~ Ben Sweetland
This time of year is bittersweet to me. My children are hard at work repacking their backpacks for school, making lists for the local office superstore, so we can make the last minute purchases necessary to start off the year properly.
My teenager needs pens, the middle child needs marbled composition books, and the youngest needs a new clipboard as hers cracked over the summer. I need binders. We need to reschedule beginning of the week trips to the grocery store for lunch materials. And this year, I’m in school myself, so the need for organization is even more paramount to our survival!
In the midst of the mad scramble to get ready, I wanted to take a few moments to mourn, and another few minutes to express gratitude to the universe for the gifts we have received. Three years ago, we were happily homeschooling. I miss those days. I miss the leisure to take our time on a project, I miss the slow-paced days, I miss the company of my girls. I’m mourning that time all over again, because I was able to be home with the girls for part of the summer, even though our time was disjointed because of visitation with their father and weekends away from them.
It was not all paradise, though, that precious time of homeschooling. I found myself unable to live an unfulfilled life any more. The girls alone weren’t able to enrich my life the way I needed, and my partner had quit interacting with all of us. I was incredibly, desperately lonely.
Opportunities presented themselves. An amazing charter school was ready to open at the same time as a full-time position in my chosen career opened. The girls were accepted at the charter school, I was offered the job, and our lives changed. We weren’t together all the time any more. That was sad, that was good. My girls were closer to friends, learned how to gain in peer leadership skills. They had fun at an experiential school that had them outside all kinds of weather, every day. My middle child discovered a passion for gardening!
I relearned how to live with passion and intensity. I remembered how much fun it was to be in engaged conversation with other passionate people who cared to make positive changes in the world. I threw myself into a rewarding career. Happier mommy meant happier children.
More changes – my partner sunk so far away from us that it was no longer tenable for me to live with him, so I made the decision to move out with the girls. We moved three miles from school, into our community. Then I lost my job, which required a career change because there were no open positions within commuting distance of our home. I gained an opportunity to go back to school for the classes necessary to get a teaching certificate in New Jersey.
It’s been a whirlwind of changes for the last year. It’s been frightening, joyous, overwhelming, ecstatic, sad, lonely, happy, amazing. My head still spins to think about what the girls and I have been through in the last year. We have survived, we will continue to survive, we will thrive in spite of the curve balls thrown to us. We are strong; we have deep strong roots from being able to count on each other. We are flexible, like the saplings, able to endure strong gales by bending with the winds of change that blow over us. We are alive; engaged with each other, engaged with the world, engaged with life, like the geese who now fly over us every day, headed bravely toward their goal, helping each other take turns at the lead, breaking the way for others who are tired, continuing on no matter what the weather.
So this day, the last before school starts, is bittersweet. Full of promise, full of sadness. We are excited for the new possibilities, mourning the older, more comfortable way. We are starting anew. We are ready!
No comments:
Post a Comment