News From Hawkhill Acres

This has been one of those weeks where my email brings me the world, or at least the more interesting parts of the world. From my friend Margaret at the Secular Homeschooler’s play group that Daughter and I attend, I got this neat link - Peter Callesen’s Paper Art. I love the skeleton. (How’s that for a teaser?)

From Deborah Markus, editor of Secular Homeschooling Magazine, I got an email that kept me from bellowing at my highly irritating, completely disorganized and ADD-afflicted beloved family. She said something about how her son was sick so she could just focus on him which simplified things for awhile and I started thinking about focus.

As a mother, I spend 99% of my time focused at least somewhat on my family, more specifically on my kids. Of course, the fact that my kids are unschoolers means that they learn a lot from our interaction. But even when I’m doing other things, there’s a thread in the back of my mind (or my heart or my nervous system depending on what the kids are up to) that ties some of my attention to them. But just in case that thread gets a little frayed, there are other ways that my focus is forced to return to them, again and again throughout the day. To stay with the textile analogy here, our lives are so interwoven that when they warp, I woof.

Here’s a typical example of that. I’m sitting at my desk, where in a few minutes I’ll be writing a book of organic gardening tips. (Actually, it’s written. I’m just proofreading it for the last time.) But on top of the notes I’ve made of changes I might make, there’s a drawing of a very fashionable, slightly anime-ish young lady (with a tail) who’s ice skating with flowers falling all around her. True, the flowers are kind of a tie-in with the book, but still.

Daughter’s drawings are all over the place. This is partly because she draws literally scores a day, and also because of the ol’ boundary problem that ADD people find so hard to resolve. Like gases, they expand to fill the available space, taking over rooms like Sherman took Atlanta. I love her drawings, but I get extremely pissed off just a little cross when I have to do an archeological dig to unearth the notes I took on carbon offsets, and then discover that they’re mixed in with anime as expressed through the medium of peanut butter and jelly because Daughter was having a working lunch. It gets old.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have the least stuff of anyone in the house. Most of it is on my desk in the basement computer room, in my closet or on the table next to my living room chair or beside my bed. We live in a huge old house that has either 9 or 11 rooms. (We disagree on whether two of the rooms are actual rooms or… well, something other than rooms.) But anyhow, we have plenty of space for everyone’s stuff.

So, why is it that everyone else’s stuff keeps getting into the middle of my stuff? I pick up my Word for Dummies book to check out indexing and there are little foam fashion items - high-heeled shoes, hats and dresses - stuck to the pages. Daughter’s, obviously, but why has she stuck them to the pages of a book about using a word processing program? Why not stick them into a junk mail ad for Kmart or something? Come to that, why stick them to anything at all? Why have them in the first place, if you’re going to just stick them all over other people’s stuff and then forget about them?

I settle down in my chair after dinner and pick up one of my half-knitted socks and find that I’m missing the needle I need to knit the socks off the needles they’re on. (I use the four-needle approach to sock knitting, which means that the sock is on three needles and I knit it off with a fourth needle.) After a short search around my chair, I’m frisking Son’s cat, who is a fool for yarn and knitting needles, when the geek bursts into the room and says the stupid stick broke and now his computer repair isn’t going to hold.

“Where did you get this stick?” I ask him.

He looks at me with his hair in points and a vague look in his eyes.

“Someone left it beside your chair,” he says, “I guess it was a lollipop stick or something.”

“No, it was a wooden knitting needle and I needed it to knit my socks.”

“Well, maybe you could still use it,” he says, “If it’s a short sock.”

And this illustrates the other side of the coin with mothers and families. What’s theirs is all over the place and what’s mine is theirs, when they can’t find something of theirs that they need. I hate to sound like a selfish old termagant (which always sounds like some kind of shore bird to me but is actually from the Crusades), but sometimes I’d like to have just one room that I could call my own. A room with a lock on the door and all my stuff inside. I’d go inside, lock the door, sit down all by myself… And be bored to tears and very, very lonely.