Tom Sawyer

As soon as I open the washing machine, I hear an enthusiastic flutter of toddler feet, then find two extra hands grabbing and shoving clothes into the washer. I now spend half of my effort removing the wrong clothes and simultaneously tricking Helena into thinking she is helping me. I watch her fascination with my work and eagerness to take part in it, the laundry, a job I tend to avoid as long as possible. Why do I hate it so much?

I'm not alone in a desire to shirk my work. Recently in the car we listened to chapter two of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain, Mark//Mark Twain Library), where Tom tricks his friends into paying him for the privilege of whitewashing his fence. Afterwards, Twain writes:

If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Obligation as a motive for doing something seems closely related to resentment and procrastination. My children definitely grumble and postpone their work when I assign them chores, yet when they decide to surprise me by cleaning up the house, they work cheerfully and quickly. This principle seems true even when I am the one making myself do the work. A pile of clothes to fold sometimes seems an insurmountable obstacle: couldn't I just bake a cake instead?

Synonyms for obliged include "forced, required, bound, compelled, obligated, duty-bound, under an obligation, under compulsion, without any option" (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/). I can't think of a time in my life when someone actually forced me to do anything, so for me, being obliged to do something is not a real situation but a feeling, and the synonym "duty-bound" best reflects this. When I act out of duty, I don't feel joy in the results of my labor. Instead I feel relief that I can cross something off the to-do list. How can I transcend duty? How can I help my children do the same?

I have not arrived at a perfect solution, but this year I have seen some changes in my family as I have tried to make it more of a team effort than an individual pursuit. We all take our separate positions cleaning the kitchen after a meal, set a timer, and see if we can complete the job in 15 or 20 minutes. When we all work together, jobs become shorter, and the effort to beat the clock adds interest. Our clean clothes pile has become a mountain lately, so the past few weeks we have had a "folding laundry party" a couple of evenings a week. We pile the clean clothes on my bed and everyone finds, folds, and puts away their own clothes as quickly as possible, then helps with towels and the baby clothes. Because the results of cleaning are so short-lived and relentless, I have always had a difficulty feeling entirely satisfied after doing a job. Enlisting my family's aid, then talking and laughing together throughout a job makes the process fun and the completion soon. Mary Poppins spoke truly when she sang, "In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap, the job's a game."

Cleaning rooms, making beds, and getting dressed in clean clothes in the morning have been habits I've struggled with helping my children develop. Then my sister Johanna told me what she does, I stole her idea, and now I am finding success with telling everyone that I would love the whole family to join me for a home-cooked breakfast as soon as they have those tasks completed.

As a child, I thought Tom Sawyer successfully tricked his friends into doing his work, but it's not that simple. They had fun whitewashing his fence. Working cooperatively, finding success in the results, and  taking well-deserved rest at the end of a task can help anyone develop the ability to feel self-motivated and enjoy a task instead of feeling obliged to do it. Even me.

On Accompanying

Karina and Katie performed in a voice recital Tuesday night with me accompanying them on the piano. My years of practicing and taking piano lessons have culminated in playing accompaniments, which thefreedictionary.com defines as "a vocal or instrumental part that supports another, often solo, part." If I do that job well, I will scarcely be noticed, I will follow the singer's lead and enhance the performance in an inconspicuous way. I have no time to sit back and enjoy the music. Last night several people told me Katie looked so enthusiastic while she sang, but I missed it, with my eyes on the score and my ears following her lead. What I gained was a feeling of involvement in the music, of losing myself for the benefit of another and finding my abilities strengthened in the process. I love supporting my daughters as they sing. A parent's most noble job, in my opinion, is to provide the support and the scaffolding her children need to climb to greater heights. This requires and enhances every ability I have gained in my life. Like my accompaniments on the piano, motherhood involves few times to relax and enjoy. The songs I am creating form only the background of my children's lives. However, I find purpose in supporting, a vocation suited to me for the present time, until I will once again be the soloist.

Weep to Have

I feel poetry but lack the power to make my words profoundly beautiful like my thoughts. This month while reading Jane Eyre, I found that Jane felt the same about her artistic ability. When Mr. Rochester asked her about some of her paintings, she said, "I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise." Sometimes a particular poem strikes me because it captures my feelings in a way I am "powerless to realise." This week I encountered Shakespeare's Sonnet 64 and feel new awe at his power.

Impermanence and inevitable loss are his themes. He begins:

          When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
          The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
          When sometimes lofty towers I see down-razed
          And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

Amid monuments to the dead, the poet laments time and weather's slow destruction of our attempts to remember them.

The next four lines show the effect of the tides:

          When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
          Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
          And the firm soil win of the watery main,
          Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

I feel a faster progress of decay and visualize a child's disappointment at the loss of his "kingdom of the shore," a sand castle.

Viewing ruin all around him, he thinks:

          When I have seen such interchange of state,
          Or state it self counfounded to decay,
          Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
          That Time will come and take my love away.

Because nothing is permanent, we will inevitably lose even those we love. His concluding couplet mourns the having because of the fear of losing:

          This thought is as a death which cannot choose
          But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.

I feel this as I witness and participate in my children's inexorable march to adulthood. I know my goal as a parent is to eliminate my position so that one day they will all leave my home, but I still dread it. When my mother visited a couple of years ago, she swept my floor after lunch one day, and I complained, "My floor has to be swept after every meal."
  
She replied, "My floor stays clean, but my house is empty."

I "weep to have" because I fear for the empty house, the loneliness I know I will some day feel. One day at church I sat between my eldest daughter, Karina, and my youngest, Helena, the beginning and end of my cycle of motherhood. I remember Karina as the baby in my arms, but she stands taller than I am and will leave for college in only three years. I try to grasp that remaining time but the "firm soil" increases "store with loss" and runs right between my fingers.

Some day I will ask myself where the years went, but I will know that I lived them. I am grateful that in the midst of a busy life I can spend each day with these children, to help them, know them, relate to them. The days and stages of their childhood dissolve like sugar into the syrup of my life, sweetening it but in an elusive way I find difficult to distinguish and savor. One day I will have the time and solitude to savor it and the sweetness of my memories will remain.

Sonnet 64

When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometimes lofty towers I see down razed,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage:

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main,

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store:

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate—

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Don't bring these things to the table

"Table Manners Made Easy," our new chapter in Sheryl Eberly's 365 Manners Kids Should Know: Games, Activities, and Other Fun Ways to Help Children Learn Etiquette, began on May 5. From now through mid-July, behavior at the table will be our focus. On Saturday we read a short list entitled, "Don't bring these things to the table." In case you were wondering, here they are:

• Handheld video games
• The remote control for the television (keep the TV off during meals)
• A magazine or book
• The newspaper
• Homework
• The dog

I guess five out of six isn't too bad. We will continue to have our manners lessons every morning at the breakfast table, along with the book, even though I now know it to be a forbidden item. There isn't another time with the entire family present that would be as convenient. Consistency trumps etiquette this time.

A Thinking Love

I am a stay-at-home mother, a chef, a nurturer, a seamstress, a musician, an educator, a baker, an accountant, a writer, a wife, a student, and a lover of the arts—all without pay. I am not a housekeeper, a maid, a chauffeur, or a laundress, although at times I do the tasks necessary for those roles. I am also a feminist who worries that by embracing these roles I appear to be an unliberated housewife who has attenuated herself into a mere outline of her husband and children. This life satisfies me even as I visualize an imaginary feminist despising me for my unliberated life.

Save your contempt. I don't despise you in return. The Mommy Wars have always mystified me. I do not need to justify staying at home by persuading myself that my children will surpass those of the career-balancing mother in every way because I sacrificed my identity on the altar of motherhood. I chose this life and think other women should be free to choose theirs. While Eric works, I have the freedom to help my children grow, to watch their identities unfold. I also choose to consider it my calling, not my job.  I do not need or want a salary for my work because I love it for itself. Renumeration would only cheapen my motivation. My worth as a person and my identity do not center on what I receive money for, which I consider a hollow way of valuing a person. I think Eric sometimes envies me my freedom to pursue my interests with my children.

Homeschooling has given me my greatest purpose. Through home education I believe I can give my children an individualized education superior to any they could receive in school. I have not lost myself in the process, but instead it has led me to utilize more of my mind than anything else I have ever done. Pestalozzi said:

The mother is qualified, and qualified by the creator Himself, to become the principal agent in the development of her child; . . . and what is demanded of her is––a thinking love . . . . God has given to the child all the faculties of our nature, but the grand point reminds undecided––how shall this heart, this head, these hands be employed? to whose service shall they be dedicated? A question the answer to which involves a futurity of happiness or misery to a life so dear to thee. Maternal love is the first agent in education (Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 3).

I give a "thinking love" to my children not through the suppression of my individuality but by using all my faculties and abilities to tutor them as I work with them daily. Every mother is an expert in her own children, and I try to use my expertise to help each child develop uniquely. Suzuki wrote: "The word education implies two concepts: to educe, which means to 'bring out, develop from latent or potential existence,' as well as to instruct" (Nurtured by Love 86). As much time should be spent educing children's humanity as instructing them. Coaxing out their latent qualities requires much time and the knowledge of and love for each individual that I alone possess. In the process I realize my own potential.

Reading, accompanying a choir, writing, singing, teaching, explaining math concepts, directing a play––my week consists mainly of these activities, all of which benefit both me and my children. Sometimes I think that feminism in the 20th century could have taken a different path, that envisioned by Charlotte Mason at the century's start. She wrote:

We are waking up to our duties and in proportion as mothers become more highly educated and efficient, they will doubtless feel the more strongly that the education of their children during the first six years of life is an undertaking hardly to be entrusted to any hands but their own. And they will take it up as their profession––that is, with the diligence, regularity, and punctuality which men bestow on their professional labours (Mason, Home Education, 3).

Educating my own children is my professional labor. It takes diligence and more of my intelligence than anything else I have ever attempted. Every day I learn a little more about the value of each child, of the difference a good education can make, and about having a large impact on a few people as their latent qualities develop. I am living the life I have chosen. In the middle of the daily chaos I find myself, no mere outline but fully fleshed, a complete woman. And yes, a mother.

A Lazy, Sky-High Fly Ball

Grayson, parkhand, ex-Minor League ball player, never learned to read. After he finds a young runaway, the two become friends, and Maniac Magee assumes the task of teaching him. Grayson finds that he must practice reading just as he used to practice baseball. And it can be frustrating:

Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. . . . To the old pitcher, they were like his own best knuckleball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down––not even the pitcher, much much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing (Maniac Magee 101). 

I swung and missed yesterday morning, just like Grayson in Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee, only instead of learning how to read I was learning how to tie knots. I attempted two knots necessary for rock climbing: a figure eight with follow through and a clove hitch, both of which I have learned before. Even though I read instructions in my rock-climbing book, examined the pictures, and Eric walked me through the process, I still struck out.

Eric didn't let me give up. He coached me repeatedly after each failure, just like Magee coached Grayson:

But the kid was a good manager, and tough. He would never let him slink back to the showers, but kept sending him back up to the plate. The kid used different words, but in his ears the old Minor Leaguer heard: 'Keep your eye on it . . . Hold your swing. . . Watch it all the way in . . . Don't be anxious . . . Just make contact' (Maniac Magee 102).

Magee felt confident that if they kept at it, Grayson would learn to read. Eric believes I can learn to tie knots, even though I lack spatial visualization ability and have fumbling fingers. "Anyone can train himself; it is only a question of using the right kind of effort" (Nurtured by Love 37), wrote Suzuki. What, then, is the right kind of effort? The Suzuki Method has taught me that it consists in part of these things:

1. Small steps
2. Consistent effort
3. Repetition

When working with my children, I have found small steps to be an invaluable tool. A piece of music can be broken up into ever smaller portions: lines, measures, single notes, and if any larger portion is too difficult, a smaller one can be found that is achievable. In addition, the Suzuki books also haved graded repertoire, beginning with simple pieces that build necessary skills now for more challenging pieces later. The same process can be applied to every educational situation. Although strugglings and frustration usually play a role in learning anything, I have always found that breaking a task into smaller steps makes the impossible possible.

Even though I felt like it wasn't possible, Eric kept me at it. He guided me through each small step until I succeeded in tying a clove hitch. The knot worked!

However, small steps will not make a difference without consistent effort. Learning only takes place if lessons are spaced closely enough that any ability gained is retained. Otherwise, frustration can resurface as the skill has to be relearned, something that has happened to me with tying knots, so three hours later, Eric brought me rope and I tied it again. This time, it will stick.

But only if I use repetition to cement it in the mind and the body. "If some skill is easy for you, that is evidence that it has been developed through training to such an extent that it has become a part of you,  . . that your purpose has been achieved by work and repetition until the skill has firmly taken hold in your consciousness" (Nurtured by Love 43). I need tying knots to become as automatic as other things I take for granted, like knowing how to read.

Though practice is frequently grueling, the reward of watching something difficult become
 easy is immeasurable. With weeks of work, Greyson began reading, "nailing those vowels on the button, riding them from consonant to consonant, syllable to syllable, word to word" (Maniac Magee 102). I love Spinelli's description of Greyson's feelings that night:

The old man gave himself up willingly to his exhaustion and drifted off like a lazy, sky-high fly ball. Something deep in his heart, unmeasured by his own consciousness, soared unburdened for the first time in thirty-seven years, since the time he had so disgraced himself before the Mud Hen's scout and named himself thereafter a failure" (Maniac Magee 105). 

Learning frees us to drift off "like a lazy, sky-high fly ball." What we now know takes hold in our consciousness, changing forever both who we are and how we view ourselves.