Artifacts from a young life

A couple of days ago I got Eugenides' newest novel out of the library and I had seven days to read it.  I did it in three.  I have stayed up well beyond a reasonable bedtime every night and am weary now.  It is so hard for me to put down a book even when I know I will suffer for it in the days to come.  If I could figure out how to read for a living, I'd be all right.  After I picked S up from school on Tuesday, we came home, had a snack, checked in, all I wanted to do was pick up the book.  I thought maybe - maybe - if I got her going on her homework followed by an educational video game on my computer, I'd buy myself a half an hour to read and still be with her.  Parallel play.  It worked.  She did her homework, I read, occasionally helping or checking in.  It was paradise.  Then she disappeared into her room.  This is pretty unusual.  S is not one of those only children you hear about who can entertain themselves for hours out of sight of all others.  She tends to want to interact after her homework - take a walk with me, play a board game, help with dinner.  But she was just gone.  I could hear her shuffling around in there, hear drawers opening and closing, the occasional light crash, nothing to worry about.  Once or twice she emerged and grabbed some tape or scissors.  What was she building in there?

I read for a good hour.  I mean a good hour.  God, I love reading.  I glanced up at the clock, I was going to have to start dinner.  Throughout this low-energy bluesy time, I've maintained certain activities.  Non-negotiables.  I get S to school on time every day, well-fed and with a home-made lunch.  I make healthy dinner from scratch.  I keep the house fairly clean.  Still pursuing writing, but with less fervor than it deserves, still trying to figure out how to use my MFT license without diving into another fucked-up public mental health job, still spending too many hours a day researching homes in a small town far away yet to be publicly announced as my husband is still sucking off the television industry teat, I am primarily a glorified housewife/stay-at-home mom.  At least everyone is eating healthy food and the house is in order, even as my brain is a bit wonky.

Finally, S comes out of the bedroom with a reusable shopping bag over one shoulder.
"Can I do my presentation for you?"
I sit up.  I wrench the book away from my body, remind myself it will still be there at bedtime.
"I would love to hear your presentation."
"Pretend you're at table one, ok?"
"Ok."
"So after I show you something, I'll pass it to you, then you pretend to pass it to table two, but you can really just put it down on the side table."
"Got it.  This is your artifact presentation?"
S nods.  Then she stands in the middle of the living room rug and rocks back and forth, smiles like she's trying not to giggle, seems to have a hard time knowing where to rest her eyes.  She has switched into performance mode.
"This is a book called Harold and The Purple Crayon.  It is one of my favorite books because the boy draws everything with his crayon and I've had it for a long time and my mom's friend Adam gave it to me and he moved to New York and I miss him and so it's very special to me."
She hands me the book and slips me a quick smile that says she's excited about what she's put together here.  I try not to get teary.  When I get proud, gushy teary, she always says, "Seriously, mom?"
I place the book on table two.
Next she pulls out her baseball glove, "This is a really good kind that you can't get anymore.  It is a Reggie Jackson glove and my uncle gave it to me.  [How old is it, mom?]"
I think, then whisper so as not to insert myself into her presentation, "Over thirty years old."
She continues, "It's over thirty years old and it's very special to me because as you probably know, I love baseball.  And I'm a lefty."
She hands it over, I consider it and place it on the table.
A super close-up picture of our dog is accompanied the narrative, "he's very lazy because he's had two knee surgeries..." then self-correction, "I mean, he's very lazy and he's had two knee surgeries so he can't walk very much.  But he was lazy anyway."  A giggle, then, "this picture of him lying on the floor is pretty much what he does all the time."
Next, a metal owl bookmark "that Poppi gave me so it's really special.  He likes to give me bookmarks and lets me pick them out.  I also love to read, so..."
Then, a carved stone owl that "Nana got it for me in Budapest because she knows I love owls.  And they carve a lot of things out of stone there."  Not sure how specifically true that is, but sounds good.
I'm most surprised when she pulls out a bracelet I gave her that I think I bought in the East Village on one of my earliest independent outings, just a series of metal squares linked together and a small rock glued on each - lace agate, amethyst.  "This is special because my mom gave it to me and she knows I love rocks.  I have like 400 rocks in my collection from everywhere we go I get rocks."
The presentation slows down as she shows how the clasp works, which requires her to lay the bracelet down on a table and slide the metal hook through a miniscule loop.  I resist helping her, as I won't be there at the actual presentation.  I imagine the kids will try to help her and the teacher will ask them to sit back down.  She'll figure it out.  I am mesmerized by that bracelet - when and where did I get it exactly?  It's got a real pull for me, a strong feeling of mid-teenage hippie days when I was into rocks and crystals.  It's pretty cool.  She's finally got it on.  "It's too big for me but I hang it on my wall as decoration and someday it will fit."
 Her final item is a geode bookend.  "As I already said, I love rocks and this one is big and sparkly.  My dad gave it to me, I don't know where he got it but he knew I would like it.  There's a bigger one, but this is the best one.  I'm going to pass it around, but be careful because it's heavy..."

It's a random sampling and I wonder if she shouldn't have included items that were more specifically historical - the first tooth she lost?  photos of ancestors?  I stop myself immediately.  This is how she defines herself.  Owls and rock collections.  Her lazy dog.  A book that makes her feel happy.  Her baseball glove.  She asks if she can do it again.
"You can do it all night," I say.
"I like doing this!"
As I watch a second time, I realize the sample isn't random at all.  It has a very deep unifying factor.  "Adam gave me this book before he moved to New York.  He's really important to me." 
"This glove was my uncle's." 
"From Poppi," 
"From Nana," 
"My mom's bracelet that she gave to me,"
"a geode from my dad."  

She defines every item with a description of the person who cares enough about her to give her something from their own private collections from youth or buy her something on their travels because they miss her.  My daughter is only seven and she already knows that material things are only valuable in how they represent love.  That the most important artifacts tell the stories of the relationships you build.  That the story of one’s life is the giving and receiving.  The items, no matter how sparkly, are just symbols of the real stuff.

Aggggghhhhh.

I'm reading a novel in which someone slips into deep depression, a real chemical low, can't-get-it-together depression.  I know I do not have that.  I have the blues, the funks, low-energy irritability.  I blame LA.  I know it's not entirely LA's fault.  But LA does have to bear some of the responsibility, with its sprawling spread-out-ness that makes it hard to see the ones you love, to create community, to feel a part of anything.  It's partly your fault, LA.  But not having lived anywhere else for the past 14 - fourteen! - years, it's hard to know what it'd be like elsewhere.  Sometimes I got the blues in New York in my 20s, in Massachusetts in my college years.  I lived in a state of teal and aqua and turquoise in New Jersey, but I was a teenager then.

One of the strange things about watching your child grow is that they start to have moods.  Like, real moods.  Not just those meltdown in the middle of the grocery store because you've taken them on one too many errands and they are hungry and tired and just need to throw themselves on the ground and wail.  I'm good with those.  S still has those types - the big, intense, and quickly over melts.  What I would call the healthy melts.  If you don't try to reign them in, they pass like an intense but brief tropical storm, like the afternoons when I lived in Costa Rica, when between the time you left your host family's house and arrived at the radical political science institute you'd be drenched and the sun would already be shining.  I like those kind of storms.

But now I sometimes see the blues.  Not a lot.  I have a happy kid, an active kid, a kid who brought home a book from the school library on Derek Jeter because "even though he's a Yankee, I really like him," and "he inspires me, mom, because he's like me.  He wanted to be a professional baseball player from the time he was my age!"  S has stopped worrying about the fact that there are no female professional baseball players.  She has over a decade to remedy that.  She starts Fall Ball Little League in two weeks.  Baseball.  In case you meet S, don't offer her "girls' softball" as an alternative.  S thinks softball is bullshit.

Mostly it's a lot of joy and interest and curiosity with flare-ups of frustration or exhaustion, but now and then there are blue days for her too.  And those are hard to weather.  No matter how much I believe in letting people have their feelings, in walking through the tough times, in not suppressing the struggles, damn is it hard to not try to "make" your child happy.  But I don't.  Mostly.  I listen.  I empathize.  I question, act curious, try to go deeper.  Sometimes I just say, "yeah, some days are like that, huh?"  And they pass.  Far more quickly than my blue periods.  I know (post-a-shitload-of-therapy) that part of why my blues hang around, my funks funk me out for longer than necessary, my body ends up achy and my brain fuzzy and my mood apathetic is that I fight them.  Higginses are troopers!  We don't have down times.  We present with a smile and we don't like complainers.  We see depression as weakness and lethargy as pathetic.  (Imagine my learning curve to become a therapist and find empathy for the real struggles of real people).  The Speers-Higgins clans are steeped in deep Puritan blood and the Puritan work ethic not only sees finding joy and fulfillment in your work as besides the point - it actually discards those concepts as devil's work.

And so I do blame LA.  And I blame New England.  For here I am, generations deep in the Plymouth Brethren 'you work because that's what you do' Puritanism, the 'don't expect much from life and you won't be disappointed, in fact occasionally you might be pleasantly surprised' motto of my parents (seriously, my mom just said that to me this weekend and I dry-heaved.  And it's not in a Buddhist way of being in the moment, but in this old pilgrim way of self-sacrifice and discomfort in the idea of pursuing dreams or taking risks.)

And while the old New England stock rattles around deep in my chest cavity, making my heart feel selfish for its desires; my groovy LA therapist tells me to put my hand over that heart, cradle that chest cavity, close my eyes, and ask it (my heart) what it wants.  "Get really quiet and listen for your heart's desire."  Yes!  Yes, my heart's desire.  In that big, white-carpeted, ocean-viewed office in Santa Monica.  Yes!  And then I walk out and call my mom to arrange our child-care schedule for the week and even without telling her about my therapy (because I'm not an idiot) I feel like a giant asshole for not only thinking that I have the right to follow my heart's desire, but even to have a therapist with a big white-carpeted office.  Self-indulgent.  Privileged.  Entitled.  These are very bad words.

Is my desire to return to Massachusetts a primal desire to return to the homeland?  Is it partly driven by a desire to stop living split in two?  Because the groovy-LA-follow-your-bliss-crystal shit doesn't sit right inside me, even as I have acid reflux from the New England Puritan crap.  But my friends who still live in Massachusetts have found a way to reject at least some of that without trying to replace it with an airy cultural philosophy that lacks context.  They are following at least some of their desires - they are musicians with day jobs who gig at night; they dj on weekends and are social workers by day; they gather together frequently without having to sit in hours of traffic on the 405 to see the people they love.

Today I am writing despite the blues.  For that I credit my family.  Higginses do not take to their beds for weeks or even days no matter how deep the shit feels.  I write on, I take a walk, I apply for jobs, I show up to run the workshop at school, train parents in Community Sharing so that the children in our school will learn how to talk about feelings and walk through them.  But I can't help but wonder what it would be like if I'd been allowed to have my meltdowns, go big and hard and furious, storm off to my room saying "life sucks" (without being shamed for it) and then return ten minutes later cleansed and ready to move on.  If I hadn't been made to feel that it was selfish to have a hard time.  I guess we'll see in several decades when S hits mid-life.  For now, I will take a walk.

Just a quickie

Don't want to lose momentum but didn't get a chance to write today.  Just had taco night with S and she spent the whole time telling me all the great things she's doing at school and how she and her old pals are playing tag at recess and she's having such a good time...  She disappeared into her room for the better part of an hour to gather "artifacts" for her share about her life, then asked if she could search the internet for a typing program to practice her typing, after she finished her homework.  Was it just yesterday I was pondering home school? 

Stuck in Lodi

Just started putting on Pandora after one too many frustrating experiences with random play on my IPod - Ramona and Beezus books or Charles Bukowski poems interrupting my Beck groove; Christmas songs sung by country singers sending me into inexplicable sudden panic.  Pandora is fun because you enter an artist that represents the mood you're in and see what the anonymous Pandora people think of you.  This morning I put on the Bruno Mars channel and greatly cheered up a cranky Monday-morning seven year old.  Jon said, "How'd you get the pre-show music list from the Nickelodeon show we're taping?"  It's true - from Bruno Mars to One Direction to Maroon Five - it was all the music the second-fifth grade crowd is rocking.  When I got home from dropping S at school and a quick trip to Trader Joe's, I chose the Jakob Dylan station.  Pandora always starts with a song from the actual artist and basically, I just wanted to hear that scratchy sexy voice.  Oh Jakob Dylan what you do to me.  I got some Ben Harper, okay, some Iron and Wine, getting a little folksy for my mood, and then a cover of Lodi, the 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival song that I just love.  I didn't really ever listen to the lyrics before - "Oh lord, stuck in Lodi again," and this time it made me do a little research.  It's about Lodi, California, an agricultural town about 70 miles from Fogerty's hometown of Berkeley (or so claims Wikipedia) and the feeling of a broke musician being stuck there.  I remember a Lodi, New Jersey that's pretty arm-pitty too.  I mostly know it as the place with the big DMV near the town where I got my tattoo in the early 90s - Wayne, New Jersey.  Wayne had the big fountain store (right across the street from Schatzi's Tattoos) that was made famous by the band Fountains of Wayne and the scene in the Sopranos in which Tony buys a fountain from the police officer he's had fired.  It's a great disturbing classic scene.

I have to change the channel now.  I have an aversion to Jack Johnson.  I just can't believe it's music for adults.  Switch over to the Dayna Kurtz station and hear my friend.  I'm sure she's not making any money off it.  God she's good.  She's so good.  Buy all her CDs:  www.daynakurtz.com

S didn't want to go to school this morning.  It was a classic rocking weekend with a daddy/daughter fishing trip, baseball, family hanging...I'm hoping this is just a normal Monday morning thing, but I'm having a rising anxiety about her resistance to school.  I'm pondering the concept of homeschooling.  I'm fantasizing that if we were in Western Mass it would all be different.  I'm internalizing her discomfort.  I'm visualizing her slumped shoulders as she walks into the classroom.  What is going on?  When I talk to her about individual subjects - music, math, PE - she says she likes them all.  When I ask about her teacher, she says she loves her.  It seems to be interpersonal, social, something about feeling overwhelmed being with 20 kids every day.  I imagine it's overwhelming.  I've never enjoyed being in a big office and having to deal with a myriad of different personalities.  And at the very least I had a cubicle to retreat into.

I have to turn my focus now to a training I'm doing tonight for parents at S's school to lead class groups, help them build community, learn how to problem solve, grow empathy, all that good stuff.  I led a community circle with last year's third graders and loved watching them begin to open up, listen to each other, solve problems with more respect.  Tonight I'll train a crew so we have one parent per class.  Paring down some of the confusing and overly groovy materials from the program we initially used, making it more user-friendly, developmentally-appropriate, and just plain fun.  We shall see.  I breathe deep, remind myself that it's only week two of third grade and that children struggle with going to school and no one loves it all the time and that's ok.  And that this could just be transition time.  I listen to a little more Wallflowers.  It shoots me back into a time in my early twenties when it wasn't that I was happy, exactly, but I was responsible for no one but myself.  I didn't always do a great job of taking care of me, but the worry about that was different, more existential, less heartbreaking.  Ahhhh..Angel on my Bike.  His voice is a salve to me.  S will find her own salves.  I can help her, but I can't do it for her.  That may be the most excruciating part of parenthood.

Capture the Flag: DAY FOUR

I remember Capture the Flag.  I remember my brother breaking his arm during a big neighborhood game.  Capture the Flag in our day was unruly, unsupervised, snaked through wooded areas (suburban, not real country) behind houses and from yard to fence-free yard.  I realize as S's PE teacher teaches them a (non-flying) version of Quiddich and amps up Capture the Flag to "Super Capture the Flag" ("It's way more awesome," says S), he's following their lead.  He's finding out what the kids think is cool and morphing that into a lesson plan.  Smart.  Funny to be observing so closely the machinations of third grade and realizing the strategy.  Find the in, meet them at their interest, then infiltrate with facts and skills.

It's dreary and muggy in LA, not common weather for us.  I'm in the tiny backhouse sweating.  The chickens are squawking.  Our dog is stinking up the place.  What looked like a potential place to do legitimate therapy when I first fixed it up now looks like a hovel.  The carpet is stained and pieces of leaves are scattered around the floor.  Bedding from our last visitor is piled on the couch, which is covered in hair from his dog.  The yard is littered with chicken poo and feathers, the summer garden neglected, wilting, flies everywhere.  I know it's not as Clampitt bad as I'm making it out to be, though it's not great.  It's mostly that LA looks shitty when it's not sunny.  I noticed that the first summer I was here, 14 - gulp - years ago.  Unlike other places I've lived, LA doesn't look moody and mysterious on overcast days, it just looks depressing.

I have been skewing depressed lately, at least when I'm alone.  It's not full-time depression.  I am not having that much trouble getting out of bed and I don't return there.  I've been cooking good dinners, playing board games with S, showing up to help at the school, organizing events, even having a reasonable amount of sex (with my husband, people).  And it's not like I'm just going through the motions.  I'm actually in joy in the moments when I'm with people I love.  It's just that once they all head off - on the bike to work, into the classroom, off Facebook - I'm by myself.  And I sink rapidly.  I can always pull myself out - I'm a pro at finding the next thing to do, embarking on a project, focusing the energy - but what's astonishing to me is how quickly I sink back in.  How quickly the cobwebs hanging off the windows and the dried chicken poop on the flagstone terrace dunk me down.  How the screech of a power saw nearby just makes everything seem so dreary. 

In third grade news, I asked S to change her pants just as she was walking out the door because she had clearly wiped her eggy hands on them.  She didn't want to.  I didn't care.
"But I don't care that I'm in stained pants."
"But I do."
"But they're my pants."
"Let's not do this.  Just change your pants."
She goes into her room, pissed.  Yells out, "Then can you help me find some other pants that are as comfortable?  Those were the only stretchy leggings."
I'm about to lose it.  I walk in, saying, "You might have thought about how comfortable they were before you used them instead of your napkin."
"But I didn't wipe egg on my pants."
"Then it mysteriously found its way there."
She has terrible table manners - largely our fault, I know - and only now am I confronting some of the hand-eating, the clothes-wiping, the loud burping.  I haven't really cared to be honest, but am starting to feel like I want her to be able to accompany us to more, shall we say formal (read: less-caveman) settings without having to correct her in public.  She is now expected to say "May I be excused?" and to clear her plate.  That part's going well.  The wiping-hands-on-pants, not so strong.  Sadie is standing in her underwear, looking as annoyed as I feel.  I pull out a pair of lovely, clean, dress-code appropriate dark blue comfortable leggings.
"Oh, those," she says.
I walk out of the room because frankly, I'm not in the mood for attitude.  She's still cranking at me on her way to the car.  I tell her to have a great day and I'll see her at pick-up.  I'm done with the interaction.  Jon turns around when they're at the car and runs back over, gives me a kiss.  He knows I hate having to play cop/mama.  He calls after drop off and says that she was fine as soon as they pulled out of the driveway.
"But you sound really upset.  You okay?"
"I'm just blue," I say.  "Just dumb.  The weather, the...I don't know."
"Buy a house in Western Massachusetts," he says.  He knows that's what I fantasize about when LA (or anything that happens to be happening while I happen to be in LA) gets me down.
"I guess I'll go look at some in a few weeks?"
For once, I don't really feel like flying across the country solo, even to look at potential homes for our future.  I feel like he's calling my bluff by agreeing to Western Mass after years of complaining that he could never stand the winters.  Depression comes with a degree of stuck-ness.  I sit here in the stink, the noise, the gray, and wonder if a big, bold move would break me out.  Maybe I should make an offer on a house, start to build our future somewhere else.  But depression is mobile.  3,000 miles isn't far enough to outrun it.  I just need to breathe through it and keep doing the good work.  And enjoy my ragamuffin child.

The Writing Callous: DAY THREE

S keeps getting out of bed: "I can't sleep!"  "I've got too much in my brain!"  and then finally, "Look at this, my finger hurts."  The third time she emerges from her room, it's coming up on 9pm. I'm tired and hot and quickly sliding into "Go to frigging sleep" mode.  I can't imagine how she'd hurt her finger in bed, so I just glance down without giving it much thought.  And there it is.  Wow, I remember that.

S has the early stages of the pencil callous.  She actually has the pencil blister which will evolve into the pencil callous.  Remember the pencil callous?  Erupts when you first start writing more than you've written before and you're gripping that thing real tight and the yellow painted wood rubs on your finger?  I ask because this may not be a common experience.  This may only happen to lefties as we tend to hold our pencils between our ring and middle fingers instead of our middle and pointers.  But I would assume it can also affect the middle.  S has it on the fourth finger of her left hand, exactly where I had it.  I wrote so much in third grade, really discovered my love for it, that my callous grew into a lump.  I used to rub it with my thumb.  It relaxed me.  Between my wrinkly thumb and lumpy ring finger, it was easy for me to remember which side was my left.

S's teacher sent home a short questionnaire for parents to start conversation with our kids (I assume.  I can't imagine she actually wants them back).
The questions include:
What was your third grade teacher's name?  Ms. St. Denis
What do you remember learning in third grade? Cursive writing
What was your favorite subject?  Reading/Writing

S, reading it over as I put a band-aid on the blister, asks, "Writing?  Really?"
"Yes, why?"
"That's like the opposite world answer to me."
"Well, I became a writer so...I guess I like writing."
"Huh,"  she says.  "I guess you must."

In the hour before bedtime she has fluctuated between a giggle fit and a non-sensical meltdown.  Through tears she says that school is too tiring and that she has no friends at recess and that she actually does have friends at recess but she is too good at four square and it's hard being the best at things and everyone wants to hang out with her and she doesn't like having to be with too many kids at once...
I let her go until it winds down.
Then I ask, "So you're upset because you're too good at things and too popular?"
She stares at me for a moment to see if I'm mocking, then bursts back into the giggles.
I tell her that's what we call a "quality problem."  I also say I hear her and I adore her and she'll probably feel better after a good night's sleep.
It's easy to belittle the meltdown of a kid going back to school, but honestly, it's a lot to be with twenty-two kids all day long after a summer of road trips and camping and only having to hang with who she chooses when she feels like it.  I don't like to be mandated to a room with people I haven't chosen for hours on end.  I'd probably meltdown a bit too.  And I sometimes feel overwhelmed when people want to hang out and I'm weird about being good at things.  Though I suck at four square.

All About Me: DAY TWO

We began to grow unsatisfied at our public neighborhood school in LA during S's kindergarten year.  I remember thinking from week one, No show and tell?  That's weird.  I remember seeing samples of student work and thinking - that doesn't sound like my child's voice.  But I was gung-ho about this neighborhood school that so many privileged families deserted.  When the class was discussing the solar system, I asked S if she wanted to bring in the folder of gorgeous glossy photos of each planet that a grown-up friend brought her from a trip to the space museum in Washington DC.  When I picked her up, the photos were in her backpack exactly as they left.
"Didn't you share these with the class?"  I asked.  She'd been so excited, memorized the names, the order, the relational sizes.
"We're not allowed to do things like that," she said.
Oh the beginning of the blood boil.  A burst of fury followed by deep breathing and an appropriate parental response.  "Probably Ms R just didn't have time today, so why don't you bring those back?
"I'm not allowed to bring them back."
Not allowed?  Not allowed?  Not encouraged to share personal experience with the subject at hand?  Fans of curiosity not flamed but instantly squelched in the name of more time for practicing the standardized tests?  Breathe, breathe.

After a series of events like this, I met with the teacher, brought in some articles about "constructivism" (hands-on learning, eliciting knowledge from the learner and building on their interests...).  That was not taken well.  In a fit of frustration and bad judgment, I went to see the awful (since-fired) principal who Jon used to say looked like a drunk trombone player, who was biding his time til full-benefitted retirement.  He told me he'd handle it.  He handled it by calling a meeting of the kinder teachers and parents and fanning the flames of discontent, made it seem like we were "getting them" in trouble.  Oh it was ugly.

I think if there was one incident that symbolizes the end of our relationship with the neighborhood school (where to the very end I was writing grants for gardens, bringing in comedy improv assemblies, and volunteering for the fundraising Luau, trying to resuscitate creativity), it was the incident with the dog in the morning.  After Spring Break - we're talking at least seven months into the school year - we adopted a puppy.  When S came out of school, I asked if she'd told Ms R about it.
"Oh we don't get to tell her things," she said.
By March, I no longer took that as childlike hyperbole.  She was serious.
"Did you tell your friends?" I asked.
"We don't really have time when we can share like that."
"How about lunch?"
"We're supposed to whisper at lunch so it's hard to tell a story."
"Oh." (oh shit.) "Does anyone else in your class have a dog?"
"I don't know.  We don't talk about things like that."
Okay, that's it.  You're in kindergarten and you don't talk about whether you have dogs?  You are told to whisper at the lunch tables?  You feel uncomfortable sharing personal information with your teacher?  And right there was the pinnacle of the "fuck this" that had been building.  I called Jon from my office downtown where I was holed up, secretly researching charter schools instead of finishing my client reports.
"You on board with a radical move?"
He was, though he said he'd miss the drunk trombone player.
We found a brand new charter school based on principles of student voice and constructivism (which hadn't even opened its doors yet), we entered a lottery and lucked out.  We knew it would change our lives.  We didn't know how much.

Yesterday S brought home two pieces of homework from her first day of third grade.  One was a big poster that she was to fill out with information about herself - her favorite books, pictures of her family, and of course, how many pets she has.  Because her teacher cares about who she is.  And she is allowed to talk about her dog.  The other piece was an even more detailed survey - What are your hobbies? Who is your favorite singer? What do you do on weekends?  S did it independently while I chopped up tons of veggies for taco night.  My only input was to challenge the places she put question marks or "I don't know."  "Give it a shot," I'd advise, and when she said, "there's too many to fit," I'd suggest, "choose one or two."  And she did.  Bruno Mars.  A Kelly Clarkson song.  Boogie Boarding.  She's a real third grader.

S said that part of the first day was given over to a show and tell in which the teacher and her co-teacher (special education teacher splits time co-teaching in all the rooms - don't get me started on the wonders of this charter school) showed special objects that let the kids know more about who they are.  It's opposite world.  See and be seen.  Personalize.  Open.  Share.  This is how we learn.  We know this.  This may not be how we get the highest test scores on bullshit tests.  But this is how we embrace school.  S woke early yesterday and today, put on her boyish dress code clothes, smiled her toothless smile, and headed happily to school.  There are many days when, as a barely freelance writer, an underemployed therapist, a glorified housewife, I feel like I've done nothing right.  But the moment I look at my daughter in her red, blue and tan school clothes telling me about how her teacher felt nervous getting back to school and there are things she does to help her get ready and feel less scared, when my daughter leans over her poster so carefully writing why she loves baseball, when she assumes that people will be interested in what she has to say, in those moments I know I've done one thing terribly right.