Writing Maternity

okay, I did it!

I just finished the last administrative work project that temporarily fallen off my desk as a result of the burglary.  This means, I think, that I can actually climb back on the writing wagon, and remind myself of the articles and other projects I'd been planning to do this spring.

I have a feeling that this moment is only going to last about three second, because there's another big administrative work project looming.  But I don't think that I actually need to start fretting (much less working) on that one until next week, which gives two half days (if I'm honest) to write and contemplate writing.

And that, my friends, feels like a veritable ocean of time.

kindergarten and reading

This post is really about two things, only loosely connected.

First, for inquiring minds: the Great Kindergarten Debate of 2008 is concluded.  We're going with Hippie School.  I have mixed feelings about this -- that is, feelings that are as mixed as they can be when you're confident you're sending your kid to a really good, convenient public school with lots of her friends and where you know and like lots of the parents.

(My feelings are mixed because I feel as though we -- and that's a larger collective than simply G and me, in this decision -- are wimping out.  I'd also feel confident that Squiss was going to a really good, convenient public school if we were sending her to Neighborhood School, and I feel bad for the underdog.)

Second, Squiss is really, really reading.  And, I think not coincidentally, she's suddenly become more amenable to chapter books.  We're working our way through Paddington right now, which if I'd been thinking iconically would not have been my choice for Squiss's First Real Chapter Book -- but it's fine.  I'm more intrigued by the strange thing that most of my touchstones for good early chapter books are British: Pooh, Narnia, Paddington.  Oh, wait: Charlotte's Web is a good exception, as is Oz.  I'm not going to push for Carroll just yet -- too much that requires explanation for the jokes to work. 

skiing

Life post-burglary continues.  The insurance paperwork is taking far too long, and completing it (not to mention tracking down possible "proofs of ownership") is mostly like picking at a slowly-healing wound.  But we've moving on.  Like the baby jacarandas in our front yard, we seem to be bending rather than breaking.  This is good news.

One note: I'm loving the electronic age.  Not only did the web make estimating replacement costs for my jewelry infinitely easier and less time-consuming than it would have been otherwise, but I was able to email three companies that I'd bought bags from in the last three years and have them locate my original receipts.  I didn't have precise dates of purchase, so they had to search by (I assume) my last name.  Thank you, both to the kind people who took the time and to the technology that made locating those receipts so (apparently) effortless.

On a happier note, here's my Squissy girl at the end of her last run down the mountain two weeks ago:

update/explanation

We returned from a really great and computer-free weekend skiing in Utah* to find our house burgled.  No visible damage apart from even greater untidyness than usual and the loss of some emotionally and otherwise significant item: most of my jewelry is gone; G's and my laptops are both gone; you get the picture.  They ignored the outdated (and quite bulky) desktop computers, TV, and stereo, and rifled through many drawers to relatively little avail.  (We just don't have all that much -- apart from the abovementioned laptops and jewelry -- that's of much value.  Unfortunately for us, it turns out that the items most valuable to the pawn shop are also the items that transcend monetary value for us.  Those two computers, man, ...)

So if blogging is light in the next couple of weeks, blame the burglars -- and understand that I am trying to reconstruct the last two-and-a-half years' of work.  Much of it was backed up, but some of that was on the thumb drive hiding sneakily in a pocket of my computer backpack, which they swiped (I assume to carry the loot in).  It got stuck when they dumped the rest of my things (library book, notebook, pens).

Back up your work.  And keep your jewelry in a strange place -- although given the number of drawers they rifled through, I can't for the life of me think of what a strange place might be.

* Two happy notes: Squiss was *amazing* and by the end of the trip had taken the chair to the top of the mountain and skied down some blue runs.  Tricksy has discovered her first rock star.  We went with the Transmogrification clan, and she screamed "Truck! Truck! Truck!" every time she saw him.  I think that I have to change his handle now.

still weighing . . .

The kindergarten debate rages on in our household.  Well, that's the overstatement of the year, frankly, because we both have too much on our plates to obsess.  (Over that, at any rate.)  But we haven't decided yet, and the decision point is starting to loom.

Hence, bloggery.

I'll say up front (as I've said before) that I don't really think that we can lose.  That makes the choice that much more difficult, and it also makes intensely small things seem global in importance.  I also don't want to discount what Geeky Mom calls the "'put your own oxygen mask on first' philosophy of parenting," but I'm also aware that the difference in convenience is pretty minimal.

We're swimming against the current of faculty at my college, most of whom seem to send their kids to Hippie School.  While some of this has to do with proximity, and some of it has to do with the intrinsic qualities of the school itself, the logic by which fac brats are sent to Hippie School starts to disappear, and it starts to look like the obvious and automatic move.

And I'm aware that having a whole bunch of educators as the parents of Squiss's school friends might be simultaneously great and not so great.

(The daycare where Tricksy now goes, and which Squiss went to the year she was two, also had tons of faculty kids and I have to say that I wasn't overwhelmingly impressed with the results.  We moved Squiss to her current Montessori -- and will move Tricksy once she turns two -- because we weren't satisfied with certain aspects of the school.)

My biggest misgiving about Hippie School is its very strong reputation for not teaching math (and science*) well.  I'm not down with that.  One friend thinks that the school is working on it, but I've heard it from parents whose kids went through the school years ago, and so I'm worried that it's pretty entrenched.  Squiss currently loves numbers and math, and while she doesn't play with those quite as much as she does with words, I'd hate to see her in an environment that wouldn't foster that love.  I'd hate even more if she got to junior high and, faced with kids from other elementary schools that ARE better at math, decided that she "wasn't good at math" and stopped paying attention.  Another smart girl, sidelined.

Princess Towhead's parents are agonizing over the decision at least as much as G and I are, so we're probably going to band together to think it through.  Sidecar and Gemstone will both go to Hippie School, it seems.  If Princess T goes to Hippie School, that's it for us: we're not separating Squiss from three of her four best friends (Haggis lives in another town), particularly when they'll all be at the same place.  And while the thought that she might not go to school with Sidecar and Gemstone saddens me, we're close enough friends with the girls' parents that I don't worry too much about maintaining contact.

Both kindergartens assign homework, which irritates me to no end.

* A geologist friend swore he'd never, ever send his children to Hippie School after a visit to a class to show the kids some cool rocks and fossils.  The teacher not only misinformed the kids but then put him in the position of either ratifying the misinformation or telling her in front of her class that she was wrong.

I have to confess

that I find it utterly infuriating that they start using the past tense about California (as in "it went for Clinton") when they only have 17% of the precincts reporting.  G responded with some irritation that they're really good at these projections now, but I still find it infuriating.

triangles

When Squiss was two, she had two best friends: Sidecar and Princess Towhead.  Sometimes she'd play with one; sometimes she'd play with the other.  They almost never played with one another without Squiss there, and it was rarely a threesome.  (In contrast to her current solid threesome with Gemstone and Haggis.)

Tricksy, I learned this morning, sometimes plays with The Wiggle, and sometimes plays with Wisdom (who has really on just come onto my radar, although she's been in the class for a while).  They don't play with one another.

I haven't quite figured out what, if anything, this means.

two Lauras on the "mom" thing

Here's 11D and here's Geeky Mom.

wonder

Kurt Spellmeyer, Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century (2003):

We should not dismiss a remark once made by William James, echoing Plato -- that all knowledge begins and ends in wonder.  For many humanists today, the experience of wonder if certainly important, but only as a personal consequence of an impersonal enterprise.  Yet wonder is never simply a happy accident; it is the motive force behind the making of knowledge itself, and without it, knowledge soon becomes dead and deadening.  The distinctive purpose of the humanities is to make wonder possible by insisting, over and over again, on both the openness of our experience and the coherence of the world we encounter through it.  (21-22)

working motherhood

Aspazia has a characteristically thoughtful post today about motherhood and working-outside-the-home motherhood, specifically.  Since we have two finalists coming in this week, I doubt that I'll have time to respond as fully as I'd like, but this jibes with a thought that I've been formulating over the course of the last week or so.

I ran into a colleague (whom I like, but who is not a close friend) the other day and she stopped me to say, essentially and almost literally, "How do you do it?"  That's a question I've gotten versions of several times over the course of the last couple of years, and I never know how to respond.  Sometimes it comes from people about to have children, and other times it comes from people who are childless (or even partnerless).  (Generally women in the latter case, but not in the former.)  The short answer is, of course, that you just do; the longer answer is ultimately so individual and idiosyncratic that it won't do anyone else any good.

I barely had maternity leave when Squiss was born, so I never had the luxury of only being a mother.  Integration had to happen right away because classes started three weeks after she was born.  Perhaps for that reason -- but not only for that reason -- I've never been fully comfortable with formulations that pit my professional work "against" my family or children.  Which is more important?  How can I answer that question?  If Squiss or Tricksy gets sick, I tie things up quickly and dash off to pick them up.  (Or G does.)  We take time off work.  We care for them.  But if (as tonight) there's a talk and a dinner I need/want to go to, I go.  I often wish my work were less demanding of my time, so that I could leave at 3:00 every day and have more time with my kids.  I often, also, find my kids exhausting and look forward to the moment when we'll put them to bed, so that we can hang out with one another as "grown-ups."  It isn't all work and kids, after all. 

I'm not saying this clearly, so I'll try again.  For me, mother and teacher-scholar-administrator are so intertwined in who I am that I can't imagine choosing.  Not only can I not imagine choosing, I can't really imagine the situation that would require me to choose: I can't imagine an hour-and-a-half or a single day that would make or break either endeavor.  My children have thrived in daycare; both are creative, independent, deeply affectionate beings.  And I am better for having a more public outlet, for having extended conversations (in writing and speech) with colleagues and students about things other than kindergarten and tantrums and so on.  I am (even) a better mother for that outlet: it gives me balance and perspective, it gives me greater patience with my daughters, and so on.

This imbrication is perhaps why my mental image is one of balance rather than juggling.  There aren't really any balls that I can drop, because everything is ultimately attached.