It was getting late, with no sign of the older children and their daddy coming in from evening chores, yet. I gave in and made supper for the younger ones, and directed them to get their teeth brushed, etc. afterwards. Baby and I were settled in the rocker in his dimmed room, and we were going through a litany of lullabies when I heard the rest come trooping in downstairs. Since they are all capable at making sandwiches, I kept rocking and singing to Jonathan: Jesus Loves the Little Children, Baby's Boat, Jesus Loves Me. On the last verse the volume level of a hubbub around the computer downstairs, began to rise and flood its way up the stairwell straight for Jonathan's room, intruding harshly on the sleepy mood I'd been trying to weave.
There was Emma now yelling, at 9:30 at night, "Mama?! Mamaaaaa!! Where IS she?!!" (Now, on the stairwell, this child, who has lived with me every one of her 12 1/2 years and is familiar with all my dogmatic rituals, screams out for justice against her older sister, who is performing some inane photographic manipulation on the computer...of course the subject is a shot of Emma's face.) I tried for a controlled hiss, "BE QUI-et!!!" but up popped baby's sleepy head anyway. *sigh* I might as well settle him under his covers, then go out to the stairwell, stalk down it (on tiptoe), and let Emma have the response she craves, with both lungs.
So, I did, as they all ought to have expected.
Five minutes later, everyone was upstairs and in their rooms with lights out, and no one was disappointed.
I am afraid that none of my children will remember me as anything but a screamer. There was a time, however, at around number three, that I was still a moderate-voiced, pleasant sort of a person to live with. But when Owen (number 3) was toddling and Ella Rose was gestating, I reached the point of being short a hand. People with two children can manage one in each hand, but after that, it gets complicated. And so voice control began to take over. For a few years, everybody obeyed Mama's subtlest inflections, because Mama always followed up P.D.Q. on what she said. But as children get to where they don't balance well over the knee for height, the voice is all I have...and so Jonathan could sleep through pretty well anything right from the beginning. I think that the first time he heard my voice in utero, he must have heard me yelling at the others.
Sometimes I hate hearing myself, and knowing that I am the only one listening, since everyone is scattered to the upper reaches of the big, old farmhouse. And I always instruct them, "Don't yell, just take yourself to where he/she is, and speak." It is the first double-standard I employ on an hourly basis, and I'll tell you why: everyone else scatters, as I say, at the precise time there are breakfast dishes still to do, mid-day dinner to begin, and the laundry to switch, and if I don't get my hands into all of it five minutes ago, there will be nothing on the table when my husband comes in from his hard work. And even if I call up the stairs for some help, I get some variation of "Coming!" or "Just a minute!"....which no one intends to follow through, or else I'd hear simultaneous footsteps with the response. They all avoid being available.
This is why I have a cupboard devoted to the stocking of tea. It is why I relish weeding the garden in the summer months, and knitting in the others. Welllll, not really, but ripping weeds vigorously out of the soil DOES at needful times serve as a metaphor for yanking out all the defects of my children's behavior. And twisting stitches at a rapid rate HAS sometimes kept me from wringing necks, instead.
Some days, I am so tired of having to yell to get a needed response, that I resolve: I'll refuse to raise my voice above normal speaking level, and when they override me, I'll fall silent until I have their attention. But it never works.
I suppose this may strike some as perverse, that, when we are out in public and folks comment on how well-behaved my childen are, I get this literal pain in my soul, in the form of a mental plea, "why can't they be that way at home, then?" ....Actually, that one is easy: they could never keep it up for as long as we spend at home. But it is the ultimate paradigm of corruption at large in the universe, that the ox who is treading out the corn, should need the muzzle.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
A lesson I don't want to learn
I don't think I can say that I have ever been really lonely. I have been pondering that idea, running through the old memory bank, and I'm prepared to sign off on it. I had a close friend, even a bosom buddy, here and there in the school and college years, and sometimes just an erstwhile companion, and all of that was good, but I always enjoyed my time alone. When I got married it was a wonderful blessing, but not in the expected way. Most of the world gets married to stave off loneliness, which divorce or death ushers in again. What I mean, about being blessed through marriage and family, is that I wasn't looking for something to fill a hole in myself. I lacked only something into which I could pour myself.
Background: I always liked school, the academic part, while I had to be there. The hearts of men (people) are desperately wicked, after all, and a redhead with freckles and a funny name can find out double-quick that other children with brown or blond hair and straight teeth, who always answer to each other's names just in case, can be tolerant or cruel, as it suits them. But the truth to be found in books, and the written imaginings of other minds who have made it through school, made up for alot. Putting my nose in a book (said my librarian mother) was the most productive way to spend the time before I could get to the wedding that would begin my real life (said I to myself). I think I was right. I was reading things that shaped me: historical fictions and romances by Charles Dickens, plays by Shakespeare, nineteenth-century American stories of Louisa May Alcott, oddly and fantastically intuitive ways to perceive the universe by Madeleine L'Engle, how to survive adversity and that cheerfully, from Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fortunately, it was just before I went off to college that I was saved under the preaching of a local Baptist minister, and then the Bible became the book I wanted to dig and delve into, in between all the Poli Sci and History and Russian.
We all had it impressed into us, from our first understanding of such concepts as 'self' and 'future,' that we were some sort of blank slates, upon which anything, anything at all, might be written, and perhaps to our detriment, if we were not definitely shaped for something specific, so that even when most graduates were going off to their job interviews while the diplomas were being printed, there was so much uncertainty. Young people who had paid well over a hundred thousand dollars to be classified as 'well-educated' were consoling each other over job acceptances with the statistic that people go through several careers in a lifetime. I remember being on the brink of done with that last phase of my life that went according to a pre-arranged syllabus, and listening to all of this with a sense of boiling frustration: what is the matter with you all? or is it, with me? I know exactly what I am! I'm just waiting for the right time to be it!
Since Jeffrey and I moved here, the second place we have farmed, bringing our three children, and having three more, I have been able to dive into all that I spent so long imagining, and training for. I am never really overwhelmed in the pile (being weary is not the same thing), for I spent my formative years learning to put my head down and do the chores, as quickly and yet thoroughly as I could, letting my mind run on what I would like to be doing by and by. This serves me well now, when I still dislike washing dirty dishes, but look forward to rewarding myself with herbal tea and knitting afterwards. This is how I can savor motherhood as composed of snuggling with books and kissing sleepy heads instead of a drudgery of lost sleep and filthy diapers. I may cluck about the clothing on the floor, but I swell with satisfaction when it is all laundered and organized in the drawers; and I know I'll have a chance to do it all over again every day.
In case you suspect that I've wandered off into a digression that relates not at all to my starting point, don't be fooled. (A thorough think-through makes a circle, and it takes time to get around a curve.) What lurks at the back of my mind, is that, when all of this which is familiar now begins to decelerate, with the first child going off to her own home, I might find myself with more and more time on my hands and nothing to plan and dream about. There will be all the hours of daylight, eventually, to sew and knit and potter around with my chickens and my flowers, to learn to cook for just two people, and to enjoy being myself (whoever that will be, by then)...and perhaps I shall learn what it means to be lonely.
Background: I always liked school, the academic part, while I had to be there. The hearts of men (people) are desperately wicked, after all, and a redhead with freckles and a funny name can find out double-quick that other children with brown or blond hair and straight teeth, who always answer to each other's names just in case, can be tolerant or cruel, as it suits them. But the truth to be found in books, and the written imaginings of other minds who have made it through school, made up for alot. Putting my nose in a book (said my librarian mother) was the most productive way to spend the time before I could get to the wedding that would begin my real life (said I to myself). I think I was right. I was reading things that shaped me: historical fictions and romances by Charles Dickens, plays by Shakespeare, nineteenth-century American stories of Louisa May Alcott, oddly and fantastically intuitive ways to perceive the universe by Madeleine L'Engle, how to survive adversity and that cheerfully, from Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fortunately, it was just before I went off to college that I was saved under the preaching of a local Baptist minister, and then the Bible became the book I wanted to dig and delve into, in between all the Poli Sci and History and Russian.
We all had it impressed into us, from our first understanding of such concepts as 'self' and 'future,' that we were some sort of blank slates, upon which anything, anything at all, might be written, and perhaps to our detriment, if we were not definitely shaped for something specific, so that even when most graduates were going off to their job interviews while the diplomas were being printed, there was so much uncertainty. Young people who had paid well over a hundred thousand dollars to be classified as 'well-educated' were consoling each other over job acceptances with the statistic that people go through several careers in a lifetime. I remember being on the brink of done with that last phase of my life that went according to a pre-arranged syllabus, and listening to all of this with a sense of boiling frustration: what is the matter with you all? or is it, with me? I know exactly what I am! I'm just waiting for the right time to be it!
Since Jeffrey and I moved here, the second place we have farmed, bringing our three children, and having three more, I have been able to dive into all that I spent so long imagining, and training for. I am never really overwhelmed in the pile (being weary is not the same thing), for I spent my formative years learning to put my head down and do the chores, as quickly and yet thoroughly as I could, letting my mind run on what I would like to be doing by and by. This serves me well now, when I still dislike washing dirty dishes, but look forward to rewarding myself with herbal tea and knitting afterwards. This is how I can savor motherhood as composed of snuggling with books and kissing sleepy heads instead of a drudgery of lost sleep and filthy diapers. I may cluck about the clothing on the floor, but I swell with satisfaction when it is all laundered and organized in the drawers; and I know I'll have a chance to do it all over again every day.
In case you suspect that I've wandered off into a digression that relates not at all to my starting point, don't be fooled. (A thorough think-through makes a circle, and it takes time to get around a curve.) What lurks at the back of my mind, is that, when all of this which is familiar now begins to decelerate, with the first child going off to her own home, I might find myself with more and more time on my hands and nothing to plan and dream about. There will be all the hours of daylight, eventually, to sew and knit and potter around with my chickens and my flowers, to learn to cook for just two people, and to enjoy being myself (whoever that will be, by then)...and perhaps I shall learn what it means to be lonely.
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