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Memories.
One summer day when she was nine Dagny spent an afternoon working in
the yard with her Uncle Drew. She took a break to write a poem, which
she titled “Memories”:
All
you are are memories
All
you think
are memories
All
your friends
are memories
And
all you do
is make them
Every moment of our lives is a potential memory. We can’t
know at the time which moments will bring together the elements that,
through some magical combination we may never understand, create an
indelible mark on our souls. Something a parent may forget as
inconsequential can impact her child in enormous ways.
I try to make as many wonderful moments with Dagny and Rowan as is
possible. No matter which ones they end up remembering, I want to give
them the greatest chance to look back on their childhoods with
happiness.
For me this means saying yes as often as I can. It means being mindful
of the words I use when speaking to or about my kids, the way I look at
them, and even how I think about them. It means making myself available
to share their childhoods with them and focusing on joy in our lives.
It means leaving mainstream parenting and education ideas behind and
forging our own paths as unschoolers.
I like to share bits of my own childhood with my kids. My mom made the
best peanut butter toast: lightly browned, thinly spread and cut into
four squares. Ice cream was considered a perfectly legitimate breakfast
food. Just about every time I ate a banana, my mom sang the Chiquita
Banana song, and my dad told me that when my Grandma came over from
Ireland, never having seen a banana, she bit right through the skin.
When the question was, “How much do you love me?”
there was nothing bigger than “The whole world.”
Moments captured in time give them a sense of the child I was. I loved
to help my dad hang storm windows or build a fence. I loved to watch
his hands. Covered in nicks and scrapes, they seemed infinitely
capable. My sister Anna once kicked a soccer ball into our sister
Jeanne’s stomach, and when she passed out I was so afraid she
was dead that I thought I couldn’t breathe myself. We used to
throw a tennis ball over the barn roof and run around the other side to
try to catch it before it hit the ground. When we visited with
relatives, I lay across two chairs and listened in a happy doze while
the grown-ups drank coffee from blue and white china and talked for
hours after dinner. My Grampa made boats out of long green leaves and
set them adrift on rivers of rain. He kept chewy red cough drops on the
picture molding in his room, and nothing ever tasted sweeter.
Our memories help make us who we are, and when we share them with our
children, we give them a little piece of ourselves that just might
become a piece of them that they can someday share with their own
children. Memories are the glue that binds generations of family
together.
Rowan and Dagny write little love notes and drawings on my lists,
scraps of paper or old mail. I tuck them away into whatever book I am
reading and leave them in the book when I’m finished. Since
I’m in the habit of re-reading old favorites every few years,
each time I open a book there’s a chance that a small memory
will flutter down onto my lap, giving me the opportunity to revisit my
children at a younger age.
The memories I store in my mind have a way of fluttering out
unexpectedly, too. Snapshot moments of my children, my husband, my
sisters and brothers, my parents and myself. When I one day heard from
the backseat of the car, “Mom! She’s BREATHING on
me!” I remembered that the backseat of our childhood car was
never quite big enough for me and my younger sister. When I see Rowan
making "ice cream soup," I remember that my mother
told me her father liked to soften his ice cream before he ate it too.
When I hear Jon answering Dagny’s questions about how to
drive, I remember when we were in high school and he got frustrated
trying to teach me to drive a stick-shift because I couldn’t
stop laughing.
I can make a guess at some of the memories my kids will carry with them
throughout their lives. Searching for Grampa “the candy
man” ’s current hiding place, exchanging gifts with
the fairies in their house of twigs, piling onto the hammock together
to eat cherries and spit the pits, giggles and squeals at night when
the ‘klonker monsters’ in the radiators start to
act up. Or maybe those will be my own memories of their childhoods,
stories I can tell their children when it’s hard for them to
believe that their mothers were ever as young as they.
People often lament the fact that children grow up so fast. True, time
seems to be passing a lot faster than it did when I was a child, and
it’s nearly impossible to believe how long it has been since
I first looked into each of my daughters’ eyes, but I take
consolation in knowing that we're building a store of memories that
will always connect us. In stories, bowls of ice cream, songs, long
green
leaves, stick shifts and cherry pits—the miscellany of our
lives—bits and pieces of life and love become something much
greater than the
sum of its parts. By focusing our lives on our relationships with each
other, we’re taking advantage of every possible memory making
moment.
Yesterday Rowan squeezed a few final coins in her piggy bank then
decided it was time to empty her out and count the money. She ended up
with $20.23. Hours later, shortly after she finished reading for the
night and was settling in to stage 3 of falling asleep (which consists
of telling me things and asking me questions, mostly, with very short
intervals of laying quietly and apparently thinking furiously), she
jumped up and got a piece of paper and a pen. Using some sort of
formula I have never seen before, she determined that half of $20.23 is
$10 and 11 1/2 cents. I mentioned that if she'd like to divide it
perfectly evenly, she could just add another penny. She liked that
idea.
At this point I was still unsure what the point of this figuring was.
Next thing I knew, $5 was being added from her allowance stash to one
of the $10.12. So she had $15.12 and $10.12—and a plan. She
wants to
spend the $10.12 because she has never spent any of the money she's
saved in her piggy banks. And she wants to take the $15.12 to the bank
and open her first savings account, something she has never been at all
interested in doing before.
She asked me a lot of questions about how banks work: How do you get an
account? Does it matter how you sign your name? Why do they give you
interest? What do they do with your money? What if they lose your money
somehow? (My fact-checker, Rowan, says she didn’t ask that
last question—I just brought it up.)
When we’d covered all the bases, she put her paper on my
dressing table and climbed back into bed (over a loudly snoring Jon) to
begin stage 4 of falling asleep—longer stretches of quiet with an
occasional comment. At about 12:45 I told her I was getting ready to
fall asleep, and she offered me our lavender pillow. I said I didn't
really need it, and she was glad because she actually wanted to use it
herself. We lay quietly for 5 minutes or so, and then Rowan said, "I
know you're getting tired, but I have one more question. Would you mind
answering it?" Me: "Sure, I can answer another question." Rowan:
"What's long division?"
I stopped here for a bit of internal monologue: "Ok, Rue, you are
exhausted, and there’s a tiny little part of you that wants to
scream ‘I just want to go to sleep!’, but this is
it!"
Was I excited about the fact that Rowan was interested in
“math”? Nope. By "it" I meant that these moments
are what I love about our lives. We live in a way that allows me to
choose to make any moment a happy memory, whether it's at 1:00 pm or
1:00 am.
Internal monologue delivered, I took a big breath of Rowan and lavender
and felt a deep-down happiness with my life that I hope Rowan felt
return to her in tsunami-sized waves of love.
Rue: Ok, the short answer is that long division refers to dividing a
big number—numbers like 4,674 or 290,542—by another number,
like 24.
Rowan: Oh, ok. So what is 290,542 divided by 24?
Rue: Well, I can only figure it out on paper. Some people can do it in
their heads, but I can't. It gives me a headache.
Rowan: Why? What do you do on the paper?
Rue: Hold on, I'll show you. (Gets up to grab paper and pen off
dressing table) You'll have to see if it makes sense to you.
Rowan: Why wouldn't it make sense to me?
Rue: Well, it could be like when you were learning to read, and you
wanted to do it, but it took a little while before your brain was at
just the right place to get it. So if you don't get it right now, it'll
just be something you get when you're ready for it.
Rowan: Oh, right, ok.
So I showed Rowan the way I do long division on paper. I showed her the
way I position the numbers around the little two-sided box. I told her
what numbers we were looking for—let’s see, how
many times does ____ go into _____? She used her fingers and toes and
count-by-two abilities to figure out the answers. I showed her how I
subtract and pull down numbers to determine what number we should work
on next.
We completed one problem. Rowan didn’t seem very impressed.
She took my pen and told me that she prefers cookie division. She drew
nine cookies (chocolate chip, of course) and drew a line through one of
them, showing me that each of us gets 4 1/2 cookies. Much more fun, I
had to agree. We snuggled up and fell asleep, full of numbers and
cookies and plans and love.
Memories.
Rue Kream is living happily ever
after with
her husband, Jon, and two children, Dagny and Rowan. She is a
passionate advocate of unschooling
and respectful parenting and is involved in the creation and
maintenance of the
Unschooling.info website. Her book, Parenting A
Free Child: An
Unschooled
Life, is available at freechild.info.
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