Light and Momentary

Meekness, Mistreatment, and Mama Bears, or What Will the Ursine Inherit?

For a while after our meeting with the principal, things were better. But Joe came home on Thursday feeling glum. He had been drawing during a read-aloud, which is okay during normal read-alouds but not during this one, for some reason. And then later, during some down time, he had been folding origami. He didn't get in trouble for folding origami per se, but for folding it too loudly. (This baffles me. I listen to a lot of origami being folded at my house. It is not a noisy affair.)

This pair of infractions meant that he would miss out on the next lunch in the classroom. While his classmates stayed in their room, he would go alone to the cafeteria, where he would sit alone to eat. He said he didn't think it had ever happened to anyone else, all year. At bedtime he said, tearfully, "Sometimes people have to clip down twice in one day but she always gives them a chance to clip back up. And I tried all afternoon to clip back up but she never noticed when I was doing anything right."

For a moment I wanted to go to her house and ring her doorbell repeatedly and point my finger in her face and say, "You, Mrs. Rutabaga, you are the embodiment of all that is wrong with American public education." I wanted to pick Joe up at lunchtime on the day of his scheduled exile and take him somewhere extravagant and feed him lots of garlic so he would stink up her classroom for the rest of the afternoon.

Because Jesus was all about shaking his finger in people's faces and plotting passive-aggressive stunts.

The next day Joe came home with two further minor infractions: while waiting for a lesson to start, he had been folding a Post-it note in quarters. Neither of us can remember the other one now but it was exactly the same kind of thing. He said, "It doesn't really matter. I wasn't bad enough to get a pink slip and she already took away my chance to eat lunch in the classroom."

You shouldn't work with kids for years if you don't know a basic truth: when you come down hard on their minor infractions, when you don't let them find a way back, they stop caring about your rules. (Especially if they are rules about loud origami.)

This is exactly what I meant when I told the principal I wasn't sure their relationship was salvageable. The thought of him sitting there hopefully at his desk, doing his best to please her all afternoon and getting exactly nowhere, makes me very sad. Also wrathful and disgusted, but mostly sad.

Elwood wants me to email the principal. I feel like That Parent emailing the principal without listening to the teacher's side of the story. The thought of listening to the teacher's side of the story makes me want to swear pre-emptively. So! I am complaining about her on the internet instead. Jesus probably did lots of that too.

This is one of the hardest things about being a Christian woman, I think: how do we balance meekness and assertiveness? What should our stance be toward people who don't treat our children as we think they ought to be treated? The extremes are easy to figure out: you do your best to send the predator to prison (while seeking grace to forgive), and you teach your child to extend grace to, say, the blind person whose cane trips him up as he's walking down the street. And then there is this vast uncertain middle ground. My kids need to know that they do not ooze sunshine and rainbows from every pore, that sometimes they goof things up and life is hard and they have to suck it up with all the good cheer they can muster. My kids also need to know that I am always, always there for them, and that I will not let people mistreat them or bully them.

(I am writing in haste because I should really be working, not blogging, and because a deadline approacheth. Please pardon any murkiness in my writing or thinking.)

Elwood is right, I think. I should write to the principal, just to let her know what's going on. I will do that today, internet, even if it leaves me feeling like That Parent, because my previous exchanges with Mrs. Rutabaga have left me reasonably confident that she and I are unlikely to see eye to eye. Here's the deadline part: do I leave my office hours early so that I can go and have lunch with Joe? Nothing fancy, just a friendly sandwich somewhere outside of school? I think I do, internet; I think I do.

I was walking to the office this morning thinking, "This is exactly why people get so caught up in dictating others' behavior, because it's easier than addressing our own shortcomings." For today, the plank in my own eye is feeling like plenty to deal with. (Hey, does anybody need a little mote-ectomy? It might be a welcome distraction.) For today, my path to holiness requires me to love my son, tenderly and fiercely and in a way that will help him to grow. It requires me to love my enemies patiently and forbearingly (shut up, spellcheck), even when I would rather buttonhole them and gossip about them. And do you know what? I'm not finding it easy to walk that path today.

Seven Quick Takes: Measure Twice, Move Once Edition

1. There is not enough chocolate in my house. I am reduced to eating generic Nutella from a spoon.

2. We have been talking for a while now about rearranging the bedrooms. We've had three boys in one room since Stella arrived, and it is usually messy. Having two roommates means you can shift the blame -- "but he has more dirty underwear on the floor than I do!" I say, "Boys. Any dirty underwear on the floor at any time is too much dirty underwear on the floor. Never let your dirty underwear touch the ground. Like the American flag, only with coliform bacteria. The hamper is RIGHT THERE."

Will it ever sink in? One wonders.

3. The reason I'd been pruning toys and purging closets recently was that I'd come up with a Plan. We'd move into the room where the toys and kids' books lived. The middle child would move into Stella's room. The two youngest kids would move into our room with the toys, while the books went into the now-single-occupancy room inhabited by our 12yo. Happiness!

4. We'd been talking about how this would work but I forgot the cardinal rule of moving: rooms with no furniture always, always look bigger than they really are. I said, "Should we measure to make sure our bed will fit in this spot where we want it to go?" Elwood said, "It will be fine. This is a big room." I said, "Yeah, by 1923 standards it's big." I lay down in the floor to check the length. It seemed fine. I did not (<-foreshadowing) check the width.

5. Elwood is the family spatial-visual genius. This title was given him by my college roommates when he helped us load our moving van. He could see exactly where everything ought to go to maximize our use of space. They were in awe.

I assumed if he said we were good to go, then we were good to go.

6. I came down to find Elwood and Alex shoving the head of the bed against the windows in that room. (Unexpected benefit of having a 15yo who is as tall as his dad: I am off the hook for much of the furniture moving!) I said, "This is not right! We will freeze if our heads are next to the leaky 1923 windows!" Alas, that's the only way our bed fits in the room.

This departure from our planned configuration also means my dresser doesn't fit. (Not a big loss -- I've always hated it and will be happier with a Craigslist substitute. But in the short term it's a hassle.) And there are a bunch of details we didn't fully think through, like the total lack of storage space in the downstairs bathroom. It's not crazy for me to keep toiletries upstairs, but it's not what you'd call efficient either.

7. And that's why I'm eating fake Nutella from a spoon.

___

7½ I wrote most of this post last night, before we spent our first night in our new room. I was bummed because our baby monitor died sometime in the last three years while it was living in the basement, and I was worried about not hearing Stella. Do you know, mother ears are something. I heard her easily in my sleep, despite being separated from her by a pretty good distance. The volume of her call was pretty low, but the content ("Mama! Mama!") jolted me right into consciousness. So that's good. Wish me luck with her transition to the bunkbed.

More quick takes at Jen's.

Like a Cow

Today I was talking to a woman who had her first baby about a month ago. She's already back in the office, trying to make breastfeeding work. "That must be tough," I said. "Yeah," she answered, "I feel like a dairy cow."

I've heard this a lot: newly lactating women feel like farm animals. It speaks to me of a culture that is really confused about lactation. Nobody ever says, "I feel like a barnyard animal because I'm gestating." We see pregnancy as normal; this is not, after all, Brave New World. We see lactation, however, as optional. Weird. Degrading.

I have to tell you guys: I had no idea I had been living in a bubble (a breastfeeding-is-perfectly-normal bubble) until last summer. That infamous Time magazine cover coincided with my summer class, in which I had my first exposure to dozens of young women sharing their unedited thoughts about breastfeeding. And what did they think? For the most part, they thought it was weird. Gross. Potentially damaging.

In December I will have been nursing one child or another, or sometimes two of them, for 16 years. (I'd put the odds of Stella weaning before her birthday at about the same as the odds of her reading independently before her birthday. It's not out of the question, but I'd be pretty surprised.) I never post about it these days, though, in part because the public reaction to the Time cover, with the 3yo nursing while standing up, was so shrill. Freakazoid! Pervert!

Stella, who is 3, is nursing standing up as I type this with my freakazoid hands; I am thinking about the sea change in my attitude. I had to pump for Alex because he was on the ventilator, and I remember feeling slightly horrified by the milk spraying out of my breasts. I said, "Hey! It works!" I thought, "Yikes! That's weird!"

It's been a long time since nursing seemed weird to me. Nursing means I have a ready supply of the highly nutritious food that my pickiest toddlers have consumed happily, with no worries about safe storage or spoilage. I have benefited immensely from this potent tool for comforting my kids during the tumultuous transition from baby to big kid. There is an ineffable rightness in the reality that I can build their brains and strengthen their immune systems at the same time that I am building bodies and soothing spirits. It's providential, not perverted.

It's a shame that cultural weirdness about nursing turns it into something women think they have to hide. Last week Stella asked for Elwood when she woke up in the small hours. This is exceedingly rare and I was happy to send him into her room while I slept alone in our big bed. In the morning she said, "I'm so happy to see you, Mama. I don't like Daddy's breasts." It still cracks me up, but it seems a little less share-able than it did before the Time craziness.

Even women who are determined to nurse will often talk about it as a duty they're eager to shed. They want their bodies back, they say. Here in my sixteenth year of lactation that idea is pretty foreign to me. I'm not in a hurry to have my lap back -- I will be a little sad when no one wants to cuddle and read Frances or Curious George or St. George and the Dragon any more. I'm not in a hurry to have my arms back -- a world where nobody wants to be scooped up and hugged will be a sadder world. And although I expect I'll have my breasts back sometime in the next year, I'm not counting down the days. I have been a nursing mother for more than three-eighths of my life. It's not, as you may have deduced, an identity I'm in a hurry to shed.

When I nurse my children I don't feel like a cow. I feel like a woman. I feel like a human. I feel like a mother.

As always, this post is only my own musings about the cultural weirdness that complicates lactation for many women. I'm passing no judgments on women who feel like farm animals while nursing. I've been there; I'm somewhere else now. This post is about the view from where I'm standing. It's fine with me if you're standing somewhere else.

That Post About Running

I have been running, off and on and off again, since 2006. This has been the best season I've had so far, and I'm writing about why so I'll remember. These are the things I've learned:

1. The first two miles are a drag. I almost always feel a little grumpy and out of breath until mile 3. For a long time I liked the feeling I got after I ran, but I had to drag myself out there.

2. Then it gets fun. This is the first season I've gone on runs longer than 3 miles, and I can't really convey how surprised I was that I loved miles 3 and 4 and 5. During, not just after.

3. Sweat is good. I love coming home soaking wet, having worked hard enough to sweat through my workout clothes. This is a novel feeling -- both the sweating and the liking it.

4. Stronger is better. It's always hazardous to extrapolate from an n of 1, but this year I added strength training to my schedule and this year I had no joint pain at all -- until six weeks after I bailed on strength training. I went back to Pilates on Sunday night (and my abs still feel like a megalonyx thought they might be a suitable spot for hibernation) and I am still planning to see if I can hit that weights class again even though my schedule has changed.

5. Slow on the trail is better than bitter on the couch. I have always felt like I was too pitiful to call myself a real runner. One of the many cool things about my summer running group was seeing that my pals in the second-slowest group were undeterred by their lack of speed -- they signed up for races that looked like fun, at each one they ran the best race they could, and then they collected the T-shirt at the end. All of this, apparently, without gnashing their teeth over being slow. Go figure.

6. It really does get easier. I wrote in March about how badly my first run of the season went. I didn't record any details because I found them embarrassing, but I wish now that I had them for reference. Two things in particular that feel like milestones to me: first, when I am doing intervals on the treadmill, I can jog for the recovery interval instead of walking. Second, when I went for my first outdoor post-sprained ankle run it felt painfully slow. I refused to feel gloomy about that, since slow and steady wins the race to be free of the Ace bandage. When I got home I plugged my route into Map My Run with low expectations. I was happily surprised to see that my painfully slow pace was <11 minutes per mile.

7. Success breeds higher expectations. Now I am thinking about doing a half-marathon in the spring with one of my friends here in town. Can my aging hypermobile joints take that much pounding? Can I make time for the training given that I have five kids and a job? No idea, but I think it's worth a try. I'll keep you posted.

Another Sunday Night Mishmash

It was a better week -- a much better week.

NancyO asked about the progress of my 9-8-7 plan, linking to an article that reported substantial improvements in life satisfaction for people who ate 7 servings of produce a day. I don't doubt it for a minute. That was the 9 part of my plan, and though I haven't been hitting 9 every day (I'm good with 5 veggies, usually, but 4 fruits is harder), I see a real difference in my outlook and my energy level. In all of my past reform-the-diet plans I've been determined to add veggies and eradicate sugar, but this strategy of eating lots of produce and then having some chocolate if it sounds good feels much more sustainable.

The 7 part of 9-8-7 was about running 7 miles a week. This part of my plan was temporarily derailed by my sprained ankle, but it is healing and I am getting back out there. It feels great. I should do a running post -- I've been kicking one around in my head for a while.

The hardest part, much the hardest part, is getting into bed at 10:00. (I am giving myself a pass tonight because I caught a nap with Stella this afternoon.) It takes stern self-discipline, unexpectedly big discipline. It's worth it, but I have to work at it every single time.

The Pandora station I mentioned last week took me down an unexpected rabbit hole. I was struck by the Sugarland cover of Come On Get Higher, which led me to the Matt Nathanson original, and I've been listening to a ton of Matt Nathanson this week. I used to do this thing where I'd get obsessed with a particular song or album, and listen to it again and again until I knew every beat of it. Haven't done that in years but it's been fun to find a musician who catches my fancy -- so much so that I went out and bought new strings for my guitar.

I told the guy I wanted medium-weight strings and assumed it was a mistake when he rang up a package of lightweight instead. I asked him about it and he said, "Oh, you'll shred your fingers on medium-weight if you haven't been playing. And it might damage the neck of your guitar if you didn't have medium-weight strings on it before." But do you know, I am rock-solid certain that the ancient strings it is currently sporting are medium-weight, and they are my own dang fingers to shred. So I'm taking those suckers back this week to exchange for the ones I should have insisted on getting (I was in that post-confession naked and vulnerable state, but I will be firm on my return), and I'm going to play guitar and plant bulbs and finish that entrelac dice bag.

Out of minutes but I'll see if I can get that running post up in the next day or two...

Sunday Night Mishmash

It hasn't been the best week.

Last Saturday, eight days ago, I discovered that my laptop had been used for nefarious purposes by the person I'd have least suspected of nefarious purposing. His first reaction was to lie, and his second was to say "I didn't mean for you to see that" (which, DUH), and his third was to say he wouldn't do it again, but in a weaselly way that leaves me suspecting he's just planning to cover his tracks better next time.

Trust is inelastic: you can't just snap it back into place like nothing ever happened.

The next day I went out for a run and it was glorious. I was trying a couple of new things I'd been reading about -- a different breathing rhythm, in particular, that allowed me to go 10% faster than my usual long run pace without wanting to kill myself even a little bit. I felt fantastic -- for the first 45 minutes. A hundred yards from home I hit an uneven spot in the sidewalk, went down hard, and sprained my ankle. It is not a bad sprain, not at all like the one 5 years ago, but the ankle is still green and tender a week later. (Parenthetically, I think my summer strength training class was a really good thing for me and my floppy joints. No joint pain all summer long, but this week I've got a sprained ankle and, from a separate incident, two sore hips. Need to figure out a way to get back to that class.)

As you already know, school troubles made it a stressful week. I'm trying not to borrow trouble on that front, but I am a dedicated trouble-borrower.

Yesterday Elwood and I had a stupid argument that poisoned the weekend for me. This isn't the place to air our dirty laundry, so I'll just say OH do I hate stupid arguments. I went to Mass this morning still churning with resentment. I wish I could say that the readings on marriage filled me with hope and encouragement, but...not so much.

Anyway. There are bright spots too. I went out this evening and bought six dozen bulbs: 32 daffodils and 40 tulips. I love planting bulbs. I took the four youngest kids to a nearby farm today, where they unexpectedly had a blast feeding goats and calves. We're planning a Columbus Day trip to an apple orchard. Cider doughnuts ahoy! Yesterday I organized the toys and half of the craft closet and I discovered that there is an actual floor in the boys' closet. Who knew? I have to go tuck a boy in, and with the rest of the evening I am going to work on slapping pictures into albums while listening to my new Pandora station. I am not much of a country music fan, but I asked Pandora to make me a station based on Sugarland and Patsy Cline and it's been unexpectedly fun. (Yesterday I was hip deep in the contents of the catch-all big bin when the hipster dad from the other side of the block rang the bell. I answered the door with the most stereotypical kind of country music blaring from my pocket -- pickup trucks and faithful dogs and cheatin' women. If he had any doubts that I wasn't a hipster, they are now dispelled.)

I'm working on a felted entrelac bag for my 12yo. When I asked him what kind of project he wanted me to make for him next, he said, "Is there anything you could knit for me that would let you try something new you've been wanting to try?" Isn't that the sweetest? I have some delicious dark chocolate which I plan to apply medicinally. Here's to a better week.

The Meeting

You guys, thanks so much for your prayers and support.

Some backstory: Mrs. Rutabaga has been at this school for as long as we've had kids there. I don't view her as incompetent. I think she's kind of rigid. I think she doesn't know exactly what to do with kids who are moving faster than usual. I think she's not a person I'd want to meet for coffee and chitchat. I'm not going to try to get her fired based on what happened Tuesday.

When our oldest son was in fifth grade, she taught his math class. He spent most of the time out in the hall, working ahead on his own. This is the teacher who stonewalled us when we asked if she had any ideas about how we could prepare him at home for the junior high math placement test. She said, "No one from this school has ever placed out of sixth grade math and I can't help you." She wasn't ugly about it; it just hadn't occurred to her that he would be the first one (apparently? hard for me to believe that's really true) to nail that test. He's taking calculus as a sophomore now, but I can't say she helped him get there.

She was in the meeting today; her students were in art class. I forgot to take my beta blocker beforehand, and so my heart was stuttering in angry bursts as I told her how baffling I found her reaction, how poorly her emphasis on answering (inane) reading comprehension questions meshed with my own long-term goals for Joe, how concerned I was about Joe's recurring Sunday night malaise and increasing stomachaches. I am desperately bad at conflict, you guys, so I am pleased that I was able to say, in a level voice, that my son had been consistently bored and miserable in her class and that things needed to change.

We learned some useful things in the meeting: there have been licensing issues, now resolved, with the math software that let Joe work ahead painlessly last year. He's been getting sucked into the antics of a group of troublemaking boys, which explains some of the teacher's background frustration.

After the teacher left the principal said, "You don't seem to feel at peace about the situation," and I said, "No, I do not. I am not at all convinced that their relationship can recover at this point." We talked about switching him into the other fifth grade class. The principal is open to the idea but is somewhat reluctant to do so. This year Mrs. Rutabaga is teaching math and language arts to the faster-moving kids from both classes, so it's far from a perfect solution. For a few different reasons, the principal said she'd prefer to switch him after Christmas break if the problems continue -- not yank him right away. Part of me wonders if I should have pulled a flounce at that point: "No, you will move him TODAY or we will take him OUT of your school." I'm not really a flouncer, though, and she made it very clear that she's willing to work with us.

The principal pulled Joe into her office shortly after we left. She told him that no one -- at school or at home -- wants him to be bored and unhappy. She told him that it will be fine for him to work ahead as long as he demonstrates mastery of the basic material first. On a recent math pre-test, not realizing that it could be his ticket to working independently on interesting stuff, he tore through the front and skipped the back. Elwood and I agree that it's important for him to be diligent. It's that same old thing with math education, though, one of the very things that spurred me to homeschool: when are you measuring and fostering competence, and when are you drilling your students into counterproductive boredom?

So. The short-term plan is for him to run with the happy math software and to have ready access to books that interest him. Mrs. Rutabaga is not going to send him out in the hallway to trudge through pages of reading comprehension questions as punishment for his initiative and interest. The gifted program has just started up, and he will have access to his current gifted project in the classroom as well. If things do not improve rapidly, we'll let the principal know and we can try switching classes. I do think she has his best interests at heart -- she sent me an email about their meeting that said, "He is a fabulous kid!"

If that doesn't help, putting him in our parish school would be the next strategy. We've talked about homeschooling, but Joe agrees that he would be lonely if it were just the two of us -- he is the most social of all the boys. Still, it could be an option if we needed it to be. I'll keep you posted. Thanks again for your prayers and good wishes.

Next

We're meeting with the principal in the morning.

I decided it was unwise to reply to the email that so incensed me, because I couldn't draft more than a sentence without swearing and because I was getting sucked into the petty. I'm not going to be petty. (MOVING ON now, sailing serenely past the temptation to regale you with details.) I sent a brief email saying that Elwood and I wanted to talk in person.

She said we could meet six days later.

I think it's generally a bad idea to go over someone's head without trying to work things out first, but -- really? Six days? I don't think so.

So. Nine o'clock. Prayers appreciated.

Getting it out of my system

Dear Mrs. Rutabaga,

I started receiving email in January of 1993, almost 20 years ago. In all that time, the email you sent me last night is the only one to which I've ever been tempted to reply with an obscene and anatomically improbable directive.

My son, your student, is miserable in your class. I know it is frustrating for you that he is not meeting your classroom expectations. You have apparently failed to consider, however, that the reason he is not meeting your classroom expectations is that your classroom is not meeting his expectations -- namely, that he would be learning.

It was a red flag for me when I sat in your classroom for half an hour at the meet-the-teacher event in August and heard nothing, not a word, about what the kids would be studying. I learned a lot about your discipline policies, about how they move their clothespins up and down depending on whether they've been good or bad, about how they can buy potato chips with their good behavior points. I have no idea -- none -- what your goals are for social studies or science or math or language arts.

My son came home yesterday with unhappiness etched all over his face. When I asked him what the trouble was, he burst into tears and begged to be homeschooled. You had told the kids they needed to read The Giver according to your schedule. His crime, his unspeakable transgression, was to get so excited about the book that he came home on Monday and dug up our family's copy to finish the story. He was so eager to talk about it with me -- why did it end that way? What would it be like to live in a world like that? Your response, when you found out about this deplorable enthusiasm, was to tell him he'd have to do all of the reading comprehension questions -- approximately 200 of them -- for all 22 chapters.

I have to tell you that reflecting on this threat, and remembering the reading comprehension questions to which I was subjected as a grade-schooler, makes me want to gather up all of the school's reading comprehension workbooks, shower them with napalm, and watch the flames with glee. Afterward, calm and moderate soul that I am, I will spit on the ashes.

I do not intend for my son to remain in your class much longer, but there is something you need to know anyway: if you were to succeed in your efforts to teach him that assiduous reading is less important than a grim determination to stick to the schedule, you would be doing him a grave disservice. It is difficult for me to imagine that a teacher would really want to drive a stake through the heart of a student's zeal for reading, his willingness to be drawn inside a fictional world, but based on this and other encounters I have to conclude that you find his alacrity unacceptable.

I myself find your attitude unacceptable. Your email indicates to me that we have fundamentally incompatible philosophies of education. And yours? Is wrong.

Yours most irascibly,

Jamie Gladly

PS This thing you do where you call yourself Mrs. Rutabaga while calling me Jamie? It doesn't fly. First names are fine. Mrs. + Surnames = also fine. Power-trippy games -- not fine.