the ongoingness

Our library book reservations shifted from mason bees to mushrooms to leather crafts.

I try to support these random bursts of enthusiasm for bizarre activities, and the best way I know how is to lug home stacks of reference material, to disinfect resources and pile them in places I think the boys might sit down.

I mean, it's all better than the blender of current events, fungus foraging and leather-smithing over omicron and supreme court nonsense, for sure.

We work pretty hard to help the boys learn. The small things, like saying thanks and holding doors, admitting mistakes and acquiring permission and arriving on time (haha). And the bigger things, too.

Plus, the things they're interested in. 

For example, Hank's fascination for architecture evolved, and now he's illustrating pages and pages of elaborate perfume designs, free to access my very limited stock of "fancy" bottles for inspiration. Tolliver's leather interest stems from stories about a great grandfather's skill plus a bag of scraps from Goodwill. And Tucker has been tediously creating tiny flip books, making incremental changes to each backlit small sheet, commandeering the therapy lamp for his own purposes albeit way too late at night.

With new interests though, can come feelings of inadequacy. It's hard to be a beginner, to proceed to suck. Andy tells the boys on a regular basis that it's okay to make mistakes (just maybe not the same one over and over). He encourages them to keep self-forgiveness handy, like throat lozenges or a pocket knife.

We both want the boys to notice the radical delight in doing something without real purpose. To embrace the mediocrity, to celebrate the small improvements. Failing is not shameful or scary, getting it wrong does not cancel a person's entire existence. Trying something new is never not a good use of time.

We certainly do not believe that it is our job is to soften every edge, though we desperately wish gentle, joyful lives for the boys. May confidence and curiosity, may courage and humility, be part of their inheritance.

tis the season

 The tree is up and decorated, and Santa has been given a short list.

excessive celebration

Dear Tolliver,

You are, and always have been, so attentive to small details, the way fabric feels against your skin, the insect hovering around a clump of leaves at the side of the street, whose slice of pie is infinitesimally bigger. Your teachers tell us the same thing, about the ways you notice and watch and listen.

I find fascinating the way you can convert your urge to make noise into motion, your acrobatic attempts at silence. You are remarkably speedy, your still body transmuting in an instant to flying muscle.

You've learned that you're capable of handling big feelings, and that it's safe to experience emotional discomfort. Very interested in the precision of an outcome, you seem to have a deep, hard-wired need to be competent. It's hard for most of us to be a beginner at anything.

I admire your perseverance, the way a thought becomes stuck in your head, becomes a big boulder rolling downhill, lord help anyone who wanders in the way. I might admire it even more when you live in your own house.

We celebrated you with pumpkin pie and chocolate mousse and grocery store cupcakes, with a new rock tumbler and new books, with friends and cousins at a football party on the high school turf. You had so much fun. Your dad might've had more.

You love weapons and artifacts, Garfield and Nathan Hale, cheese puffs and peanut butter. You love being outside, carving rocks and cuddling cats and catching balls. And I love you. I love you more than your worst days, your messiest room, your terrible choices, your biggest mistake.

I think you know this, but it bears repeating: I call you my son but you belong first to you, and then in the hearts of so many.

All my love,

Mom

So full

The boys visited a flint farm in Licking county earlier this week, collecting rainbow colored rocks to create stone tools. Flint Ridge is an eight-mile vein, long mined by American Indians and still attracting rockhounds today. Tolliver came home with buckets full of Ohio's official gemstone, with a big smile and even bigger spear point dreams. The boys are actively interested in Native Americans and, naturally, the tension in how history has been portrayed. They are beginning to recognize the enduring relationships between people and their territories. They are teaching us to do the same.

We worked through a little six degrees of gratitude exercise, beginning with grandparents who still cook for us at all three houses, moving on to hard work and secure incomes that provide means for groceries year round. We acknowledged the chefs, the shelf stockers and cashiers, extrapolating back to the truck drivers and the asphalt layers and the infrastructure, to the factory workers packaging and butchering, the farmers laboring, the animals and plants and the fields in which things grow. 

Pausing to give thanks like this allows the turkey time to rest and the wine time to breathe (and me to wonder if a parent can envy a dead bird or a bottle, just a little?) Feeling tired, though, means that we are alive, like the trees and the stars, and that we are lucky.

We are so full of gratitude. 

And of turkey and tenderloin, taco soup and lamb stew. Of curiosity and creativity.

May all this thankfulness, and all this learning, be more of a lifestyle, and not just a holiday.

going places

Tucker and I saw Hadestown over the weekend and although I know it is not my place to try to sculpt a particular outcome, I couldn't help but imagine him playing the piano; on stage with the cast, the orchestra on several occasions really stole the show.

Friday evening Tuck went to the middle school dance. He didn't have much to say afterward, but smiled and admitted having fun.

He is suddenly so teenager-y, broody and moody and secretive. Most of the time he moves like he's been mentored by a tortoise, unless he's made his own plans in which case there's a real sense of urgency. 

He is typically surly for the first hour after waking, loquacious before bed. When he does want to talk, he speaks out of what seems like nowhere but what must be a real place inside him. His face contorts, a prelude to words, Where do the egg shells go? (compost, not trash) or What else has Nicholas Cage been in, besides PIG? 

I mean, he's almost thirteen and thinks he knows everything, except he also wonders where to place the stamp on an envelope and what assuage actually means.

He does know that a B minus is not the death of any dreams, and that sometimes failure is actually an option. He gets so engaged in projects that he often forgets to eat, but he's pretty sure he likes his hair shaggy and he always offers to help fold laundry or clean dishes before he heads for a screen. 

He has a questionable sense of direction but also really excellent manners and a big wide open heart.

weather whiplash

We've gone back and forth from shorts to winter coats and gloves to shorts again, all in under a week.

If there was any sort of chromatic crescendo this fall it was short-lived, like the leaves turned brown one day and fell the next. And then it snowed.

quick trip

Treat drinks and gambling, 

history lessons and target practice, 

cattle and catching up with our favorite West Virginia family