all. That’s enough.

anniversaries

Disclaimer to start. There is a lot of shit to unpack and disseminate in this post. In many ways, this is the launch pad post for the book I may or may not ever write. I’m gonna try to keep it short but there is a lot in here and I by no means want to make light of any of it. That is not what the brevity is about. If nothing else it is just me keeping it short enough to make sure I actually cough it up into the light of day, and this broader field of awareness, to begin with. 

Here’s the warning: I’m going to talk about God in this post, and abortion and pregnancy loss, infidelity and deceit and magical thinking, forgiveness and radical honesty, suicide and grief, yoga and sweat and tears. It is a lot in a little. If you need to skip it, I understand. If you do manage to read it, please, be gentle. Not just with me but with yourself and everyone who has made a mistake or been faced with a difficult choice or who has been in any way irreversibly altered by a life event. All of us. Be gentle. Be kind. I will keep trying to as well. 

Today marks the 8th anniversary of my abortion. I received care at the Planned Parenthood in the Third Ward of Milwaukee, a clinic that is currently unable to offer abortion services due to current state laws. Mind-boggling. Abortion at that time for me was both the only clear choice and also one which induced immense trauma and years of regret. More so even than the miscarriage that followed less than a year later. The decision for me involved choosing a third baby, which I had always longed for and wanted, or choosing my existing family and the work I needed to do in my marriage and on myself. I knew that being pregnant then was in nobody’s best interest, including a potential baby’s. And holy shit is there absolutely nothing worse in the world than suffering being pregnant when you don’t want to be.

In the winter months prior to this surprise pregnancy and subsequent termination, I had an affair with a friend of my husband. It is, I think, the darkest and most hurtful thing I have ever done in my life. And of course, my actions hurt (which is altogether too soft a word) the person whom I care for most in this whole wide world. I didn’t do it because I didn’t want to be with Chris, I did it because I was lost from myself, my relationship, and my life. It continue to feel so ashamed to admit that at 36 years old I still thought the external circumstances were responsible for my internal experiences. I was miserable and like a wild animal trapped in a domesticity it had never been designed for. I didn’t know how to read the signs or ask for help. I hadn’t yet learned to identify all of the parts of myself; their needs, their desires, their contradictions. There were reasons and a lot of shit living under the surface inside of me that led up to it. And yet none of them were enough, in a million years, to justify my actions or the pain I caused. It was bleak. I was naive and in my naivety, cruel. There was nothing more liberating and also excruciating than the eventual revelation of my infidelity and the deconstruction of my tower of lies. I was restored and reclaimed unto myself and, in the ultimate grace of my life, to Chris. And I, by no means ever want to make light or small the very real pain that he has had to tend to and do his own healing work with from the trauma that I induced. He is a brave and bold man to choose to rebuild a marriage and a life with a woman who decimated his sense of safety and trust when most of the culture tells you to cut bait or that an affair is a deal-breaker. It was not the easier path for him and he walks it anyway. I think we have done a remarkable job of rebuilding, but nothing in life is truly linear and we are awake to the reality of that.

So when we became pregnant right in the very early days of our recovery, it was simply too tender to consider. Yet even with that clarity, choosing to end that pregnancy was simultaneously the path forward for our family and one that I regretted for many years. Abortion laid me low. It wasn’t until the arrival of Wilfred over 5 years later that much of the grief and trauma that I carried from that choice abated. And honestly, I could, even when in the thick of my regret, see that it was in part a product of my own magical thinking in tandem with not understanding what the aftercare of abortion would entail. In the weeks and months following my D&C I spiraled into a hopeless pit of despair that I simply could not drag myself out of. I know now that much of that depression was a product of the quick and intense flush of hormones following an abortion. And yet my resulting lived experience was a feeling sense that I had betrayed almost every part of myself.

I remember a few weeks following, when I was truly in the thick of it and my tears were as vast as the salt sea, we shared a meal with some of Chris’ cousins by love. At that dinner when Courtney, in an honest and sincere effort to offer me comfort, told me that God has a plan for me- something that I find generally insensitive and trite and like a true bypass of very real feeling and experience- it landed as perhaps the kindest and most compassionate thing that anyone had done for me in my pain. I felt in that moment, and in the days and months and years following, the light of his faith like a gift and balm to my heart and soul. Not enough to convert me out of or into anything but instead a comforting and benevolent transmission of Grace or God’s Love or Consciousness or any other name that holds the truth of this mystical mood. Years later, when he ended his own life, I came again to reflect on his words from forever ago and saw the peace in them still, even within the chaos of unimaginable loss. It was in this way that it seemed to make striking sense when we found ourselves expecting Wilfred only 2 months after his death. The baby that he seemed to know we would welcome one day.

I was also comforted in the months following by regular therapy, time in the hot room practicing the OG 26+2, and in shifting our family lifestyle to a home and family-centered one. We began our home education journey the following fall and it turned us toward a path that was truly our own, authentic to us and to me in particular. It set me forward on the ultimate trajectory of reclamation, me as meg and me as mom, and how I truly wanted to embody all of the identities that build me into the woman I most truly am.

I did really sweat it out on my mat in earnest for many years. Funny enough, I just got an email in my inbox yesterday congratulating me on my 10-year anniversary of my very first hot yoga class. So funny to think that it has already been ten years when I often still feel so new to it, like such a beginner. I had been practicing for a good long while before ever stepping into the hot room and I suppose that explains it. It still feels new in a way to me. I suppose when you take the longview with practice and with life, that is a natural outcome: things stay new for a while. And really, what a helpmate that practice has been to me over the years. There is nothing like staring at myself in the mirror for the first 55 minutes of that sequence, boring a hole into my own eyes reflection while letting all of the noise in my head get all the way loud until the heat and the struggle become too much for anything extra. What follows is perfect silence, space, and peace. Sometimes clarity. Sometimes insight. Always peace. I owe a lot to my time in the hot room. Of all of the posture practices I feel well served by over the years, that one is at the top of the list.

Yesterday on the drive to Islesford I listened to most of Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lemnke. One of the strategies that she discusses for folks in recovery is what she calls Radical Honesty. For me, that has been a central and pivotal component piece to my own healing and is now built into the essential framework of my daily living. This refers to all of the big, and most of the time infinitesimal, mistruths we tell others, but to an even greater degree, that we tell ourselves. You see, I did not see myself falling into the darkness that led up to having an affair. It was incremental, one modification or acquiescence at a time. Hardly noticeable. So in the aftermath and my recovery and healing and reclamation, I realized I had to tell the truth about every single thing. Even the omissions that I tell myself are only intended to spare unnecessary discomfort for the recipient. And yes, I continue to be imperfect at this and I am forever a work in progress, but I track this shit for myself and do my best to attend to everything that needles me in a way so as to alert my attention to the calibration of my truth.

All of this (way too many words) to say: July 11th forever. Thank you for marking time and serving as the teacher/turning point in my own edification and becoming. I love that often when I am remembering this day, I am here in our Maine home, soaking in the salt air and feeling all of the ways that we heal here, time and time again. Coming home to our hearts and the time and space to reflect on all of it. And begin again.

* I have been sitting on sending this to publish, for obvious reasons. I needed Chris to read it first and I also needed to sit with how comfortable I am in exposing the parts of his story that are too intertwined with my own to parse out and protect. And how comfortable he is. It is tender and will be forever. We also had to ask and really get to the ground of why this sort of telling is of such importance to me, and the word that keeps on turning up for me is: Integration. My own unending efforting toward wholeness, connection, compassion, and… the integrity that informs and builds out an integrated life. So, it is with his blessing and his love that I share this but also with the understanding that I still feel strongly about protecting my husband’s peace, now and forever, and I would love for anyone reading this to try to hold that dear as well. xxx

always more blood

Order of operations. Things land in a particular sequence. Then they process. Then they integrate. And then maybe they even process some more. The first sort of circling stage is around my own particular nihilism about what the point of another personal telling could possibly be. But because I have staked so much of my meaning making in the dirt and muck of belief that the personal is what makes the universal, I know that to undervalue the purpose of my story too much is to undervalue it all. 

So there have been waves. Clear waves, murky waves, roiling waves, and so much endless churning as the SCOTUS override of Roe V Wade lands more deeply inside my body and my mind. And honestly, I don’t want to write about any of it. I have spilled so many words about abortion and miscarriage and bodies and blood and I am so tired. And the nihilist in me, which seems to be growing bigger and more keen every day, wonders what the point of any of that writing, spilling, rehashing, sharing, imploring, would serve anyway. 

Here is the wave sequence. I will do my best to keep it all as personal as possible. Why wouldn’t I? First, shock and numbness, obviously. And then the near simultaneous recognition by both my husband and my daughter that I too would be a dead mother had I not been able to receive emergency medical care in the form of the abortion procedure referred to as D&C, Dilation and Curettage, when I hemorrhaged from an incomplete miscarriage. That was the first real pain thought. Of which there have been many more and within which that particular one remains a constant. I would have died. 

And then I reflected on the D&C that I received the summer before my miscarriage and how if I hadn’t been able to get that care and had instead had a child, now a seven year old, I would most likely be more or less fine; I would in all likelihood be alive. However, my family as it exists today very well may not have made it. My marriage might well have buckled were we left with no choice to have another kid back then, my children would have lived different childhoods because of it, and on and on. A different world would certainly exist for us and I cannot really say if it would be better or worse than the one that we live in now with one another. But I would be alive.

Without the second D&C, I would not. And that is when my mind sprints in the direction of all of the bodies of people who will lose their lives, one way or another, without essential medical care. 

I consider (constantly) my homosexual daughter and her life. I consider all of my queer family and friends and their lives and families. And then all queer people. And then all people who have in any way had to fight for their rights one day or today and still. And basically then I remember that I do not want to write any of this or think any of this because the central unifying truth is that there is not one human being living in America who will not be adversely affected by this new dystopia. Beginning with the poorest of brown and black people and then spreading out and up from there like a contagion. And we know contagion now, don’t we?

This is a moment in time where the constant is this small and infinite truth: we will all lose. And well before our time. 

Yesterday morning as Maple and Wilfred and I rode the Mailboat from Islesford to Northeast for one last attempt to load my kid up with as many groceries as possible before leaving her on her own for a few weeks, we found ourselves on a boat surrounded by women. All different ages and from varying backgrounds and geographies. Within only a few minutes of being gathered up in this haphazard, random, and ever awkward way; talk turned to the shock, the pain, the grief, of a right now stripped that many of these women remembered securing in the first place. They were aghast. Stunned angry. Full of sorrow for all of the bodies set to lose this new Post Roe America. 

They all said the same thing: what can we do? Vote. Yes vote. Help other people vote. Yes that too. Please. And yet in a country where the clear majority is pro-choice, pro-womens health, pro-marriage equality, and all of the rest of what sanity, empathy, positive regard, concern and compassion, should make us pro for, it is clear that that is not the whole picture. It is the few that have the power, not the majority, and we need to wake up to it with a ferocity we haven’t quite yet fully embodied. Now is the time for the rage that drives the action. Our dissent must go all the way down to the very origin of us and not let up until we have secured the rights and freedoms that we have all, always, been worthy of.

So yes, vote. Yes, donate. Yes, call your reps. Yes, be as verbal within your spheres of influence as is right and appropriate to your wellbeing for you to be. It is all of this and something more. 

One last thing for now: I never want to in any way diminish the complexity of an issue such as Choice. I know that even with clarity and conviction, much often remains almost too difficult to bear at times. Choosing to have an abortion sucked for me. Needing to have one also sucked. A lot. But being able to get them and receive love and care and compassion within a structure of support, that is something I want for every single one of us. Now and always. 

chick a little

Everyone in the household is at varying degrees of under the weather, including myself. It makes sense I suppose as a natural response to the school year suddenly slamming to a halt. I mean it wasn’t a surprise and yet we certainly weren’t prepared for it, ya know? All three kids are upstairs sleeping right now. So strange. I got up after falling asleep with Wilfred for a bit, and took a rapid test, and made a cup of tea. Then feeling at a total loss for what to do with myself if I am not to be driving them around to their typical afternoon activities, did what I do best when I am either flailing or avoiding and got on my mat. I remember yeeeeeears ago Christina saying something along the lines of a little movement and breath when you are under the weather seems like maybe more use than just laying still. I stick to that mostly. And maybe it is just that sitting still continues to be the most difficult posture of all. 

Unless it is sitting and staring at the baby chicks, of course, which I have been doing ohhhh so much this week. I keep reflecting on why I am so very enamored with these little home hatches, more so than our mail order freshies. I mean, I always love them all. This is just a bit different somehow. I keep looking out into the hen yard and wondering if any of those hens know that they are mommies? I mean, do they? It seems both ridiculous and somehow important. 

The chicks themselves are so hardy and hale. Like the degree to which they are from this little stamp of land stretches so far past their hatch and their 21 day incubation and into the two years that their mama hens and papa rooster have scratched and foraged across it.

These little chicklets are clarifying for me what it is I will and will not do with chicks in the future: I won’t order and rather do these hatches for fun and then fill in with breed specific pullets as needed. That is somehow a very relaxing clarification for me. And I think I am learning from this distinction in a few other ways as well. I tend toward such all or nothing thinking and then behaviors especially when it comes to homesteading and home-educating and home life in general that these specifications and differentiations, however slight, feel deeply liberating. Like some > none (or all, maybe even especially some > all) really does apply to most things for me. 

Anyhow, Wilfred is up now and practice is over and as ever I am uncertain whether I made the most of my time to myself or not. I don’t feel very well after all and maybe I just got my period to boot. So we will eat popsicles on the porch and play with race cars for a bit and I will try to ease my mind and my body toward the next thing without too much worry or overcomplication. At least I will attempt that. It is imperfect which feels like the on-going reckoning of me with myself.

watching

Last night Wilfred didn’t want any stories read to him. He wanted to nurse briefly, then drink a little more milk with Chris, snuggle and get into his bed. I wasn’t surprised. It had been a difficult day for him and I am learning so much about the particular ways in which he processes difficulty. I also wasn’t at all surprised when he woke up at one am asking for “Dada to please rock him for a bit”.

Yesterday had been the last day of the Robin’s Nest playgroup at the North Branch Nature Center. We have been trying to be regular there to prepare Wilfred for 2 days of Forest Preschool this coming fall. He loves it. The mud kitchen, the chalk rocks, the stacking stumps, pebble beach and the bridge over the river; and especially the wheelbarrows. As far as he is concerned, the two that live in the playscape belong to Freddy.

And yet, of course, they do not. They live at the playscape for all of the children to use. And sometimes the kids will tolerate Wilfred taking a wheelbarrow out of their hands, especially when someone near points out that the second one is available. This was not however the case when he took it out of a little one’s hands yesterday. This child was all the way upset, yelling and sobbing and all the rest. Freddy meanwhile pretending that he could not hear or see any of it as he slowly attempts to disappear with his prize into some nearby tree cover. The little boy, after a time seemingly somewhat calmer, wandered over and wrapped his arms around Freddy’s whole body. It seemed like a hug. They got very still and it was not until a few moments passed that we understood that the little boy had sunk his teeth deep into Freddy’s cheek.

Wilfie howled. Not initially but he got there. And I swooped in and other mom swooped in and did all of the things that the mother of the kid from my last post did not: looked me in the eyes and apologized, comforted her kid who was obviously super upset and she also neither condoned his behavior or forced an arbitrary and irrelevant apology out of him. All in all, to her response, I say good job mom. She modeled all of the behavior that it is so important for our little ones to learn.

In a lot of ways, the “incident”, is less where my attention is in this instance. it is Rather it is on witnessing and understanding Wilfred’s response, what it may indicate or mean about his internal processing and what lessons he may be wiring for himself around trauma and embodiment. I am watching my son. And here is what I am noticing: in both of these events, Wilfred gets very still, he almost freezes, and then he takes it. He does eventually begin to cry, but not immediately, and he at no point ever tries to fight back or get away. He stays in place and absorbs what is happening. Y’all, it is intense to witness. Like time has slowed down and everything gets first very obscure, followed shortly by extra hi-def. And I do wonder if he is learning to leave his body, or if he is able to stay. It is hard to tell.

This time, even though he was clearly in a lot of pain, he stopped crying relatively quickly. I held him and hugged him and cooed in his ear for as long as he would let me. But he became extra remote and withdrawn, like he was burrowing deeper inside of himself somewhere, or perhaps leaving. He still held on to the stolen wheelbarrow, and we still walked down to the river, but he couldn’t quite meet it and I did end up carrying him the whole long way back to our parked car.

Eider had gone down with us so we could check out yet another school option for the next year, so he helped me manage all of the things and did his very best to help me cheer his little bro up. We stopped and took a dip in the swimming hole for the first time this year (success!), we stopped for ice cream (not so successful). And then it was a long nap and an afternoon of snuggles and now the subsequent tenderness that has followed. He is doing great, and still not entirely himself yet. I am trying to learn from this as best I can and connect some dots across time and space into and from my understanding of my two older children and all of the ways that they process and hold and dissociate and come back and release.

Which makes this perhaps the perfect moment to switch this telling from Wilfred to Eider, who in current time is the child that I lie in bed thinking about last thing at night, and wake up worried over again in the morning. He, right now, is the riddle for whom I continue to find no viable solution. I am constantly looking for the path forward and coming up empty handed time and time again. You may recall that a few months ago we were all getting very jazzed about the prospect of sending Eider to “yurt school” for eighth grade in the coming year. It is a local independent place-based school with a big ‘ol emphasis on child-led learning and time outside. I think it is an ideal fit for him at this particular stage in his education. It is not nearly so big as a “regular” school but with enough other kids to form relationships without getting cliquey, and it is not dependent on me to motivate and drive his learning on my own; a task that has become incredibly grueling over the past couple of years. Anyhow, I had been under the impression that yurt school takes the tuition voucher from our town which is what would make it a viable option for us. They do not.

It is a lengthy process to become an approved independent school (versus a registered one) in the state of Vermont. There are far more hoops to jump through and information to provide and prove and it has to be done every 5 years to maintain status. It’s a lot. And yet, as far as I can tell this area desperately needs an alternative 7-12 grade option. Especially with a local town that has no public option after sixth grade. And to be able to receive tax money for tuition opens up so much more opportunity for kids who want an alternate schooling option and/or are really not going to be well served in the public school setting, regardless of family income.

To be clear, I think that Eid would be ok in public school. Ok, not great. He would certainly need the support of an IEP or a 504 plan or both. And he would need constant advocacy so that he doesn’t either shut down from the difficulty or fall through the obvious and plentiful cracks. The reason Maple is thriving as a neurodivergent learner in a public school setting is because she a special type of unicorn that refuses to take any shit from her peers or her teachers. She is constantly advocating for herself and her particular learning style. She fights for her education every day. Not everyone is like that! Eid certainly isn’t. He is a peacekeeper not a justice seeker. Both are great. One has significantly better odds of making it in a mainstream system than the other. And like I said, maybe he’d be ok. But in my heart it feels like gambling on that is a near neighbor to sacrificing my kid. Which it feels like most of us are doing enough of one way or another every god damn day already.

As caregivers we are always the watcher of our kids, the collector of clues, a decoder of what they are saying as it relates to what they are longing for. I am studying them now. Trying to find the appropriate pathways in for each of them. It is tense. And it is far from easy. And as much as I wish I were better at putting it down it is my preoccupation as well as my occupation. I have built a life around equipping them with the tools they need to find as much connection and fulfillment as they are capable of. I want them to hold the maps to their own wellbeing and know all the ways in which to orient them.

So I study the ways in which they shut down, shut out, lash out, disengage, alienate, and isolate. It is fucking heartbreaking and it is incredibly real. All while keeping the small hand of little meg in my heart’s hand so that I can continue to provide her with the compassion she needs from her own childhood trauma while at the same time not mistaking mine for my kid’s.

This weekend, I posted briefly on the socials about the image versus the reality, the picture I paint as opposed to how we perhaps more truly are, how we feel instead of how we appear. I try to be as transparent as I can with all of that. While at the same time constantly reorienting myself toward joy and gratitude and abundance that is neither toxic and false, or delusional and irrelevant. I want to keep pointing myself in the direction of whole-heartedness, and my family too. So I seek out images and feelings that reflect that. But I want to be sure I also relay the truth of what an asshole my kid is being lately, or how fucking scared I am for them in every other breath. It’s real y’all. And it is messy. As all get out. But it is also so fucking beautiful that it almost breaks me, I mean, maybe I am actually all the way broken already. So, I cannot sacrifice them. Or myself. Or any of us really. There need to be better options, for my kids but really for all of our kids. Cuz that is what they really are, ya know? All of our beautiful, perfect, horrible, cruel, transcendent, wise, innocent, children. All of ours.

this week some.

The Hermit Thrushes are out en force on our hillside these days. They have come to embody the fullness of the Green Season in Vermont as well as in Maine. I love their etheric song. If home were a sound to me, it might be that. I am listening to them right now, in the woods that surround the clearing that our house sits on, and looking out at the pink-blue-purple-orange of another gorgeous late spring sunset. I can also see from this spot the new big cedar fence posts that Chris put in today framing out the new, much larger, and thankfully contained from the chickens, garden plot. It is something that we have been talking about for awhile but for me it has felt so theoretical that it wasn’t really until today, with the posts in and four yards of compost delivered, that I am beginning to feel some confidence that a space for me to plant and putz and dream and grow is actually about to emerge. It has me a bit giddy at the prospect. Like a door in my heart that I wasn’t quite sure could unstick itself open again is beginning to relax and release and finally, finally! letting a little light in.

Earlier in the week Wilfred had his six month evaluation with his speech and language providers through our school district. It was great in many regards: he is making headway. And yet what I have been digesting all week are terms and phrases such as 25%+ delay, and IEP, and disability. I do not experience him through the lens of terms and diagnostic verbage at all, and yet I understand it’s function and purpose and I do support it. But I am also concerned and pausing a little bit in my consideration of what it means for him within the wider scope of his life. I worry a bit, ya know?

He is so excellent, really. He just recently got his balance bike and is an absolute wiz on it just like Maple and Eider both were. Bold and little reckless and extra enthusiastic. Chris has been taking him some nights to the pump track out in Hyde Park and Freddy rides around and around and around for miles. It is incredible and he is beyond exhausted while at the same time never ready to quit. He was extra tired like that yesterday morning when I brought him to the weekly playgroup out in Johnson. He loves it there, and anywhere really where there are kids to play with and things to climb on. That seems to be a pretty reliable formula for Freddy Joy.

Yesterday there was a little bit of an older kid that we haven’t met before at the group. Maybe six or so years old. And right away he honed in on Freddy, grabbing things out of his hands, blocking him, pushing him. I just kept my eye on it. Wilfred is so cheerful and bright that he did a sweet job of shaking it off for the most part. Until of course he couldn’t. As I was beginning to gather our things up to head out I looked over and saw about 4 or 5 kids sardined into this little wooden train car and this kid just wailing on him. Punching and punching his chest while Freddy sat there, receiving each blow and crying. I ran over, called for the adults: Hey, its getting a little punchy over here! And his mom came over and grabbed him- I am holding wilfs at this point who is still sobbing, he sobbed the whole half hour drive home. And instead of looking at my kid, checking in with him and me to see if he is ok, apologizing for her kids behavior she instead tries to extract an apology from her son to Wilfred, which in my opinion is the exact fucking wrong thing to do. Totally useless and reinforces his shit behavior. And is such a perfect example of our aversion to connecting to one another’s humanity or taking any ownership of action. It is of far greater effect for her to reach out with actual empathy and concern for my kid, and in doing so model to her own what behavior is appropriate and necessary. She never even made eye contact with me. And her kid never really got to experience what it is to have genuine regard for someone else’s feelings and wellbeing.

It pissed me off. And I was already tender and part numb, as I am sure most of us are this week. Probably, maybe, this other mother too. Freddy cried the whole way home and I did too, for my own kid who maybe was picked on because he is such a cutie bright light or maybe because he can’t really talk in a way that other kids can understand. But I also cried, and keep on crying for all of my kids and all of the kids and all of us really who are on our own in a world that doesn’t give a fuck about our health or our wellbeing or our safety.

I know it is about guns this week. Just like every other week. I think that I am finally really beginning to understand the degree to which it is all the same thing: all of these problems, regular ‘ol atrocities that we co-exist with on the daily, are the same. At least the root cause is. Power over versus power with or power of or power for. Anti-abortion legislation, corrupt gun laws riddled with loopholes, pervasive cultural misogyny, racism, anti-trans bills, growing anti-asian and anti-semitic sentiment. The patriarchy depends on the clear and concise delineation of this versus that. They need the binary: of gender, of race, of class. It is an implicit necessity for the power over dynamic to function. It is not about regard or concern for anything other than that which lines their pockets and ensures the perpetuation of the machine that is Modern America. We have a standard to uphold, after all.

I am gutted this week. I think we all are. Jesus I fucking hope we all are.

Every time Maple hopped in the car this week, she’d flip the radio off first thing. Insulating herself from it a little bit I guess… It is so regular, you know? Just what happens in America. And we are so accustomed that even our trauma response is recognizable. We feel hopeless and overwhelmed, we feel pissed and ambitious, we feel numb. Rinse and repeat indefinitely with each passing news cycle. We know what we have to bear. She said that none of her teachers really even mentioned the shooting in Uvalde this week. I guess I understand that. How do you talk to kids about something that you cannot protect them from? They know better. No one has their backs after all. They were never promised to be kept safe in this system, only taught how to hide in classrooms and construct barricades with school supplies. So I get why this one wasn’t processed and instead is left to fester and corrode any of their hope that may, by some impossible grace, remain.

It seems that the only real space to occupy in this landscape is one of post-hope. As though that were a mood that applied to a different world entirely, one made up of summer gardens and easy afternoons on the lake, or, at other times of year, perhaps a casual winter ski. But hope is not something that can be left to apply to having a home, having a body, having a life that is ever ours to simply live. As though that might in and of itself be enough. Amid the grief of this post-hope apocalypse I am endeavoring to work a bit with following my feelings down into their dark origins and balancing that with some clear action items. Here is some of what I have so far:

Donate to Mom’s Demand Action and text ACT to 64433 to get set up with your local chapter.

Donate to the City of Uvalde’s fund for the victim’s families.

Contact your legislators to demand common sense gun reform.

Talk openly with your friends and family: if they or you have firearms at home, are they securely kept in locked and restricted access safes?

Attend your local school board meetings and make your voice heard regarding every single issue that effects the safety and wellbeing of all of our children.

Self-care in not selfish and everyone needs an ally. Motherwort tincture is an excellent plant friend for attending the particular anxiety that lives inside of grief. I find these strategies immensely important when the overwhelm and hopelessness creeps in. (and yes 100% cbd+thc and R E S T)

Do not shy away from your pain my dears. Let it stir the action that lives inside of your rage and heartbreak.

So, in an effort to not let the cultural numbing agents drip their soporific forgetfulness into my heart and soul, I am working to stay up close to our collective pain. The art and poetry coming out of this time are helpful to me in that effort. One of my best poetry buds shared the following poem this week. It hits hard and right and true.

By Katie Bogue
”It's going to be within, like 40 minutes or something, (within) an hour"

Go to the hospital when contractions are 5 minutes apart

labor for 390 minutes

push for 120 minutes

the nurses say the baby will want to feed every 60 minutes
(it feels like he’s feeding every 11 minutes)

you sleep for about 240 minutes every night, never in a row

the pediatrician tells you screen time is 20 minutes, max—but you maybe push it to 30 (or 50)

if their morning snack gets pushed back by 23 minutes they won’t take their nap (you need them to take their nap) and it throws off their whole day

it takes them 17 minutes to tie their shoes, 9 minutes to ask a question, 13 minutes to drive with you to school, 4 seconds to say “I love you.”

So, officer are you saying they were in terror for 40 minutes or 1 hour?

were they huddled together in classrooms for 47 minutes or 56?

were they bleeding their precious lives on to the sticky floor for 35 minutes or was it 37?

how do you leave a single minute vaguely addressed when we’ve accounted for every second of their lives

landing

This day sucked me dry and even so there has been the slightest glimmer of a notion that I may want to string some words together in this space for the first time in actual months, and so here I am. It has not been easy. I know I do not need to be telling you that and I am mostly positive that anyone on the receiving end of anything I put down is mostly in the same boat. Either it is internet trending right now or simply just so solidly on my radar that I am catching snippets at most every turn regarding a new and more equitably distributed definition of burnout. As in, everyone is experiencing it. And if I am understanding this expanded definition clearly it is meant to encapsulate the feeling of numbness associated with an absence of inspiration, a lack of motivation, and a near laughable dissociation with anything remotely resembling joei de vivre. That sounds about right. I had been trying to convey to my friends and family and myself for the past several months that I really feel quite like what I imagine a flat line to feel like. That is: nothing.

And so, it has been hard to write. Or I have avoided it. Not because there haven’t been words, but rather because the meaning of those words breaks my heart if I am in a space where I can manage in any way to have feelings. Sometimes I do. Have feelings that I can feel that is.

But now, that I am maybe beginning to see some glimmer of light, moving in slow, near impossible to perceive glimmers of waves just above the horizon of that flat line, maybe now it is safe to say a thing or two. Now that the darkness is not quite so absolute for the moment. However, I do not want to talk about how it has been. No, not that. That is too thick and familiar to so many of us that my own telling of the suffering that is life in the here and now (even a very charmed and privileged version) is too much the 2020s cliche. I will not. I abstain from that trope for now.

Instead, I am interested in any of the little bits of life that might be catching any authentic interest from myself right now. What are they? Where do they live in me? How can I best be of service to them without smothering them with the desperation of my desire to experience anything remotely resembling hope or purpose or, good lord maybe even passion? I gotta go lightly here as it were, cuz I know the parameters of my hidey-hole real well and it fits me just right. And it wants to for forever as far as I can tell.

I have been experimenting a little bit with differing combinations of THC and CBD, in edibles or oil. (not to worry, I still fucking hate smoking weed and being stoned is maybe one of the worst states that I can possibly conceive of for myself- none of that has changed.) But I am finding that I can lighten just enough of my mental burden and sometimes even most of my anxiety with just a few mgs of the two in tandem. I am getting some relief where before I really was not. I was nearly surrendered to the unending and uninspired monotony of my existence. Even when I knew (I know!) full well that I have more than my share to be beyond grateful for and inspired by. For real. It has just been concealed for longer than I am accustomed to and the muscles I had once used to rescue myself from my own shadow apparently atrophied in the three years since my big life transition that was swallowed by a global pandemic turned endemic. Which, as far as I can tell, simply means the new and forever truth of being in which we cannot unsee or unlearn the glaring inequity and misogyny and racism and classism upon whose backs all of our structures have been built. Anyway.

Something else that I have been doing since our return from Costa Rica which is by no means experimentation and is by every measure a homecoming is to leave my house twice a week to take place in a weight-lifting and metabolic conditioning class two towns over. It is every bit as fabulous as I knew it would be. A sweet and particular blend of unapologetic radical movement into and of myself. It is love by any measure. Plus, there is something about that sort of gym camaraderie that I have always found so wonderful and satisfying. Like everyone is there including your mom and your granddad and your kid and we are all just gonna try hard shit and see how it goes today. I love that. It satisfies something in me that is unmet by other means. And there is real medicine in my leaving my house all by myself to be in service only to me for a stretch of minutes that is fundamentally essential and too long absent in my weekly rhythms. I am reclaiming some shit now.

I am also considering the things that I obsess over regarding my kids and their wellbeing and education as something that is not outside the “value” of my attention and my efforts. I think that I may be steering in the direction of some additional work that doesn’t have a paycheck associated with it and understanding the value and worth of that in my life and in the world. In specific, I am working on getting Eider enrolled in “yurt school”, a local place-based small private pk-8 start-up school. They need to jump through some paperwork and approval hoops in order to be able to accept the tuition vouchers from the school districts that do not offer past certain grades (such as ours). This seems like an absolute no-brainer top of the list priority in my book, especially in an area without many alternative options at the middle and high school levels, especially if you want to expand into high school, and especially in an area and at an age when homeschool kids begin to dwindle and settle for whatever schooling options are local (and free) to them. Unless of course if the admin is completely oblivious to this and has no difficulty in remaining the area’s local “rich kid school”. Ahem. I mean, up to them I guess. But I am not going down without a fight on this one. I can fill out paperwork and pester school boards just as well as the next person, so this might be the mountain I die on. At least this year.

The other bee in my bonnet this spring has to do with Maple’s high school and services that the kids are needing there that very well may be mine to give. A couple of weeks ago I taught a little yoga to the Peoples Academy/Stowe High School track and field team. It was just how you thought it would be: some kids interested, some kids not, and a whole lot of variation in between. But it occurred to me while we were out there stretching and breathing under a hot Tuesday sun, that everyone needs someone to help them find their way back to embodied presence and offer up some compassion and empathy for the shit show that is being alive right now. Especially young people. It hasn’t been easy for any kid, as I am reminded every day by my own, who at the very least have support structures in place to access and accommodate to their needs day to day. That seems like the bare minimum to me, and yet… So, I am going to make an attempt at the very least. I am pitching a 1-2x week Yoga and Mindfulness class for the high schoolers to pop into during what they call “flex”. I think that means free time or choice time or something like that. We will see how it goes. Most likely it will be a project that starts up in the fall. But it feels right and it feels like some of the best use of me at this moment in my life.

Both of these efforts do honestly. Like this chapter is not so much about letting my kids go into the arms of their next educator so much as collaborating on how best to fill in the obvious gaps and absences that exist in the structures. I think I have some work to do here and it is both surprising and exciting. I have never been able to take a passive stance around my kids’ education or the culture of their childhoods, and this work feels demonstrative of that at a different level. I may not want to be a primary educator of a middle or high schooler the way that I still do for a younger kid, but I definitely want to help build and support the systems in conscious and meaningful ways. And what I am learning is that that desire to help is not just for my own kids, but for all kids, and at this older- oft-forgotten age- in particular.

All right. That is that for now. Keep on keeping on my dears. As you are able. Or take a nap and know that that is good too. loves.

rest/trust/grow

At some point during our time in Maine last summer, I gave up my efforts to keep Wilfred napping in his crib on his own. Up until that point, I would nurse him, read a few books, sing a song, and put him in his space with a blackout tent and a sound machine and let him fall to sleep on his own. We still do something similar at night and up until that point, it had been an excellent rhythm for naps as well. But whether it was simply a developmental shift that he would have hit regardless of where we were or was something brought on by less familiar sleeping locales, he started to resist our routine and I threw in the towel. So, from sometime just before he turned two, I have been reading and snuggling and nursing him to sleep. Still with the white noise, minus the blackout. And honestly, it was a decision that has felt just right to my heart. I always fall asleep with him for at least 10 minutes, lately for an hour or so and it is warm and cozy and restful and close in a way that I am so grateful to get to have with him.

It was perhaps a bit more challenging to love this pattern up until I finally night weaned him in early December. Physically, I was running on empty to such a huge degree that it was hard to perceive how I really felt about our setup and also because I still felt so tethered at night that I craved some semblance of autonomy during rest time. Even though I was so tired. So very, very tired. But I would get up more frequently in those days once he was asleep, and sneak quietly to the door, opening it in that particular way that only Chris or I know to do to keep it from squeaking and creep downstairs for some tea and to either move my body or try to work a bit or do any single thing that could for some precious moments claim me as my own.

It was exhausting. Even though it felt necessary. I am much more content with it this way even if that means I essentially no longer take much time for myself during the day. My practice time has shortened significantly. I write very infrequently, and I do the work of teaching yoga and selling skincare very sporadically and inconsistently. Now, I am snuggling my growing son, my last child, and I am burying my face into his round cheeks and fuzzy head and in so doing weaving pathways between him and I that stretch back into the years that I snuggled Maple and Eider in the same way. The two of them never napped independently and while that was often a struggle for me at the time- people use the phrase “nap-trapped” now and it is utterly apt- one day it was over and outside of the occasional random nap and snuggle with Eider- never Maple- it was done and I missed the regularity of that soft closeness with my children.

So much of parenting is discovering that one moment has ended and the next has begun. That once again it is time to figure out how to be in the new configuration of things even if you were just beginning to understand, appreciate, or simply surrender to the previous moment. One of the gifts of Wilfred is knowing that this is the way of things enough to slow down in the space that I occupy with him and remember that once he was quite wee and one day he will be well grown and my role in his life is to love and support and shore up the perilous edges until he is able to do so for himself. My role with the big kids these days is the same. Love, support, guide as needed (or wanted. or appropriate), and shore up the perilous edges until they are capable of doing so for themselves. And perhaps also recognize the non-linear nature of living and growing and tending. Whether it is tending our people or tending ourselves. I am learning that in new ways these past few months it seems. Bigger, deeper, more difficult, and maybe, hopefully, with lasting significance and lifelong relevance.

And wow if you have read this far, congrats to making it to the heart of these thoughts. Because while it is interesting and widely applicable to commiserate over the parenting of young children, it feels much more pressing to rally around the conscientious parenting of young adults as they grow into their agency and independence and their own sovereign voice within the heart of their own lives.

As I have traversed the sludge of the past several months, I have also been easing through the murky waters of parenting and caring for a teenage daughter. And somewhere along the way, I unearthed a wound in myself whose depth and gravity I had grossly underestimated. My own outcast teen. 

It is funny and also strange, and not at all either, the way in which we travel to our own childhoods by virtue of our kids. Especially once they reach the ages in which our memories are thicker and more prevalent. In all truth, I do not think about my teenage years all that often and having wandered into those woods these past months I can see that my avoidance of this particular time in my childhood is rooted in my own belief structure around The Bad Teenager archetype. As an adult, I think I have been just as complicit as the primary adults in my life and the culture at the time were in crafting that particular narrative. 

And as I truly work to understand my own teenage daughter; her strengths, her vulnerabilities, the places where room for structured support and love and regard and guidance live in her young life; I am unable to recall ever being asked after as a teen. Not in how I was feeling or doing, not in what I might be wanting or needing, or really any engagement at all of interest in the young woman I might be becoming. Instead, it was assumed that I was a typical teen, up to no good, engaged in nefarious behaviors, keeping community with a crew of bad influences. And while a lot of that is true, it is true alongside something else entirely which is the narrative of a young person with a home that was absent of emotional, and at times, physical safety in which questions that weren’t already making assumptions about their answers were never asked, and who I was growing into felt like the least significant thing in our family culture. 

Which, honestly, I can understand. I think much of the world was crafted that way in the 90s. Which is also why I consider myself complicit in my delay at unearthing the wounds of my own teenage self. But, ready or not… 

I have shared countless pieces of writing about the grace and grit of being maple’s mom. Christ, I’ve been sharing personal shit online since she was nine. And I have, over the last 5 years or so, processed the nitty-gritty of my life with her, in particular, less and less and less out loud. Per her request, but also per my own gut and my own evolving understanding and occasional doubt of how personal stories are the most universal and are often the entry points for our deeper understanding of our own humanity in all of its imperfect messiness. Indeed, I am a believer in sharing the real and the raw, and the true. And yet. Sometimes it is a fucking painstaking slog. This is one of those times. 

Indeed it is why I have been so quiet with my out-loud voice lately. I have been churning and churning into old griefs I didn’t know I had and also working my ass off to be a good mother to my kids. That has involved a lot of my quiet. And all of my attention. 

And while the tale is only in part mine to tell,  do believe it deserves a broader audience, especially in light of the reactions that our telling has received so far in our smaller audiences. So here. Maple crashed in February. It has been building for a long time. Maybe forever. She has always interfaced with anxiety and what those of us that know her have thought of as “her quirky mapleness”. Which is wonderful and amazing at times, and run for your life horrifying at others. She has been seeing a therapist since mid-November. A godsend in all ways and sadly something I should have taken the initiative with (as her mother!) and got going for her long before then. But we vetted him, as one does, especially when one has spent a good amount of time in therapy herself and oh yeah has also worked her ass off in raising an emotionally fluent child. Any ‘ol counselor was not going to do the trick for moo. So hers, who is doing the trick and then some, has a background in Jungian psychotherapy and also utilizes tools such as emdr to good effect with her. So there was a net in place thank god when the bottom dropped out. 

Of course, of course, the fall happened the very first week Chris was on the road in two years. A kid in class said something horrible to her that she simply couldn’t either deflect or absorb and it unraveled her to a degree to which being in school wasn’t an option and an emergency trip to our primary was suddenly our only agenda. The boys and I held space for all of it as best we could and as her care team linked arms we agreed to collaborate on a plan of care for her. A few weeks later, when she and Chris were home on their own for a week, she made it back in for a follow-up during which we agreed that some action was necessary and we chose to introduce a low dose of Prozac for moo. 

It was an easy decision for us. Not simple, and not straightforward, but relatively easy. We had to weed through some of our own personal baggage and biases around medication, but we both were very clear that the decision was not about us and all about moo and what she needs and how she feels and how much she has been asked to bear by virtue of our unintentional negligence in this regard. She was carrying a load that was one she could manage, but just barely and with great difficulty. It was not necessary for her to do so. A perfect living example of “just because you can doesn’t mean you should." Easier said than done in a world that favors independence in the form of isolation and grinning and bearing as a strategy for success.

The transition to being medicated was rugged. As she adjusted and her energy lifted so much anger and grief and frustration that had been pooling just below the surface overflowed into form; there were so many tears. But as she settled, she has been able to process years of patterning that she had developed as a strategy for coping with what has been an underlying dis-ease for years. From deep hopelessness to passive and diffuse thoughts of self-harm. She was not ok. But she was able to manage enough to limp through her low days in a way that perpetuated the cycle but never relieved her of any of the suffering.

Now that we have this broader perspective of this particular journey of Maple’s, and ours as her family, it has been both alarming and disheartening, to see that many of her friends and peers are struggling in different yet similar ways, who also have the support of therapists and doctors recommending mitigation in the form of medication, but whose parents refuse the suggestion for one reason or another. We hear accounts of this near every day right now. Another of her friends whose parents say that they just need to change up some supplements or get more exercise, or this particular one which we hear more than I can even believe: that they should try smoking (more) weed. Yeah. Cuz that is working so well for the parents I am sure. I can testify that that was my strategy through much of my teens and it did many things to shift my perspective, but easing my anxiety and depression not so much.

It is incredible that there can be all of this chatter about destigmatizing mental health and medication and that it is often the ones that are preaching the need to drop the stigma that are doing all they can to push it forward. It is strange. And trust me I get the internal struggle around the narrative, I do, but I am more interested in engaging a reality in which young people are supported in their personal becoming; a world in which teens are not vilified simply because of their age; and where parents are supported in differentiating between their own childhoods and those of the people they are raising. None of this is simple, but I think all of it is easier than we might suppose. And infinitely more worthwhile.

Life is fucking hard. It is hard to have a body, it is hard to have a mind, it is hard not to distort one thing for another and it is harder still to not sacrifice one part of ourselves in favor of another. I do not have many answers, and I reserve the right to grow and evolve my opinions and perspectives over time. But I also aim to stay awake for as much of this messy life as I can and be in right relationship with reality as it meets me and my family day to day. It’s not too late to forgive or to make amends or to try again, not yet.

some saturday words

Braved the detritus at the end of a difficult week and asked my people for help (HELP!!) - sometimes the hardest ask- so that I could get a minute, a moment, to myself at the start of the weekend before Chris is gone for the week and I am leading the charge for all of the things. Maple showed up for me and braved a few hours of tears with a little boy- her brother- who wanted so badly his mother/her mother and nothing that she steered him toward could shake the sorrow of that separation. 

But I took a 26&2 class in MY VERY OWN TOWN and when I walked in studio owner and teacher G was wearing a shirt that said: Beg, Steal, Borrow; and I cannot make this shit up that was my mantra as I peeled myself out of my daily track and into my car and down the hill and through the door of this new space. And I started a relationship today with the infrared heat in that space and the wonder that is subtle yet deep heat from the inside versus set to sear from the outside. It has me curious and excited to explore practice + teaching in that climate. 

I left yoga to texts of overdrawn accounts and inconsolable toddlers and gave myself a mental bravo high five for not being too distraught over either. Shit happens and I am doing my best which by the way is enough even when it hurts and folks get frustrated. 

Then braved poorly timed car naps and paltry snack situations for some snow and ski play before the freeze thaw cycle that starts up again tomorrow. Maybe we will get the trees tapped now. Maybe not. But time spent in play is still the very best time. And the way that Chris smiles at me when Wilfred skis fast into Eider’s arms and Eider embraces him as only he can is just about every single thing that caused me to incarnate to begin with. 

And it continues to be strange and beautiful and tragic to me that choosing myself over my kids is such an impossibility. That in my fatigue and emptiness, I still rather play with them or listen to them or drive them than fill my own cup, because their cups are still mine too… For the time being, or forever, and I feel the cliche and small death in that even as I fight to choose something new. Something distinct. Something that maybe can place one foot in both worlds. 

I don’t know. But I am learning new lessons these days and it is uncomfortable as ever and stretching me in some new ways and I think I can do it even though sometimes I cannot imagine how I could ever love myself more than them and see into form the next chapter of our lives through today’s heavy curtain of tears, and hope, and promise. Forgiveness, and compassion, and generosity continue to be the path forward and my faltering steps continue to follow it. Imperfectly as ever. Dissolving and becoming with each one.

separation anxiety

Clearly, February was not a month for writing. Or meditating really, if I am honest. I think for a lot of February I was just working on surviving, and while it is a bummer that I didn’t stay within the practices that serve me the most in those efforts, I am just gonna go ahead and forgive myself from the get-go and move the fuck along.

In part, shit got busier in late January. Chris moved into a new position at work which means double the workload and a return to travel- for the first time in two years. Um, obviously? And the team that we once were when pops is on the road is bigger by one and we have not quite gotten our legs under us as a new older (and younger) team of 4. Work-wise, it is a great move for Chris and I am thrilled for him. It is just going to take a little bit of acclimation for all of us and probably a year of Chris adapting and expanding into his new role. I am ok with both.

Of course, the first time that he was away we had some massive mental health stuff explode in our new squad of four. It was a long time coming and clearly just awaiting the perfect storm and I guess that week was that. Much of the month was spent navigating that- which of course is deeply sensitive and personal and not for sharing here, at least not at this moment in time. The main thrust I suppose is that life was a lot, both in our little family and, quite clearly, in the world at large.

It was good to get away for a few weeks. Out of the snow and into the warm sunshine. All of our bodies got some color for the first time in what feels like forever, and that in itself feels like life and health in a way that seems so basic and fundamental and, for me at least, so necessary. That part was great. It was all of the adjusting to new circumstances that was confusing and hard to navigate. It seems that on a macro level, we are re-orienting to the fact that our hopes of a definitive end to the pandemic are fantasy and that now the task is in learning how to live along with Covid-19 for the foreseeable future. Mask mandates are lifting and life seems to be asking us to resolve our differences and get on with it already. It doesn’t mean I don’t still think you are an asshole for not getting vaccinated, but I am no longer interested in thinking about it, let alone talking about it. I am ready to stop masking my family unless we are unwell and I am ready to begin hanging out with my neighbors.

So, on my level, this need to adjust is running deep. While we were away, and I had access to the help and support of my family, Wilfred was unable to tolerate anyone’s care but my own. It was real, and it was a lot. Time away turned into time on and even more all mom all the time vibes. He has separation anxiety like I never experienced in Maple or Eider. And I suppose it makes sense. His life has been so rhythmic and regular and insular in a way that theirs never was. Limited when theirs was wide. And shamefully, I have to admit, that there was a part of me that thought this level of anxiety in littles had more to do with some fault in parenting, and while some of that may hold true, it seems that other than adverse circumstances, it is far more random than that.

I am tired. And my family needs connection. And some kind of larger support and integration. I am ready for that. Even if it means that it is time to up our risk and exposure in order to form bonds that buoy us more than my own will.

All of this, in my small sphere, running inside the larger framework of the world as it continues to unravel and Ukrainians brace themselves against the will of Russian Authoritarianism. As they are invaded and asked to either evacuate or pick up arms, I keep on thinking of how much separation anxiety we all carry. On one level or another. I listened to an interview of a Ukrainian doctor and father speak to why he and his family decided not to leave while they were still able. And he asked: how can you decide, in 10 minutes, to leave your life? everything that you have ever known, that your children have ever known, and go into a world where you have nothing and no one? How do you make that decision? How do you do that? It seems to me, that the most natural thing in the world is to stay in connection with what makes us feel most safe and most seen, to live inside the context of who we are and what we know home to be. So what then is the move when home becomes a war zone? How do we make the choice to leave home for something that may be more life-giving if the only life we have ever known lives inside of a culture and a people and a land and a country?

I have no answers. And maybe, as it turns out, no point in any of this other than simply musing and efforting as best I can to put one word in front of the other and in so doing come up for a breath from my own deep well of living and mothering. I am here. And it is imperfect as ever. It seems these past weeks and months and years have been an ongoing ebb and flow of living a life of practice, in which it is the time outside of any formality of effort that I am proven time and again and reminded why I care or why I try or why I hope, over and over again.

I keep thinking there will be a time when I have more time for myself again. Where I can fill my cup way up and have so much more to give by virtue of my own fullness. Runneth over as they say. But just this morning Chris said that perhaps we should be gathering support in case of potential radiation exposure and I just had to lay my head down on the table because I think that may be more true than the hope of some flimsy return of me time. I think that the hits may really just keep coming. And that I can either buckle and suffer under the weight of that, or I can brighten from within in a new way. Suffering still, of course. But full of some greater strength and expectation inside. As in Now is the time. What am I waiting for anyway?

And before I go, because really, who knows when I will sit down to write anything next, I still think that one of the best things that we can do is make donations to the groups and organizations rallying to help and make a difference where they can. I am still donating 15% of my Beautycounter commissions on Fridays to a different organization each month. March giving is going to Save the Children, who provide aid for “children in Ukraine, Afghanistan and around the world who might be caught in the middle of armed conflict, forced to flee their homes, and exposed to injury, hunger, and sub-zero temperatures”. As ever if you want to donate directly, please do, and if you want to grab some essentials for yourself, I am happy to redirect cash on your behalf.

Thanks for being here. I love you. I think I may have something more hopeful to write soon. So please come back.

pathways

I had no idea on the front end of parenting, or really quite frankly during much of the early years, how much time it is possible to spend fretting over one person’s educational/social/ emotional wellbeing. My mind untended these days unconsciously worries about either finances (always) or Eider (often). I am on a loop. And yes I stress over moo and wilfs too; are they getting what they need, do they feel supported, is there still an opportunity for them to be thriving in the current landscape, etc… But, for me, it is mostly my bear that has my mind’s concern. 

I have processed out loud and in my spaces before regarding the why and the how that I think it is, that the easiest kid to parent is weirdly the hardest one to gauge, and for me it certainly continues to be a thing. He is difficult for me to get a bead on and unfortunately also difficult for me to read in terms of how much he is sharing with me or not. 

Which is a trigger for me when my ideal is that our family’s most consistent currency is truth and trust. But I let more than a few things slacken at the start of the pandemic and my management of my kids’ screen time was one of them. And Eider enjoys video games. In a world with no contact, it has been some. I know I am certainly not the first parent of an adolescent to feel scared and concerned and skeptical when it comes to this domain. It is a thing. A thing that unfortunately grows is its hold as kids are not only playing games but so many “streamers” are making it possible to spectate while others game and a whole virtual world have taken shape around e-sports, and e-sport community and culture. While I can bend it in order to see the virtue and endeavor to support for the sake of my son, I am still far from a fan and in a steady state of disbelief that much good can ever come from sitting in a room by yourself, talking to players somewhere else, staring at a screen, and shooting people. 

This difficulty of the virtual gaming space feels central to what I am managing for now. Tightening the boundaries and limits that he both wants and doesn’t want for me to hold up for him. He is like most of us in that regard I think. He knows there are things he rather be doing that might make him feel better or engage more parts of him in bigger and more meaningful ways, but there is this path of least resistance that when we are at a loss can slide us all right into a screen. It is the world we live in and at best it serves as a beautiful and relieving opportunity for some kind of connection, and at worst it is a trap that siphons off all of our free and vital creative energies. I want him to be happy and fulfilled and engaged in his life. I also want him to be safe.

I have known, since he was extra small, that time outside and in his body and in the elements is a powerful anchor for him and a means for him to settle into deep, honest, and authentic parts of himself. It has been a big part of his life as a home-educated kid, to be in nature programs and spend days out of doors being in relationship with his environment and a small cohort of other home-ed kids and I am relieved that these opportunities seem to finally be returning. He is relieved too. 

And I think he is also beginning to see that learning and living and school and education need not look for him the way they do for moo and that that is great and full of all sorts of other opportunities. I see that too. But I am also wondering what that means and what they are and I am staying up late going down the various rabbit holes of alternative high school learning opportunities in Northern Vermont, or alternately just compulsively thinking about what we are doing and what we could be doing alllll of the time. Are we doing this right? Does he have what he needs? What will that look like at different levels, ages, and stages if we continue on this same trajectory?

So, what I really want to know is, in earnest, what are folks whose kids don’t want to go to high school doing? And especially, what are you doing for kids who really have a desire to go to university? Who love European History? And winter and snow? What are the things that I need to know to navigate that path? Hooooow? I think I had thought that homeschool for high school would be great, especially as it fed into a trade of some sort, but how does it feed into a deep desire for academia and higher education? Teach me mamas and papas and parents. Show me the way.

unicorn treat

A couple times in recent weeks Chris has said something to me along the lines of “remember earlier in the pandemic when you would spend a couple hours a day on your mat?” And well, yes and no. There was a stretch there where everything was in a freeze frame and the resolution on a couple of things was extra high. Like kids had NOTHING happening. Like Wilfred took two naps a day. Like there was really nowhere to comfortably go, not indoors, anywhere. And also, there was a sudden influx of access. 

That seems like a bygone era in many regards, even though much stays the same today. Now, of course, the kids are doing more stuff, but the thrill of it is muted since I am relegated to the car and prohibited access to my former specatatorship. And I don’t like bringing Wilfred into many places. Not really. 

So I do a lot of shuttling and and a lot of squeezing tasks, activities, lessons, study, and practices into skinny envelopes of time. Between the hours of 1:30 and 4pm tend to be extra freaking dicey as wilfs is napping (generally) and maple needs to be picked up and eider sometimes as well, either that or delivered somewhere and Chris is in his office working and well the balance of all of the things is extra precarious and variable and yet not so much flexible really. At all. 

Today was one of those days where I wanted to slide into a class with Christina at 3 but needed to pick up Maple at 2:45 and Chris was going to leave with her again for swim team just before 4 and Eider was game to help but wilfs awoke as I was walking out the door and wouldn’t settle for anything other than coming with me for pick up so of course we were late and then wanted to nurse once we were back home again and well I slid in to class about 30 minutes after its start. Which is wildly tacky and yet perfectly natural in the land of zoom yoga and it just got me feeling very grateful for all of the options that do exist, especially in combo with everyone’s actual flexibility and generosity. 

So while weekdays I land on my mat for something in the window of 20-60 minutes- and that is a unicorn treat- I can indeed remember earlier in the pandemic when I could practice for several hours a day multiple times a week. I don’t think that was really an ideal scenario for anyone. Those were pretty sad times. I mean these are still sad times but maybe not quite so sad. So less is more, in other words. Right. And like I have said 1000x, I am in the practice of taking what I can get when it comes to something for meeeeeee.