Remembering

Two anniversaries down, one to go. And, yes, I'm still thinking about "that."

My grief and sense of loss has extended past the parameter of the accepted societal norm. Apparently, the shelf-life for sadness over miscarried babies is about a year. Anything beyond that is somewhat self-indulgent and really ought not to be acknowledged. Or at least this is what I gather from the way most people gloss over any mention I make of my loss and charge right on ahead with Topics of General Interest. (Usually of their own general interest, mind you.) No one told me that this would happen. No matter--if they had, I wouldn't have believed them.

I am blessed to have one friend (that would be you, Sarah) who still remembers that amazingly blessed Christmas of 2005 and that cripplingly awful January of 2006. Of course, ours is a bond that was forged in the fires of her own loss just weeks before. I guess those kinds of ties just knot tighter, somehow. Sarah is the one who is not afraid to close an email with a mention of the names we have given our missing children. She remembers ... where so many others can not or will not.

There are others in my life who watch helplessly as I bottom out on these anniversaries. Some seem to not connect A with B; they don't seem to realize that though I carry the weight of two years of mourning with a relative sense of peace through most days, there are other times when the burden makes any joy seem like a dim, elusive prospect that can never be as bright as it should have been to me. There are empty places at the table! I want to shout at them. But I realize that this would only come across as selfish. After all, my loss is not theirs. Their lives have gone on, just as mine has.

My husband--who has distanced himself from the pain in that typical manly fashion that allows for some long, retrospective glances without too much emotional involvement--sees me hurting and wants to help. He is gentle and careful of my heart during this time, especially, and I thank him for that. Even though he is not still grieving with me, he is more than willing to acknowledge--with words even!--that our family will not be complete this side of heaven.

Honestly, it's the lack of words that makes this remembering hardest. Two years later, there are so few people who can actually bring themselves to say, "I am so sorry that your baby died." I suppose it is too uncomfortable. They are probably just thinking that it would hurt me or, worse yet, send me off the deep end they fear I am already teetering on. Their hesitancy tells me that it would be completely inappropriate for me to ponder aloud what our Christmas card photo would have looked like this year, let alone give voice to how hard it is to see any and all children in the range of 18 mos. right now.

I walk through these anniversaries with awe at the depth of loss one person can feel when there are so many other brilliantly bright spots in their life. Am I depressed? I can honestly answer no to that question. I have been depressed and this most certainly is not what it feels like. There is no black hole threatening to swallow me, no darkness that light cannot pierce. I feel the Lord alongside me as I journey through the shadow of this remembering, and I reach out for His comfort when the sadness threatens to steal my peace. And there is peace here. It's a peace of knowing that some day, I will gather my entire family in heaven and see all my children dancing together. What I feel in the here and now is the loss of a dream that slipped from my fingertips, of a future not planned, and of a mother's heart bruised and battered, but not fully broken.

I guess that December and January will always give me pause. I will never again see December 12 on a calendar and not think of the positive pregnancy test in my upstairs bathroom, or the impromptu trip to the sporting goods store to buy the arrow I wrapped to signify my husband's growing quiver. I will never sit amongst the discarded wrapping paper on Christmas morning and not recall the pregnancy countdown calendar that I so carefully created for my children to both announce our news and to help them understand exactly when our family would expand, or the tears of joy Jo shed. And I will never celebrate Epiphany without remembering how far my emotional pain overshadowed my intense physical pain, or how startled I was to be saying goodbye so soon.

Perhaps I should be thankful that I have these precious few memories just to myself, and that I can feel their joy mingled with sadness on my own terms. Perhaps if someone else tried to comfort me, I would find myself saying, "It's o.k." or, worse, assuring them that they are o.k. There are worse things, in my opinion, than being forgotten--such as being fake.

So excuse me if I use this blog to muse over the raw spots that are too unseemly for the public at large. And pardon me if I revisit old hurts from time to time. While the official expiration date for my grief has passed, the feeling of loss itself has not. And I have to have a safe place to show all my bruised spots and tears.

Lost!

Logan has lost his very first baby tooth. At 5 years, 7 months, he is the youngest of my children to begin the shedding of milk teeth. Emotions are mixed--for all of us. Logan keeps saying that he feels "new," a sentiment he seems unsure of. As for me, well ... my baby is no longer a baby. ((sigh)) Further proof that when all those well-meaning ladies saw me out and about with my little ones and kept telling me to enjoy their childhoods while they lasted, they were right.

Another bright idea

Per our Sonlight schedule, we read a short biography of Thomas A. Edison this week. Actually, the book was scheduled for three days in my IG, but it was written on such an elementary level that we flew through it in one afternoon.

Being somewhat disappointed with the book--especially since I knew that Edison would hold endless appeal to Atticus--I began gathering resources to supplement the topic. It was one of the easiest mini-units I've ever pulled together; Atticus already owns not one, but two electricity kits that contain various experiments (basically reenactments of Edison's own trials), and our library is chock full of books and videos on the man and his work. I also found some websites that my children found fascinating. They spent an excited hour or two just tooling through the National Park site alone and enjoying the interactive features, listening to snippets of recordings and watching original clips filmed in the Black Maria studio. The online quiz that Edison used to stump his potential employees with was enlightening, to say the least.

We had basically moved beyond the topic as of today, and were settling--to my glee-- into the remarkable and infinitely engrossing period of the Reconstruction (guess what my area of academic concentration was?) when I realized that one of the recessed lights in my kitchen was out. Normally, this is what I would do:

Nothing.

It's my husband's job to manage the facilities, so I allow him to do so as he sees fit. This sometimes means that a burned out bulb remains in place for several days, but frankly, I'm o.k. with that. I have no desire to usurp the man.

Today, though, I saw this dead bulb as what it really was: a hands-on learning experience. And so, with all the drama I could muster, I started barking orders:

"Logan, get me a chair! Atticus, paper lunch sack! Jo, three magnifying glasses! Let's move, people!"

The children all clambered into action, and before they knew what was happening, I was perched on the kitchen counter unscrewing a big bulb from the 9 foot tall ceiling. Being of fairly sound mind, they knew what I was doing, but not why. As I've said, they don't see Momma doing this kind of thing very often. Curiosity was high.

After I made it safely back to the ground, I let everyone examine the bulb. Then--still cashing in on the drama factor--I proceeded to slip the bulb into the sack and smack it on the counter until I heard the glass shatter.

As you can imagine, the kids were all atwitter at this point. When I pulled the remains of the bulb back out, though, they ooohed and ahhhed. There, naked before them, were the inner workings of an incandescent light bulb.

We spent quite a while poring over the details. Atticus ran out to the schoolroom and returned with our handy copy of The New Way Things Work. We used the magnifying glasses to get a closer look at the coiled filament and to track the thin wires that led the electric current to and from the filament itself. The New Way Things Work explained the gases involved and talked about metals and wattage.

The children were enthralled. It was random learning at its best. A very bright idea, if I do say so myself. :-)

It's official

I just received an email from our agency letting us know that their offices are now closed for Christmas break. They reopen the second week of January. Now, I knew from our homestudy process last year that this was the case, and frankly, I had given up hope of any calls at this point in the season anyhow. But seeing it in writing just made something pop in my brain. (Or maybe that was the flu bug that my body is valiantly trying to fight off.) 2007 really will not be the year that our family expands. The last page of the calendar will flip, and we will keep on waiting. And so it goes ...

A Homeschool Family

Disclaimer: The owner of this blog parents (and schools) only three children, none of whom show any professional aptitude in the areas of surgery or the legal arts. Blogger denies owning white conversion van and will display title to '99 black GMC Suburban upon receipt of written, notarized request. Said blogger freely admits to receiving wry glances from her neighbors, having in her home one set of Speed Staxx cups (complete with instructional video), not supporting establishments with owls for mascots, and having a child who is the proud owner of two spelling medals.

A Homeschool Family

Et tu, Atticus?

In the past week, Atticus has developed a fascination with Latin. As best as I can tell, this newest interest bubbled up as he was studying one of the countless books we have lying around that covers the period of Rome's prominence. It's not unusual for my children--and Atticus in particular--to lounge around with a nonfiction book just as happily as they lounge around with a novel. They seem to go through phases with them--one week all of the books on Medieval history are strewn all over the coffee table, the next week, you can't walk for tripping over yet another child with his or her head in a book about the presidents.

The current topic of interest is Rome. Having recently borrowed "Warrior Challenge: Rome" from our library, and now owning copies of the terribly funny "Drive Thru History" series, there's been a bit of visual drama reinvigorating the Usborne and DK books that I am fairly certain even Logan knows by heart at this point. Atticus has seemed the most smitten with Rome; I know this because I eavesdropped on one of their little pow-wows and heard the following conversation:

Atticus: "Let's play Roman Senate."
Logan: "Not Roman Senate again! I want to play Inventors."
Jo: "Yeah, let's play Inventors. What should we build?"
Atticus: "We could invent indoor toilets, like the Romans!"

I guess somewhere along the line, my son decided that he wanted to dig deeper into the whole Roman world than even indoor toilets allowed. Language, he figured, was a pretty good next step.

For the record, my children are in various stages of learning enough foreign languages to make your head spin. A sampler: Jo spends about three hours per week on Spanish, two hours per week on French and another hour and a half on Greek. Atticus devotes two hours a week to Spanish and the same hour and a half to Greek. He also dabbles in Japanese. Poor Logan is stuck with just Spanish, though I suspect that by next fall he will be asking to start formal Greek.

There are times when even I think that we've lost our minds allowing this whole language thing and we really ought to reign it in. A prime example of one of those panic moments would be when I realized that, at 4, Logan was writing notes to his friend in phonetic Greek rather than English. I gently quit including him for a while in the coaching sessions I was offering the older two children, and within a month or two, he was right as rain.

Most of the time, though, I view their interest in languages as a hobby of sorts. They progress at their own speed through Rosetta Stone Spanish and Japanese as well as Hey, Andrew, Teach Me Some Greek! with minimal instruction on my part. My husband tutors Jo in French using Le Francais Facile! I have not been called upon to tutor as none of my children are the least bit interested in learning the German I labored so long over through high school and college.

Logic seems to insist that shoving such varied vocabulary and competing grammar rules into a child's head would result in very little retention. At best, a strange amalgam of sorts seems like it would form in their minds--a kind of Spancheekanese, if you will.

I'm happy (and a little shocked) to report that this has not happened. Jo can hold an entire (though quite elementary) conversation with her father in beautifully accented French without slipping into Spanish. And while my children get a kick out of purposefully making mommy's head hurt by referring to items by their Greek or Japanese names, that kind of back and forth thinking doesn't seem to threaten them with an aneurysm at all. No, it's just my age-addled brain that can't handle the new material.

Being brought up in this linguistic environment seems to have given my children one clear message: learning another language is fun. And while I doubt that any of them will be fluent in adulthood in more than one of their favorites, the exposure doesn't seem to be hurting them.

Which brings me back to the idea of Atticus and Latin.

What does one do when one's seven year old son insists that he wants to learn a "dead" language? Start researching curriculum, I suppose.

Just for J.