Sidetracked

Sidetracked is what happens when one is going along toward a goal and suddenly there’s a detour. The detour may take us around an obstacle and back to the road that leads to the goal, or it may take us farther and farther away from our goal. Sometimes I feel despair when I’ve been sidetracked. Other times, I notice I’m veering off course, but I’ve just got too much momentum to stop and check my inner GPS. I can certainly identify with what some of you wrote in response to my post yesterday.

this is not what I had planned . . .

As those of you who read me know, this is the first year that we’ve had all our school-aged children enrolled in private schools. We home schooled for over 25 years because home schooling was the best available option for supporting our educational, spiritual, and characterological goals for our children. But some years ago, the Catholic church built and staffed a wonderful school nearby, and last year it seemed time to enroll one, and then two, of our older kids there. They did well, and we realized that the local Catholic schools were excellent options for our children. Home schooling through high school is demanding and very often, even in a university community like ours, we’ve been unable to find the resources to educate our bright children adequately. They’ve arrived at college and, in spite of tutors and external home school co-op classes, they’ve needed extra help in mathematics and science. Both home schooling and public schools let our oldest children down in those areas, and as our youngest children grow up, I work at correcting the missteps I’ve made as a home educator.  So. Here we are, organized and ready to be educated, waiting to see what these highly-rated Catholic schools will do for our children.

My daughter Ivy teaches at the elementary school across the street from the high school our sons attend. She drives them to school early and brings them home late. We discovered yesterday that every week she’ll have a staff meeting that has them at school almost two hours later than usual, coming home ravenously hungry, and then hurrying through dinner so they can get to church youth group on time. Their Wednesdays will be slammed.

I got into a teary, motherly, hand-wringing state over this last night because this was not what I wanted for my children. I resist absolutely the pressure to make our children into miniature versions of the typical American who works too long at too dead a job to earn too much money to buy too many things at the cost of too much stress, too much chaos, and too much unconscious striving for emptiness. This is not what I wanted for my children.

And yet here I am, sidetracked into forcing upon my sons the very sort of day that they all tell me is “typical.” My son Cedar said, “Mom, everyone does it. Lots of kids just have to sit at school and wait for their parents to get off work and pick them up. That’s just the way it is.” Ivy came over and tried to be helpful, seeing my distress and perhaps even feeling somehow responsible. I reassured her that I was having a freakish motherly hand-wringing moment and it would pass eventually. I appealed to my husband, asking him if he would take off work two hours early every Wednesday to go get our boys, for I cannot possibly be at the elementary school and at the high school at the same time picking up all these different children. My husband, knowing our financial situation, looked at me with some alarm when I suggested he take time off work to pick up children at school. I could see the wheels turning, see him wondering, “What are you thinking?!”

All because I didn’t want my almost six-foot-tall baby boys to sit at the school all day long, having 10-hour days like we adults whose childhoods are over and who had our chance at not being forced into day care and after care and sitting for 10 hours a day in an institutional setting because that’s the way it is when there’s no mother at home, because she has to work too long at too dead a job to earn too much money to buy too many things at the cost of too much stress, too much chaos, and too much unconscious striving for emptiness, because that’s the American Way.

I do not want my children to have the American Way forced on them without their knowing what we’re forcing on them. This is not what I had planned.

. . . but god is here with me

This has happened to me before—many times before. One particular time stands out, the year I came up pregnant with twins. Because I was just a little over the hill as a mother and insurance costs were prohibitive, our midwives would not deliver the babies at their midwifery center. The only choice I had, if I wanted to use them, was to use a physician at a hospital and allow the midwives to work with the doctor. I had a freakish motherly hand-wringing moment when I learned this, I can tell you. But my dear midwife Judy, who had delivered two of our other children and all of our grandchildren, looked me in the eye and said, “God is in hospitals, too.” To this day I invoke Judy’s words, for they changed my life and put a new song in my mouth, a song that goes, this is not what I had planned, but God is here with me.

I’m not sure what I’ll do about the school detour. It’s probably reactive to think that one 10-hour school day followed by several hours at church every week is going to somehow ruin my sons’ lives. But I think this one situation is a good opportunity to review the facts: we don’t know what we’re doing. We think we know; we think we know a good thing when we see it. But the truth is that we’re finite and we’re not omniscient. We can’t possibly know everything we’re getting ourselves into when we get into something. This is probably why Jesus said that people should count the cost of building something before they build it, lest they be unable to finish and end up humiliated and scorned. But I think he knew that we’d end up humiliated and scorned anyway. We’re not omniscient. We just have to do the best we can.

Now I know that school costs far more than dollars spent on tuition, books, and uniforms. It costs a lot of time. I also know that elementary education must be one of the worst professions possible, and that teachers are over-worked and have too many required out-of-school meetings, trainings, and social events. It doesn’t surprise me that our educational system in this country is in trouble. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me that our whole country is over-stressed, overweight, and largely unconscious, because of the lifestyles we lead. We watch too much television and read too few books, we spend too much time in our cars and eating on the fly. We don’t eat properly because we don’t have time to plan, shop, and cook properly. It’s a crazy culture, yet the most prosperous in the world. I wonder if this is what our forefathers intended when they said that we have the right to pursue happiness?

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness: that’s the goal. That’s where we were headed when we started out. But detours occurred. I turned this way and that. And suddenly I noticed that I was far away from happiness.

the pursuit of happiness

My friend Yvonne and I were talking once about how poor we both were when we were married. She lived in Costa Rica with her husband and her first child, and they had dirt floors and no modern conveniences, but they were happier than they have ever been since. The sun shined every day, and they had all kinds of fresh fruit growing right outside their small house. She could reach outside her kitchen window and pull a fresh mango off the tree. Hearing this, I grew wistful for my first tiny house, where my husband and I and our first child lived together. We had next to nothing, not even a television or a washer and dryer. When we could finally afford a washing machine, I hung the clothes out on the clothes line to dry, and it was glorious, breathing in the smell of clean linens and clothing as they dried in the breeze.

We were young and we didn’t need anything much. But as the children came and our husbands worked hard and succeeded, our needs increased and our spending did, too. We became sidetracked, taking our eyes off the goal, which had been happiness. We had it, and we had nothing. Eventually, maybe our goal became happiness and comfort, or maybe it became happiness and my-child-is-good-enough, or maybe it ran by now-you-won’t-look-down-on-me. The detour stopped along it’s-too-difficult and it’s-not-convenient, everyone-does-it and it’s-not-important. We stopped at I-don’t-have-time-to-analyze-it and absolutely fell off into a ditch near we-need-this-we-do.

There is a map. It shows the places to where we want to go. When we look at the map, the way seems so simple: there it is. I put my finger on it. But after I fold the map up, and put it in my pocket, as I go along I’m distracted by the scenery. Things happen along the way; I meet people and there are caravans, hamlets, villages, county fairs, dancing bears, markets, catastrophes, accidents, robberies, illness, injury. Soon, the image of the map and the way I was to go are dim in my mind’s eye. But I tell myself that it’s all right, I still know the way. I feel I’m going the right way.

One month or one year later, I realize I’m lost. I’ve tarried too long in this place, and I’ve lost the way to where my finger was, so long ago. To that, right there: my goal. I unfold my map and can see how far away I’ve gotten from my intended goal, and I see I’ve got miles and miles to go, weeks or even months and years, before I can get close to where I thought I was going. Maybe I’m not even sure I still want to go there.

I’m sidetracked, because I haven’t watched my way.

The thought manifests as the word;

The word manifests as the deed;

The deed develops into habit;

And habit hardens into character;

So watch the thought and its ways with care,

And let it spring from love

Born out of concern for all beings . . .

As the shadow follows the body,

As we think, so we become.

~ Buddha, Dhammapada