Already

So another week goes by, and things are looking up already.  Most of our boxes are unpacked. A cross is on the wall, even if pictures aren't. High schoolers have schedules for classes that please them. Middle schoolers have met some peers. Fourth grader is going to Catholic School - a last minute shift in the plan. And tomorrow I leave to take our oldest to college! How is this moment upon us already?  I am not prepared. I hope he is!

This is to a daughter, not a son, but a memorable moment, found at The Writer's Almanac:

To a Daughter Leaving Home

by Linda Pastan

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

It's late at night on a Thursday. I keep having to remind myself what day it is because everything is topsy turvy right now. A week ago, we were going about business as usual: taking books back to the library, arranging a trip to Magic Mountain for the next day, setting up a play date for the younger two. Today, we are in a new house, in a new town, about 2/3rds unpacked, the rest of our belongings (mostly books) still in boxes. Instead of listening to a few dogs barking, I'm listening to traffic on the busy street outside our window. The parakeets haven't made a peep in a few days. The 17 year old hates his dad and me.  I'm sick with worry about the baby drowning in the pool. The 8th grader is bitter. The 6th grader is angry. The 4th grader is clingy. The 10th grader is bossing everyone around.  The only happy kid is the oldest, who is still in Ventura working. He comes down next week, lives here for a week, and then heads off to college. The baby and I are going with him. It will be tempting to stay.

This is the worst part of being a military family. Ripping our kids, and ourselves, out of a community every two years is physically and emotionally draining. I keep thinking of Simeon's warning to Mary - my heart feels pierced times 7. Moving again, and again, and again doesn't make it easier, only more draining. We have more stuff, more memories, more stress and anxiety. More souls that want to follow their own wills.

I fret about our weight limit (we were a few hundred pounds under - but we loaded our car with at least 1200 pounds.) and discard things I wish we'd kept - like a rocking chair we got when our oldest was a baby, even though one of the rockers and a slat were broken.  I even mourned when we sold our junkie old Toyota Corolla - for more money than it was probably worth.  I am mourning the kids' Catholic school. I even considered homeschooling again, especially after the 6th grader asked for it, but he was the hardest kid to teach.

I know, I trust, that in a few months, we'll start to feel at home. Already we love the community library, which we visited on our third day here because unpacking books isn't happening until I figure out shelves. And my husband has safety proofed the stairs. The baby loves her room with toys - she didn't have a play space at the old house except in the garage.  But this house has unusual paintings.  It's on a busy corner. It has no yard. It has unsafe stairs and cupboards. And the rent isn't cheap.

So why did we choose it? It's big. The schools are supposedly good (smaller than most public schools, but lots of involved parents - which raises test scores) and close for everyone. It's a 15 minute bike ride from my husband's office. Kids are everywhere.  We couldn't find anything else in our price range that was big enough for our family and I was in reaction mode to the small house we lived in for two years.

Many people love this community here, but I miss the Catholic school where the teachers and the other students all recognized and cared about each other and shared at least the same mission to know, love, and serve God. I miss my job. I miss my moms group. I miss our fruit trees and I even, a little bit, miss the house that was a compromise.  And my heart aches for my senior, who would have been valedictorian of his class, was class president, and probably could have been student body president. He would have been eligible for several local scholarships, which won't be available here. He left his friend and band mate (who was off to Thomas Aquinas College anyway). And he left behind a girlfriend, which I'm a little relieved about.

But worrying about the stuff and the schooling is just a corollary of the different, bigger kind of worry about the state of the kids' souls. Will this challenge knit us together or will they hold this against us and reject everything we say and do and believe? Not only have their math lessons been interrupted and disconnected, but so have their lessons in the faith. Will they want to be like everyone else and let the world define them, or will they remember that in the big picture, they will pass out of the world forever, instead of just for a couple/few years, and their eternal home will be waiting only if they don't turn away know.

I think going to register at a new school was tough on everyone. We all were in tears at some point this week. Our experiences elsewhere should remind us that in a few months we'll be feeling happier about our situation. We'll start to make friends and figure our way around and find favorite things. We'll begin to dig into the community. And when it is time to leave this place, we'll mourn again. (But I won't miss the busy street...)

Things are a little messy

around here:

We'll just have a few days of interrupted service while the packers finish up, load, and deliver.  As of next week, we'll be residing on an island again - but one that is not tropical, remote, or moving on island time. Stay tuned for more.

This will be address number 13 since getting married. Pencil it in, although it should be good for at least three years this time around.

Summer Reading

Despite the long to-do list, I have been doing a lot of reading lately. We've made a few last minute trips to the library for something free to do and the kids have gotten hooked on some new series so we had to keep going back. Now I'm down to my last five days in the county, and I have library books in the house. Must return .... just as soon as I finish the book I have been reading...

Doesn't look like I will make it to the end of Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent. I read enough to want to come back to it, though. I picked up several books from the list of speakers at the Catholic writers conference - Alvarez's book, Peace and Something's Out There by Robert Bausch (really liked Peace - a novella about a small detachment of soldiers in WWII venturing out into no man's land to do a reconnaissance mission, and one of them commits a war crime - or is it? The second book is a collection of short stories, mostly about unhappy love affairs. A bit too depressing.) and I finally finished Gregory Wolfe's Beauty Will Save the World, which has some good quotes I'm meaning to type up, but since it is a collection of essays it does have some redundancy.  I agree wholeheartedly with Wolfe's premise, though - that Catholic artists have to engage the world and Catholic arts patrons do, too. Instead of fearing what is new and modern, or instead of retreating to a mentality that classics are best and what is new lacks depth, we have to look for the good, the true, and the beautiful in contemporary art as well. Granted, a lot of contemporary art does lack a Christian worldview or understanding of human dignity, but not all.

For instance, I just finished T. C. Boyle's San Miguel, which is a historical novel published in 2013 about one of the Channel Islands right of the coast of Santa Barbara.  After our trip to Santa Cruz this summer, the setting was very familiar, and the little bit of history I picked up from the visitor's center about the sheep ranchers who lived at one time on the island provided just enough background information for me to really enjoy this book. It told the stories of three women who lived on the island from their perspective - one who tried to like living in the isolated conditions, but didn't have the constitution, one who wanted to escape, and one who embraced the Thoreau inspired ideal of rugged individualism and made the best of island life.  In some ways these women mirrored the attitudes of three stereotypical Navy wives.  My only reservation about recommending it wholeheartedly to everyone are the few sex scenes - mostly unnecessary. The little bit of erotica distracts rather than adds to the story -- and could be a big part of why so many faithful believers shy away from contemporary art, literature and drama.

On the children's literature front - I finally got my hands on some Melissa Wiley fiction - Little House on the Highlands. I loved it, and read most of it outloud to my nine year old.  She doesn't really like to read, which breaks my heart, but she likes to listen to me read and to sit on the couch together. Hard to find time for that lately. She especially liked the bits of folklore sprinkled throughout this book.

My 11 year old wanted me to read some other Gordon Korman books. His new favorite series are the Swindled books. I finished Swindle and Zoobreak while sitting at the DMV for almost 3 hours the other day.  I also read a brief bit of A Mango Shaped Space, recommended by my 13 yr old, but ran out of time to finish it. She loved it. And Baby has been enjoying picture books, which makes me very happy.  I picked up some biography picture books and really enjoyed the one about Roget, The Right Word, although it has those fractured fairy tale illustrations that aren't my favorite.

More book reviews to come. Running out of time and energy!