So in my family - well, in my one family - if you were sitting still, you were being irresponsible somehow. Or at least that's how we've all internalized it. My mother is incredible. She's gotten older now and she's less crazy, but now she's stuck working all the effing time because, well, because she's an effing midwife and they pay her a lot of money so that she works five million hours. In fact, god, if I look at myself versus my mother when she was my age, well gee, I think I'm doing pretty good since I'm a stay at home mom and we try to live like we're on vacation more. I'm all about efficiency so there's time to party. We are so privileged to be able to fit in all the stuff my parents used to have to squeeze in on weekends and summer holidays or whathaveyou into the regular week with time leftover to veg out.

But then there's this part of me, I suppose, that is always guilty feeling about that veg out time because, you know, then the kids are playing video games or not getting some enrichment that I forgot to do earlier because we were running errands or I had City Fresh or we were out of town or what the hell ever we were doing instead. And then I'm tired and I'm thinking, "holy fuck Jon! why can't YOU take them on a hike and engage them for once?!" And that's where the marriage part comes in.

Because like it or not, there's going to be this division of labor discussion/argument. It's just going to happen. There is more than there is possible to do and at some point every so often, you do nothing in order to do nothing because you've been so busy doing and doing and doing and then when you wake up from doing nothing, there's even MORE shit to do because you took that time off! And yeah, we do things differently and we do different things and I personally have this crazy urge to evaluate it because sometimes I find myself folding laundry while he's busy playing stupid Left for Dead and I'm thinking of the other ten things I needed to accomplish and think maybe he could brush the kids teeth instead of sitting there and then he does it if I ask, but then he doesn't do it right and really we're supposed to be all particular about Aleks' teeth now that he has braces and he needs help being talked into it and I can do that and be gentle, but still insist whereas Jon will just fold and think that whatever is good enough, when maybe it isn't, really. And I'm left to be the bad guy and the one insisting on these requirements.

So it's like this: yes, I have a lot of shoulds, and I'm responsible for many people and I don't want to resent not having the help to create the life we all enjoy, even though I'm not the only one enjoying it, but sometimes I do and sometimes I'm informed that I'm shoulding all over everyone else when I thought I was just doing what they all actually needed to have a rich, full, well-balanced life. I can't figure out everyone's needs and desires plus my own. And there's always always too much to do so that all my time gets portioned out in this fucked up juggling way where there's always a ball in the air and I trade out which one it is at the moment because something's always gonna not be able to be attended to, and even things that shouldn't be there are there, where taking care of oneself or hanging out with friends or reading a book or doing nothing becomes an obligation or a priority to be checklisted. And then I sound crazy! And I realize every woman I know who has children is doing this. Especially with older children. When they're little - if you're a SAHM at least, I don't know about working moms - the speed of life is slower and what the kids require is different and more immediate to their staying alive. When they're older, it's all like everything you do or say is going to absolutely affect who they are as adults and whether or not they read or write or go to summer camp or do enough of any or all of those things is now happening and is no longer a theory of how you're going to parent, but actually what you have to do and they're living it and remembering it NOW. And if you read the internet at all ever, you're wrong about it. In fact, you're pretty much just wrong about what you think because there are lots of people offering their opinions about it all the time and even the things you thought you thought become wrong and you're doing even what you're good at (or thought you were) wrong too.

The best part is the solutions for the freakout that ensues: medication, exercise, meditation. Mind, body, soul. Whether it's giving up gluten, doing a yoga intensive, seeing a therapist, getting on anti-depressants, drinking wine once a week (or nightly) with friends, joining a gym, or getting outside - whatever the recommendation is, it's all MORE STUFF TO DO. Sanity becomes part of the checklist. It's completely insane. We are all just sitting around encouraging one another to be able to stay on the wheel. I don't think there's really some other option though. It's just what it is. Still. It's crazy.

I think we're all in this boat. I don't think I'm unique or alone at all. I don't think there's a way to change it. In fact, these days, I don't even feel crazy overwhelmed by anything more than all the opinions I'm finding that I'm doing it wrong. The whole medical nonsense for my son that is always ongoing is of course frustrating, but if I bitch about that it's just to say it out loud, to process, to vent. It's not to look for a change or to drop something else. There's nothing to drop or worth dropping. Shift, maybe, sometimes, but nothing to give up completely and shifting happens in a constant manner.

Oh! Getting back to the overall summary, right. I went on a big tangent...
1) I am busy.
2) My husband is busy.
3) He gets annoyed with my busy and I with his and both of us, at times, with our own.
4) He tells me mean things like, "you're uptight," because he is annoyed with my busy.
5) I internalize this after months of feeling confused because everywhere I look I see, "you're doing it wrong! You should be (check all that apply): serene/patient/gentle/more fit/less tired/prettier/wealthier/craftier/less crazy/better at gardening(cooking, baking, writing, reading, working, talking, friending, managing, arting, gifting, cleaning, concising, projecting, not projecting, spending your time, handling your emotions, raising your children, not raising your voice, um, et cetera), and et cetera et cetera et cetera..."
6) This internalization leads to a large conversation born of self-hate/doubt:

a) if I accept that I am uptight it is because
b) I am busy/stressed/overwhelmed because, well, I just am, this is a condition of being in your 30s with children and
c) the husband is not alleviating this because
d) he is busy/stressed/overwhelmed and upset that I am busy/stressed/overwhelmed so to alleviate this I must
e) be less busy/stressed/overwhelmed in consideration of his feelings because
f) I can only control myself. Except
g) why am I then the one doing all the controlling of oneself? Why am I the problem-solver? Isn't that just
h) more to do, leading to more busy/stress/overwhelm? So...
i) if I accept that controlling oneself is simply more busy/stress/overwhelm,
j) is there an alternative where there just IS, where one can just be? Perhaps
k) nothing is good or bad, everything just is.
l) if I accept that everything just is, it follows that judgment about judging (and many other things) is largely unnecessary and that
m) I can just let go and be what I am and do what I need to do and just not judge it. Does that mean
n) that not judging/letting go looks basically the same as where we were to begin with? Which just makes me think
o) "It's all just a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes." Great.
p) Cruelty, manipulation, meaninglessness.

Glad I solved that existential dilemma.

So I ask, is it possible, and more importantly, should it be the goal? "It" meaning just being. Nothing is meaningful or important, or everything is but not as important as I make it out to be. And doesn't it remain true that we still need to talk and think about all this anyway in order to constantly understand that all is well and nothing is fucked, dude?

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I made something approximating a quilt. It took me 8 years.

I originally began it on a whim when I was pregnant with Aleks. I was all, "I'm going to make my baby a quilt!" I decided it was to be a crazy quilt. I can't even sew in a straight line, nor do I have the patience to. I underestimated what a crazy quilt requires. I got an area of about 35 by 33 inches and gave up. Couldn't figure out what to do with it. Added a border very poorly. That may have been a year later.

Several years after that, I got the idea to start adding on, to make it bigger. Thought I'd give it to my grandmother who was in a nursing home after a car accident. Didn't happen. Added squares, didn't know what to do with the crappy border. Gave up some more. It sat around. My grandmother died.

Then I pulled it out again, thought I'd make it for a Christmas present for my mom and step dad. Still didn't know what to do about that non-flat border thing. Added more squares. Got tired. Quit. This happened several years in a row around Christmas. I bought batting and flannel for the backing. Added squares. Got tired. Put it away again.

It was supposed to be king-sized by then. King-sized is really, really big. Then my mother switched around her beds and now she sleeps in a full again. So I figured I could stop where I was and add the backing and batting and quilt it and be done. Well, that's actually a lot of work. It's been on my to-do list for a few years now. Well, like 6, but off and on for different reasons, clearly. So, maybe 1 or 2 as a finish-as-the-size-it-is project.

What spawned me to actually pull it out and try it this time? I needed more family cloth wipes. I had these towels that were falling apart and wanted to add flannel to one side. I didn't want to buy flannel and haven't made it to the thrift store to pick up old flannel pjs, but I knew there was a whole lotta flannel taking up space in my closet. I figured finishing the quilt would give me enough leftover to make toilet paper. For real.

So I finished the quilt in time for the occasion of my mother's 55th birthday yesterday. I pulled it out on Sunday and got the backing all added and everything sewn up. Then finished going back and forth over all the uneven border bits with the machine on Monday. Added leaves to make it look like a vine, or in some way at all intentional. It worked. Then Monday night, I sewed up some more toilet cloths, then finished knitting a baby hat. Then started on another baby hat yesterday after presenting my mother with her quilt. She liked it a lot. It really does sort of look like a quilt too. Even if it is all uneven and weird. I figure it's good enough. I've seen those Gee's Bend quilts and this is no worse than some of them (though certainly no better than many), if not as awesome and folksy.

It's actually on a king-sized bed here, but just goes to the edge, so on a full/queen, will be perfect and larger than store-bought quilts.
Off-center stitching.

Little leaf.

Lots of the fabrics came from things taking up space around my mother's house for the past several decades.

This is my favorite fabric in the bunch - some random scrap my mom had that was busy doing nothing in a box somewhere.
This pretty flannel backing now matches my toilet paper.

The only kind of mom who is recognized as valuable as "just" a mom in our society is one with a book deal.

Crunchy Mama Bragging Rights OR Doing the Green Things I Gotta Do

There is so much talk all over the web, especially on these homeschooling mama blogs that I frequent, about going green this and going green that and trying to be more conscious and more present and whatever else it is. I take an anarchistic approach to all this, with a little stylisitic anarchism thrown in because I'm not entirely into knitting and baking as the root of defining my soul (though I do knit and I do bake).

Well, I've been doing this shit for years. Part of that is that I was born into a family full of lefties who joined that back-to-earth movement (sort of) back in the 70s, so there was plenty of DIY motivation about in childhood. Later on, I became conscious, as my mother did, of more bits here and there of what to do to not destroy the planet, at least by minute little segments. So for more than a decade I've been carrying cloth grocery bags and using rags and cloth napkins and the like. Additionally, we

• make most of our own cleaning products, purchasing only detergents and soaps and oils
• grow gardens
• compost
• recycle
• hardly ever flush the toilet
• try not to randomly set things on fire
• maintain only one car
• walk
• buy local and organic
• eat vegetables
• volunteer with a Community Supported Agriculture Group
• buy used
• reuse glass and plastic
• convert old items to new ones
• use cloth toilet paper
• cloth diaper (when we diapered)
• breastfeed (when we breastfed)
• rely heavily on the library
• do not ever buy bottled water - we used to use SIGG bottles, but turns out they suck too (and that buying something we don't need to stop doing something we don't need to do doesn't make sense), so now we reuse glass jars
  
• make things from scratch
• develop plans for our organic unicorn farm where we will live happily ever after in a carbon-footprintless environ, free from the worries of modern life. For reals.

My life is perfect. What, yours isn't? And that's all stuff that we do that "saves" the environment. That doesn't even get into the details about how gloriously perfectly crunchy we are. My kids ran around in hand-dyed cloth diapers covered over with hand-knit organic wool longies eating veggies from our garden and drinking kale smoothies. I mean, clearly I win, right?

Not only that, but we do ridiculously crunchy things like homebirth and unschool. We go on hikes in the woods and volunteer together as a family. Lordy, if I were a better blogger, I could win crunchydom real easy. Especially if I had a DSLR, because then I could showcase our wood floors and nature trays and the crafting we do and crap and it would look so beautiful and perfect, which my life is, of course (that whole complaint list notwithstanding). Then all the moms in their houses could ooh and ahh at what an excellent mother I am whilst trying to keep a damper on the creeping feeling that maybe they're not quite as good as me.

Yes, that must be it. I might as well already live on that organic unicorn farm.

To counter all that complaining for no good reason, really - or one really good reason - here is the note I wrote to my husband for Valentine's Day.

I want to summarize the past twelve Valentine's Days or somehow distill a meaning from all those years together, but to arrive at conclusions seems impossible and somewhat naive. There are no possible ways to adjust or exact some grand narrative that would not always inevitably conclude with words that are faulty and imprecise. There are too many paths and processes to parse together, too much tragedy, hope, despair, triumph, and the stoic and altogether mundane soldiering on which occurred and occurs every day in this life together. There are too many words for all of it to grant it adequate meaning. It would be simply too much babbling on. And yet, I suppose, there is something simple and exact enough to suffice: I love you. Always have.

I'm currently reading Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Like all books that speak to things I already feel, this book is infiltrating my thoughts. Despite my past dabbling in Treasure Mapping, I really have always hated the idea of the secret laws of attraction, and Bright-Sided is the perfect antidote to that. It is appropriate, then, for it to worm its way inside my head and to encourage hearty "hell yeahs!" and occasional sharing of choice quotations with others. I think too, it may be appropriate to counter a world chock full of the encouragement of faulty thinking with a list of complaints. Thus...

I may very soon lose my health insurance and so will my husband. He is making more money this semester and we will no longer qualify for Medicaid.

We qualify for Medicaid because he has been in graduate school the last 7-1/2 years, which is incidentally how long our son has been alive, who is incidentally also a reason for which we qualify.

My husband's 7-1/2 years in grad school have resulted in something to the tune of $140,000 in debt. I think. That's a guesstimate.

He doesn't have a job yet.

I spent the months between May 2009 and February 2010 trying to get my son an appointment to get a palatal expander so that he can wear it for 6 months to a year before having it replaced with bone from his hip sewn into the roof of his mouth. He still doesn't have the expander, but has at least had the molds to make it done. Any day now...

I think I have a sinus infection.

It's hard for me to complain sincerely when I understand my immense privilege in this world.

No war is a good war. I can hardly imagine an instance where any war is a just war.

The inefficacy of our government is tiresome.

I hate cooking. Eating is something that carries great ambivalence for me. I love food. I hate preparing it and am extraordinarily picky, oddly. I cannot bear flavors that are too strong. No stinky cheese, no stinky beers, nothing too spicy. I like salt, sugar, carbs, and kale. I do not gain weight, or rather, mass.

It might be obnoxious to give each complaint so much context. They hardly read like complaints.

I fully believe that capitalism is derived of patriarchy and that both cause most of the problems in the world. It is unfortunate to recognize this and yet have it be the water I swim in.

My children are driving me insane lately. Nearly to violence. I have strong beliefs about kindness and community and collectivity and all things gentle and honoring of both the individual and the group, but lately I want to tear them limb from limb and throw them about. I'm certain this is the fault of February.

I loathe February. It is the longest month of the year, even though it isn't. It is agony to be in February, stuck, cold, sick, hating life, hating each other, hating everything, in the darkness, in the gloom, the gray glow of sunlight bouncing off the snow doing nothing for anyone, feeling, inevitably, ill at ease, itchy, aching for a better, brighter, more well-rounded and fantastic life.

Somehow, I've been feeling not at all accomplished, not good enough, glaringly imperfect of late.

Part of this glaring imperfection is the wanting to tear children limb-from-limb: it causes me great concern, makes me wonder if I am the only one not enjoying this parenting thing enough and if there is something not entirely wrong with me because though I am an unschooler, I seem to be doing very poor with the unschooling, or the exploring of the world, rather. Perhaps this is February and illness and crushing debt and joblessness and the immense privilege of sitting on high examining the problems of the world (and personal life) with a fine toothed intellectual comb, or perhaps I'm just a very bad pessimist and poor facilitator of life.

Self-doubt is particularly agonizing in the gray gloom.

My right hand, still mostly numb from having severed my median nerve three years ago, feels like a cold dead weight and makes it difficult to type (particularly the "m" key), pick up small objects, not burn myself, and impossible (I believe) to put a clothespin back together once it has come apart.

Sebastian is still not pronouncing all sounds correctly and it's making me worried that waiting him out is a stupid approach.

Aleks wants more interaction with other children. Sometimes specific children. If this is not fulfilled, it is my fault.

I am the only person doing much cleaning in our house these days. I am also the only person that takes the children anywhere ever. I also pay the bills, do the taxes, run all the errands, do most of the cooking, and stock everything we need. I also do the "homeschooling" and am heavily involved/buried in a volunteer gig outside of the home. This is highly irritating, but the only solution given certain circumstances.

I feel emotionally exhausted.

Thinking positive will do nothing to remedy any of that, except, perhaps, the self-doubt. Any foray into positive thinking to soothe said self-doubt may simply result in deluding or failing to motivate myself. That does not sound like a desirable outcome for my skeptic self.

There also seems to be an over-riding theme of general ambivalence. There are rationalizations galore available for all of the personal issues (though none at all for the global ones), but it seems impossible to pinpoint actual causes or to project results from a course of action.

I should also note that despite all the personal complaints, our life is genuinely excellent and complaining in the context of being a white-identified American is without a doubt, whiny and obnoxious. It is also, fortunately or unfortunately, the truth.

The Art 365 thing ended up being impossible due to scheduling difficulties. Or, rather, photographing the evidence and displaying it is an unwieldy task for me these days. Maybe one day.

6/365.
That's me in the middle in black, rehearsing for a stage play for the first time in more than a decade.

4/365.

3/365.

2/365.
With children:

1/365.

since the end of the year is here, i decided to revisit my treasure map for the year, which i made in march then displayed dutifully on my computer's desktop for months before forgetting about it upon the death of the computer. later, i reinstated it, but my husband replaced it with a day of the dead image and i'm reluctant to argue with him about the matter by usurping his desktop authority.

today i examined the individual parts. read the words, thought about what i'd intended, what i'd had in mind. in large part, there is no way to determine if what i seek will come at all this year or the next. jon being on the job market means that things like "stability," "certainty," and "security" are somewhat difficult to come by. i've learned to try to not get my hopes up too high lest they be dashed in short order. of course, this goes against everything the map is supposed to be. i retain a sort of cautious optimism and continue to make plans, but try not to say them out loud too much. at least not yet...

the entire map centered on a theme of growing: personally, practically, literally, spiritually... i wanted to grow. i wanted to build on the new things i'd already been doing and simply grow them. i wanted to continue and deepen my involvement in my community, my commitment to local foods, my work with my children's education, my relationship with my husband, and my exploration of my place in all of it. most of this was pretty easy: i was already set for it, already on that path. recently i've surprised myself with a sort of dismissal of all of that as nothing much though. it may be simply an end-of-year, post-christmas-doldrums-feeling speaking, or it could be a bit of burn-out (which i hope is temporary).

i'm still sitting here clinging to the belief that all of the work of the last decade will come to a fruition of sorts where the next phase will begin. there is still time for that. it will come one day, one way or another.

the section that really caught my eye, however, was the phrase, "everyday limitless art" displayed carefully on leaves as though dripping like rain. it's hard to say whether it was accomplished precisely, though it was certainly attempted. the "everyday" part struck me. i thought of keri smith, of all artists that i admire, of the notion of free art everywhere all the time. the notions of creating and experiencing and really, ultimately, appreciating the small acts of creation that exist everywhere in our lives all the time.

so i thought, what i really need to do is embark on it with intention and a full heart. what i really ought to do is aim for everyday limitless art for real. be it writing or photography or collecting/catching or daydreams spun in doodle or any other real or virtual object i can see or experience, i should aim to make it every single day of all of my life. but maybe i'll just start with this coming year. i'm thinking art 365. we'll see where it goes. and if it goes. and how it goes.

I am busy and complainy about it. I want nothing more than to write lists and check them off again. When I think of my life, what I might say about what is going on right now, it is all the to-do-list, as ever, whenever I stop any more to think about it and write it out. Occasionally there is the drama between friends, which I cannot blog or really journal as it is not my own drama, but theirs. Or there is the strife and struggle of marriage which is decidedly not good entertainment for anyone other than my poor damaged heart. It needs its privacy and no ears but good friends. Most usually, there is the struggle of children and my feelings about everything with them and how that grows and changes and drives me crazy. But I have the other blog for working that out and feel that I must do so there.

So what I am left with is my own constant struggle to define myself by outside activity - by the writing and the arting and the constant volunteer work. The hum is getting louder by the minute with the volunteer work just now. There is also the whole life to organize and predict and arrange for. I have not the disposable income to outsource all that grief and oftentimes there is much to be haggled over, rather than merely purchased. The efficiencies of capitalism have sadly created infinite bureaucracies that I navigate alone in a sea of the alone.

I was thinking about joy and cultivating joy. It's something I like to say with deep sarcasm - "cultivating joy." It's a phrase I roll my eyes at quite dramatically. It's a bit of an inside joke at this point. It is not to say that there is anything wrong with actually working to cultivate joy, if that's your thing, and the rolling of eyes is not to say that I do not actively seek to be happy myself. It's just a matter of being an incredibly sarcastic person, focused mainly on the obstacles to certain paths rather than the great journey of getting there. I see obstacles as opportunities for problem solving, which is serious work, rather than as fantastic adventure.

Actually, I say all that, but I've not yet been able to articulate what it is that so supremely annoys me about endless optimism. I suppose it's a sense of entitlement. That one would expect the good outcome seems hopelessly naive to me rather than as a method of manifestation. I don't believe in the universe. I do not buy the secret laws of attraction. There is no logic in it because there is too much suffering by the innocent for it to be so. In my mind, it is a mark of utter, blind privilege. And to that end, I instead view the world as a struggle. I expect the worst so as to create the best possible outcome rather than to be disappointed.

Yet I am in the place I always wanted to be in. I have arrived quite fully into the life I had planned. It's just not quite done, so I have a hard time recognizing it at any given moment. I see my children, I see their joy, I sense their adventure and I try my best to give them the freedom to be with that, to feel it. Yet inevitably, I fail. I come down on the truth of an act or event with far more harshness than is at all necessary. Or I skate the edge. It is not every moment, but I am not perfect by any means. And my sarcasm and downer attitude tell you that ahead of time. You know what to expect around here. We are not perfect. We are not perfectly happy, we do not excel at bliss. We excel at reality and at laughing terribly hard at it. We offer our guffaws and our chuckles and our cackles up in open mockery to the universe. I'm convinced the universe loves us for it.

i have been ill of late, in both body and spirit. my lungs are made of pork, so the joke has been going, their inhalations sporadically ending in coughing fits, like the swine flu that's supposedly everywhere and awful. here, we seem to be handling it well enough, if we aren't exactly well. the hacking has yet to manifest as pneumonia, so i think we'll be all right in the end. plus i've turned a corner and no longer feel as though i've been beaten along all my bendy points in the night whilst i slept.

my mood, on the other hand, has been dampened by one bit of bad news after another: an entire month spent in doctor's offices with aleks arranging and arguing with care providers about what he needed and when and how to configure it, resulting in his sixth surgery scheduled for 8 days from now, provided this illness doesn't incapacitate any of us further, then work and taxes and scary taxes and stress and work and volunteering, then a car break-in and the flu within but hours of one another, the smallest child vomitous all night long while i shivered unnecessarily, my body trying to muster heat to kill the disease, then travel and holidays and my 30th birthday, then the sudden and tragic death of a friend... then more birthday, then bad moods, then more illness, then our health care pulling a houdini, then discovering that jon has no job whatsoever come july-ish.

it can all leave a girl wondering what she did to deserve this last decade. and i have no answers there. i am smart and creative and have done my best to make decisions both in keeping with my heart's true desires and with protecting myself and my family to a reasonable degree. yet i have been bombarded by this onslaught of that which is out of my control and every time i am here, in this bell jar, as it were, i find myself meditating uncontrollably on all the horrible and awful things that have befallen me and wondering what i might have done to prevent it. i find it all weighing heavy on me. it's the helplessness and the uncertainty, the seemingly impossible heights of instability and it feeds the stressed us, our bad moods and short fuses, makes us entirely too human allthetime.

this is the real me that guilts and worries and frets over everything always. this is not the collection of short stories about my life that show us in the glaring yellow of eternal sunshine, its rays haloing the angelic downy heads of my children, their laughter ringing out, like the blogs of so many mothers or the soft-focused lenses of fabric softener commercials.

i try and try to see if i am being unreasonable, if i might not be able to somehow twist this all as advised by so many psycho-spiritual self-help gurus, into a storyline that refuses to elevate these traumas to such an important status that knit their way into everything else. but i've not found the way to do that and in many ways reject such advice as counter to my authentic self. i am not overly despairing, i do not think. i am simply in the muck of it, as so many are and have been. i can see the blessings, if i cannot always feel them beating heavy in my chest. i know my privileges, but i also know too well these obstacles. i am trying. i am always, always trying.

What I do when I'm bored.

I've been cheating on my blog. For more than a year now, I've been keeping another blog. It's mainly about my children and what they're doing as unschoolers, but still. I think I've lost whatever tiny readership I had remaining here by straying, but I have not forgotten you.

Now it's the new year and I hope to make some new changes. Things got stale on the whole site when my web editor began disallowing me to update anything beyond the blog. That was quite awhile ago now. I tried doing some other things in my life. I began volunteering, moonlighting as a doula, and I tried to start my own business last year. The business thing did not go very well and now I have a basement full of SIGG bottles and some excess debt.

I have plans though... I'd like to combine the two blogs in some way and refashion the entire annakiss brand into a household name for the jaded, anarchistic crunchy unschooling mamas out there or those aspiring to be or desiring to mock such folks. I'd like to keep them each separate, but together and ever-so-slightly more equal. That may be quite the lofty goal there, but now that I've said it, I'll have to do it. First thing on the list is doing some web design, so this is all likely going to take some time. Especially since I am clueless about said web design myself and am otherwise occupied by, you know, raising these kids...So look for it when it comes!

It's one in the morning and Aleks has just slammed the door at me. Not on me, not in my face. Just at me. He's angry because I told him to go to bed. I was impatient because I am tired. I was folding laundry and he wanted me to find a hanger for his Darth Vader costume so he could hang it up so it would "look cool." I told him I would in a minute, but that he needed to go get in bed with Papa who was supposed to be reading stories. When he protested, I retorted with the cold, hard demand. That's when he slammed the door.

I continued folding and went back to my thinking about parenting, homeschooling, unschooling, our financial situation, Jon's job situation, whether or not I should be able to support myself, whether or not I actually could if circumstances demanded it, and ultimately whether or not I would be happy with whatever hypothetical horrible scenario I found myself in without a college degree. I imagined the worst - Jon dead or us divorced, me moving back in with my parents, dragging my two kids with me to a life where they are not allowed to do whatever they want and I have to go get some horrible corporate job to struggle at for all of eternity. It does not sound terribly happy at all. Certainly, it does not sound satisfying.

Maybe I could find some down-on-her luck fellow single anarchist mama to found Hobbiton with instead of my husband. Maybe that way I could maintain the illusion that I would be okay, that I could maintain all this ideology I walk around with through the worst of it. In all likelihood, reality would be closer to the former scenario. In any case, there's a veil here, isn't there? Some sort of tenuous grip on philosophy? Do we exalt it beyond what is reasonable? Is it all merely masturbatory? Are our children set up for failure at the hands of a culture that does not remotely resemble this world we create? I am forever defending that my children are not sheltered, goddammit. They interact with people of all walks of life and do things I would rather they not do and make choices I would rather they not make. Things that are not in line with how I feel it all should be. I defend this to some of the very same people who have argued against the things I do on both sides - that I allow them too much exposure to harmful elements and too little exposure to beneficial ones. I find more and more that I do not have hardly any of the answers.

What would I do if it all came crashing down? With my ideology on clearly shaky ground, what am I defending anymore? What am I even doing? What should I be doing? And if it doesn't work out? What will there be left to defend or do or attempt? Soldiering on through sludge that probably has no place with philosophy. That's not what anyone ever wanted for me and I know I've got to be smarter than that. Three of my four parents have master's degrees and I dropped out of college three times. My husband and I go to these departmental shindigs where the new grad students and post-docs ask me questions like, "Are you in academia also?" I pretty much always scoff at them. Right in their faces. "Ha! No, I dropped out of college three times." It doesn't sound very smart.

I think back to why I dropped out of college all those times in the first place. It just wasn't ever a good fit. As I say, "Me and school don't mix." It's not like I went to the same kind of school over and over again at all. My university experience ran the gamut - a small liberal arts college, community college, and a major state university. What would have been a good fit? Was there ever a time where I could really have just plowed through and become what I wanted to be? The last several years, I thought I'd been figuring it out, that there was still plenty of time to change my mind, to become what I am. Mainly to write. I've been busy raising these kids though. I thought that was good too. I thought we were here building a life, or trying to reach the point where we could. Jon's finally finishing his degree, but that's putting us in a transitional space that is rather unpleasant and more unbalanced, it would seem, than anywhere we've been before, at least in some aspects. Which is what's making these questions feel ever more immediate. What can I do to keep us from slipping into abject poverty? And why didn't I do anything the last ten years to secure my own position? What should I have done? What could I have done differently?

I was busy raising these kids. That was the life I was trying for. That is the life I am trying to do. When Aleks slams the door at me though, I think that maybe I don't want to be here, doing this, trying to build this life. I remember when we first moved here I was so excited about trying to conceive Bastian. I sat on a bench at the park and told Heather all about how much I loved being a mother - that it was like I had finally found my calling, what I wanted to be when I grew up, my career. These days I can only remember saying it. I have no recollection of that feeling. It's gotten too confusing. I've gotten too lazy. Their energy is too much. The stakes have suddenly changed. Now that they are three and six, it's as though suddenly I have to be doing things to make them grow up. They should be better behaved. Aleks should be reading. Bastian should be speaking better. They should not be playing video games as much as they do. They should not be up at one in the morning.

There is so much pressure from so many places for them to be something we just aren't. I wonder a lot lately if I just don't have it in me. Maybe I can't muster the energy to do the things I'm supposed to be doing with them. Whatever those things are. The baking, the art, the nature walks - none of it's enough. Nothing is ever enough. Maybe I'm just not one of those women who can feel satisfied by mothering. I don't even know what that means.

The philosophy in me says that all of those expectations are ridiculous. All children need is free time to figure things out. All they need is time with me and my husband and eventually more with others. The philosophy says that the expectation to socialize early and often is too much of an expectation - it becomes uncomfortable and contrived and lacks the freedom of empty space and time. The notion that anyone has anything figured out at all is ludicrous. No one knows what they're doing. Most of the people my age are still figuring out their lives. My parents are still making it up as they go along. I am no different. I am merely trying things out and praying for them to work and that's likely the best I can do. That, and apologize for the demand made that caused the door to slam at me.