Faith at Dumb Ox Academy told a story about how her reading glasses interfered with her motor function, to disastrous effect. It made me laugh and wince at the same time, because of course I’ve had those moments too. At least she didn’t drop her baby into the cold cuts tray, as I did at a holiday party once. I was the only one there with a baby, because the party was hosted by someone we had gone to college with, and most of the people there were (1) strangers (2) single college-types who probably thought the baby in the hors d’oeuvres tray was some kind of housewife brain drain thing. Liam was completely unhurt, by the way, just bewildered. I don’t think the celery and cheese slices fared quite so well.
Another holiday, probably pre-Christmas, I had come home from a long day in town, 60 miles away. I had brought Aidan, then a toddler, to Early Intervention — always extremely stressful since he would always end up completely overstimulated and “shut down” — frantically charging around and unresponsive. The EI was 50 miles away which didn’t help. I think I had done some shopping too and driven home on snowy, icy roads. Anyway, my husband had a fire going when I got home, and was sitting in front of it with the doors of the woodstove open so he could bask in the warmth. I had a bunch of trash from my purse in one hand and a twenty dollar bill in the other, and you guessed it, I threw the 20$ in the fireplace. It vanished without a trace. We were living well below the poverty line and we Really.Could.Have.Used that twenty. My husband was astonished, as well he might be, but showed an unkindly tendency to treat the incident as a symptom of some deeper issue going on in my life; as if I was indulging in an unhealthy passion for seeing good money go up in smoke. My children were merely astonished, in a rather admiring way. Mom messes up! Mom BURNS money!
Holiday seasons are stressful, of course. Plus, as I was just thinking yesterday, by homeschooling we take quite a bit on in addition to our normal lives. Whenever we are juggling too many plates (or pieces of paper, or a lively infant) we can end up with a temporary “regression in our motor function” to use some special needs jargon. I think this is a good time of year — the beginning of the new Catholic liturgical year, as Faith points out!– and also the time for several major holidays of other religions — to reflect and celebrate what we did do as well as what we didn’t. Sure, the baby landed in the celery; but wasn’t that partly because I was doing the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life, raising a new little soul? Sure, the 20$ went up in smoke, but it was after a day of hard work doing all kinds of necessary things; I wasn’t burning it away in the local casino. Faith was serving her children lovingly when she stumbled, and she went on from there to buy books and gifts for her family. In homeschooling, too, some of our “failures” can be the incidental byproducts of much bigger victories.
