finishing well

Sunday afternoon — the making piles and library list phase of planning.

Tomorrow we begin what will likely be our last semester of homeschooling.  We took a break last week to read for pleasure and tidy and regroup — six weeks on, one week off seems to work well for us.  After the encounter with the corpse a few weeks ago on a hike, and then an extremely difficult work week (six huge events in six days), I've been drained.  So the full impact of this "last semester" thing hadn't really hit me.

When my older son was tiny, his stock phrase when he was overwhelmed was, "Mixed feelings!  Mixed feelings!"  

Totally.

On the one hand, this is the life I know, and after eleven years, I'm finally getting the hang of it.  Just last week, I decided to ditch the really crappy canned literature program we'd been using.  Then yesterday I realized that I had only two days to generate a one-semester contemporary world literature course. I ought to have been in full-on panic mode, but instead, I just kept thinking, Damn! I love my life!  Really.  The challenge is exciting.  I have learned both flexibility and commitment, when to barrel through and when to try a new approach.  And, mostly, I love exploring, learning All The Things.  

But then, on the other hand, of course, there is the constant anxiety — Am I ruining this child?  I had a dream the other night that I had won an award for my homeschooling efforts.  And, well, the little statuette trophy was so vulgar, I can't even tell you what it was.  (Really, subconscious?  Sick!)  Pardon the language, which, frankly, isn't even strong enough, but what that award communicated was this: Congratulations!  You really fucked it up!  

Not only do I not want to ruin my child, which was always as far as I went with my goals for homeschoooling, not ruining, but I also want to end well.  I want to enjoy the heck out of these last months, do it up right.  

But endings are so hard.  Mixed feelings!

Over the years I've noticed that the college students I work with occasionally seem to preemptively end their relationships some time between spring break and graduation.  Friends, string quartets, couples — relationships don't just expire or evolve, but explode in a fiery, emotional mess.  This happens less now that we have Facebook and other social media, but I still see it.  It's as if they don't know how to balance the demands of redefining their identity, finding work or gaining entrance into graduate school, and maintain their relationships.  

I think parents do this too sometimes.  We have these social scripts about teenagers, that they need to rebel, push away, that their peers are more important than their parents.  And I've witnessed parents who conveniently disengage at the end, and chalk it up to teenage angst.  Whatever.  I haven't done the research, but my hunch is that our children still need us, always need us to be present, engaged.  My experience has been that while, yes, peers are important, I am still Mom the Mom.  

I did not expect rebellion and did not experience it with son 1.0.  In fact, a year or so ago, after he'd left for college, I went to a luncheon with many other parents of grown and almost-grown children, and listening to their conversation it suddenly struck me, "Oh, my gosh!  I forgot to set a curfew!"  When I reported this conversation to a friend, he asked, "And you said that out loud?  What did the other parents do?  Poke you with a fork?"

I lucked out, no question.  I have also worked dang hard, done well in some areas, done poorly in other areas.  But I've done my best.  

The challenge is to keep doing my best while both re-imagining my own identity and navigating into an actual career.  And if there's a trick, a secret strategy, I have not figured it out, but I have a feeling it has to do with making good stories and being open to delight.     

Last week we had lunch at our favorite cafe, and then spent a good chunk of the afternoon at a little air museum we'd not been to before. And by "good chunk" I mean "about eleventy hours longer than I wanted to be there." Because air museums are not my favorite.  I don't enjoy flying, and while I do love history, I find all those war stories so very distressing, those pictures of "our boys," looking just like my boys, so disturbing.  

At one point we went outside to climb around inside an ancient rusty helicopter, as that seemed to be a required activity. I noticed right away that son 2.0 was as unimpressed as I was. 

"You seem more interested in those planes out there on the runway," I observed — rather insightfully, I thought.

"That's because they can actually fly." 

Oh. Right.

A moment later, glancing out at the plane on the runway, which seemed to me to be running but empty, my son said, "I don't know why he has his APU on.  I don't think there's anyone in that plane."  Maybe it was something that sounded like APU, actually.  I have no idea what he said or meant.  And he kept making these comments about the planes, using terminology that was entirely foreign to me.  And it was a little bit hilarious.

That trip will be a good story.  And we laughed.  Okay, it would be more accurate to say that I laughed and that he demonstrated that he was bemused by my ignorance.  Which is to say, there was hilarity.  And which is also, decidedly, not ruining.