When we don't know

We learned yesterday that four schools have rejected Big Guy, and four more have yet to respond. Among the rejecters was the one I'd been told would be perfect for him. I have no idea what happens if no one accepts him; send his packet to a second tier of schools, I guess. Think he'll get in somewhere by September?

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We received a letter from Snuggler on Monday proclaiming. "Camp is SO much fun!!!!" It was dated July 4, the day after she arrived, so we are hoping camp is still SO much fun! 

Being on the non-receiving end of two weeks without modern methods of communication is kind of odd. I was thinking the other day about the immigrants of days of yore, who left home and whose families didn't know for a year or more if they arrived, died, prospered, or vanished. Kind of puts today's teary farewells in a different perspective. Technology has micro-calibrated our definition of what it means to know what's going on, heightening our sensitivity to not-knowing -- and perhaps heightening our anxiety in the process.

There is something comforting in accepting the fact that I won't know about Snugglers life for two weeks. It helps me remember that I am not responsible for making her happy; she is going to have to handle that herself for the time being. I'm not actually in control; being without a means of pretending that I am is, in its own way, a relief.

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Andrew and I have been batting around book ideas, and have one about which we're excited. It is nice to work together, especially after more than a decade (for him) of 60-80 hour workweeks and (for me) near-single parenting. We have had dozens of terrific conversations about things other than kids and finances and deadlines. It's like... being married.

In the past month Andrew has gone to a pile of classes at the outplacement firm: resume building, Linked-In networking, interviewing skills, etc. He came home from one class where the instructor advised everyone to use the 100-zero rule: spend 100% of your energy on things you can do something about, and 0% on things you can't control.

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I have no idea what the future holds for us, job-wise. We're okay through October, at which point the witches and goblins remove our safety net and the cold, hard world cackles at us. We have figured out a suitably sub-optimal fallback plan, a way to almost-survive in the event that no substantive solution becomes apparent by then.

Perhaps Andrew will get full-time work, perhaps I will, perhaps we'll write books and do freelance work and somehow pay for insurance for seven people. I am not particularly anxious about it, because we're doing what we can do.Well, except at 2am. When I'm awake at 2am I worry. But I'm pretty sure that's all anyone is doing at that hour, unless they're working the night shift.

One of the nice things about getting to middle age is the realization that things eventually work out. Or else they don't. In this country at this time in history, even if things don't happen the way you want, you generally don't die. That's good.

Am I odd to find comfort in the thought that whatever cliff might (or might not) lie ahead probably isn't large enough to be fatal?

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I have a post going up at Seeds of Devotion later today about some of the faith-related aspects of this. Or at least I think it's going up; I'm not in charge of the mechanics. It's odd not knowing exactly when that will happen. But I think we can all live with the uncertainty.

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Math and girls

Over the weekend Eldest and I were thinking up ways she can pull in a little more money this summer. We decided that a one-week, half-day math camp for middle school girls might be just the thing. So I wrote a note to our local parents' list asking if anyone was interested, and we got a handful of responses. That surprised me, since one advantage of the camp will be lots of hands-on enrichment activities, exactly the kind of thing that kids no longer get in school. You'd think there would be huge demand.

Then this morning it occurred to me to post the same note on our homeschool email list. Bonanza! Within an hour my inbox was filled with inquiries. And this surprised me, too, because homeschoolers generally already do a whole lot of hands-on stuff. And middle-school girls who are homeschooled don't usually face the same social pressures of girls-don't-do-math as tweens in school.So you'd think there wouldn't be that much demand.

So we live and learn. Eldest is working as a counselor at a day camp for the next three weeks, which now turns out to be a doubly-good thing, since it will help her have a better understanding of how to run her own camp in August.

A birthday

He was the earliest of my children, a mere three days late, and the only one who was not induced. At 7 pounds 8 ounces he was our lightweight.

Big Guy turns 15 today. A year ago I was not certain he would make it to see this day. He is more stable than he was. We are stronger than we were. This week we begin discussions about transitioning him back home in the fall.  

We still face great uncertainty. But we have him today, and for today that is enough.

Happy birthday, Big Guy. We love you.

What the neighbors know

I yelled at Little Guy this morning. Barked, is more like it. We were running late because he'd been slow about putting on his shoes, and I don't like being late. I especially dislike it when someone else is taking my kid to camp, and we're holding up the person offering transportation.

Moments after I shouted at Little Guy we walked out of our apartment, and there was the young couple from next door in the hallway with their two little kids, looking rather shocked.

I could say that one thing I hate about life in the city is that your neighbors know more about your temper than you'd like. And yet the real problem is the temper, not that people know about it.

Like every other mom, I have days I don't handle things admirably. I have times when you'd gape and think I was a bad mother -- and in that moment, for that reaction to that kid, you'd probably be right.

But in its own mortifying way, it's good to have others overhear what we say in anger. Because sometimes the only way to see what we need to change in ourselves is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. It startles us into re-realizing that no, this is not okay. 

Anger may be understandable and it may be normal, but it's still not okay. Accepting that we're going to make mistakes is one thing; figuring out how not to make them repeatedly is another. And so this morning I am prying the exasperated Why can't he get his shoes on in a reasonable amount of time? question out of my brain, and exploring different ones: Why doesn't he get his shoes on? How can I prevent the problem from repeating? And how will I handle it differently if it happens again?

Neat as a pin

Snuggler left yesterday. She's at a sweet little church camp somewhere in Pennsylvania. I've never been there because, as you now know, we don't drive. My friend Ellen picked up Snuggler's duffel bag on Friday night, and I dropped my daughter off at Pam's house yesterday morning for a ride out. And then Chris sent this photo and called to say Snuggler had arrived safely and was all set.

Don't let anyone ever tell you that city people are cold or rude. They do get annoyed when you stop in the middle of a busy sidewalk to check your tourist map and clog up traffic. But people who live in close quarters have had plenty of practice in getting along with and helping others. Unless, of course, they live in the rich sections of town. But that's another story.

With Snuggler and Dancer both gone it occurred to me that I could clean their room and it would stay clean for at least two weeks! That was such an awesome thought that I took a stack of trash bags in there right away and got to work. Five grocery bags full of paper and two bags of junk later, I started vacuuming.

Last December in a fit of maternal kindness I bought a $9.99 ornament-making kit at Michael's. (Yes, we do have a small Michael's here; it opened about a year ago.) The kit had styrofoam balls and sequins and little pins to use to put the sequins in. And the girls had a good time making glittery ornaments with friends. But one day, some months later, the box containing the sequins and pins spilled in their room.

I am not sure of the sequence of events after that: maybe I didn't discover the spillage until it had already been there a while, or maybe I didn't inspect Snuggler's clean-up job, or maybe both. We vacuumed up the worst of it, but the pins proliferated like fruit flies. They spread throughout the room and wormed their way into the carpet. It was a veritable plague, an epidemic of pointed proportions.

Eventually Little Guy got tired of involuntary acupuncture treatments and invented a pin vacuum consisting of the metal head of a broken lamp, with strong magnets around the inner edge. He glided his apparatus over the floor and was surprisingly successful at removing many dozens of pins.

My preference for solving the problem would have been to rip out the 15-year old wall-to-wall, which is in dire need of replacement, anyway. But our budget didn't permit that, so yesterday I spent an hour crawling around, manually extracting embedded pins.

I did not count how many I removed. It was a lot. And now that room glitters, not with the glint of steel, but with plain old cleanliness.

Differences

Dancer gets a break on Sundays at her dance intensive. After several false starts I found someone who knew someone who could take her to church (thanks, Rhonda -- it worked well!) This afternoon the whole camp is going to a Detroit Tigers game. Mom-Fail admission: Dancer has never seen a baseball game.Not even on TV.

I have no excuse for my 12yo child's complete ignorance of professional sports, other than to say that we get no TV reception, and have never bothered to get cable. Tickets to live games are not in our budget. In days of yore Andrew edited the Baseball Encyclopedia, but now he's content to listen to games on the radio. So this will be a true cultural excursion for Dancer.

Next week's trip will be a novelty as well: they're going to a mall. She's never been to one. I guess it's a side benefit of city life; we don't have malls.

To distract you from gaping too long on these gaps in my child's education, I will steer your attention to the differences between living in the 'burbs and in a major city:

• We don't own a car.
• Our church has more single people than families. 
• There's no pool or lake nearby to swim in.
• If we're only going a mile, we walk.
• We always wear purses across the chest, and never hang them on the back of a seat.
• No child expects to have his or her own room.
• Our grocery stores don't issue coupons (and don't accept computer-generated ones)
• We have a trash chute instead of a laundry chute.
• Kids' sports teams (and fields) are hard to find.
• We only buy as many groceries as we can wheel home in our granny cart.
• We have no attic or cellar in which to store things.

And  yes, it's true: my kids have never been in a Walmart. They can cross city streets and travel on the subway, but I'm sure they'd get killed crossing a parking lot. Because we don't really have those here, either.

Invitations...

It feels a bit weird at times to see how many people read this blog (about 250 a day) and how little I know about most of you! So consider this a personal invitation to:

1. Leave comments on posts
2. Write to me at LotsaLaundry1@gmail.com if you're shy or don't know how to leave comments
   
3. Subscribe with a feedburner or via email (see the bottom of the left column), so you get blog updates automatically.

Regards,

Julia


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