Confessions

When I was six or seven years old, the school I attended announced a poster contest. Students were to create posters about their adult ambitions and the most artistic effort would win. I knew what I was going to draw. Me at a podium speaking into a microphone with a gigantic flag as a backdrop. I wanted to be the President of the United States. Before the ink was even dry on the mental version of my poster, I was informed that such roles were reserved to men and that God didn't make or gift women for leadership roles such as President of the United States.
Here we are thirty years later and we have a woman seriously contending for the office I coveted in grammar school, and I have to confess I'm sorely tempted to vote for her as a way of finally voting for myself. I won't though. She's pro-abortion, and we can't have that. I would wonder why there isn't a woman of right conviction to oppose her contending for the Republican nomination but it is obvious that its because the same men who discouraged me fill the ranks of the Republican Party.
Women have so much more to contribute than the fundamentalist groups within Christianity are willing to admit. Sometimes I think one of the strongest pulls of Catholicism is their firm conviction that Mary's little yes was anything but little, and that the most powerful event in history took place because a woman said yes. I love how my new church is filled with women, women leading. No, there won't be a female pope, but there certainly are female saints and personally I think they count for more than popes anyway.
God does make and gift female leaders, and I'm one of them.

Happily Weary

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted. I'm pregnant and I've been working very hard on the annual Heifer International Living Gift Market. Those things combined with my regular gig as a homeschooling mom of five mean I haven't had energy to post my musings. However all the hardwork paid off, for the full story check out the Heifer Happening Blog. We raised 6,680 dollars and had a good time doing it.

Super Woman

Your Superpower Should Be Mind Reading

You are brilliant, insightful, and intuitive. You understand people better than they would like to be understood. Highly sensitive, you are good at putting together seemingly irrelevant details. You figure out what's going on before anyone knows that anything is going on! Why you would be a good superhero: You don't care what people think, and you'd do whatever needed to be done Your biggest problem as a superhero: Feeling even more isolated than you do now

What Should Your Superpower Be?

Knitting

I went out and thoroughly enjoyed The Jane Austen Book Club last night, and it reawakened a conviction I'd come to earlier that I need to learn how to knit. It's more of a spiritual metaphor really. I'm by nature an unraveller. I could spend hours, days, weeks, years, working on difficult knots both physical and metaphorical, but what do you do with all that material when you come to the end of teasing it out? I'm thinking you knit, but I don't know how.
I dropped into Meijer last night to pick up a few things after the movie. The handy craft section is nicely stocked and they had several different resources to help me learn the basics, but isn't knitting something you need to learn from another human being? Do it yourself knitting teaching just doesn't have the appeal of live instruction from a friend or mentor. Unfortunately, I know more knotty people than I know knitters. I guess that's part of the drill when you are an unraveller, but the material is piling up and I'd like to live more intimately with the metaphor. Maybe I'll sign up for classes.

No-brainer

I'm having a difficult time synthesizing spiritual freedom and intellectual freedom. In the early years of my life one had to choose and faced with such a choice jettisoning intellectual freedom was, well, a no-brainer. However, my mind seems particularly ill-suited to prison life so it staged a mid-life breakout. Now I've got to find a way to live with the consequences.
Turn about being fair play, the simple answer is to jettison my spiritual freedom in favor of agnosticism or a fuzzy faith without any particular allegiances, but I have a feeling my soul is even less suited to prison than my mind. So the question has become how to stand fast in the freedom Christ has given me and read Virginia Wolfe and Thomas Hardy. The old answer was to find out what respected Christian teachers had to say about such dastardly duos and carefully see nothing more or less than what you were instructed to see. My mind won't have that anymore.
My previous life assumed that Christianity was fragile, or perhaps that my hold on it or it's hold on me was fragile. I think that's false. Times of extreme doubt and struggle have always ended by uncovering unshakable bedrock, such as my complete adoration of/addiction to holiness. If I am going to accommodate the new freedoms my mind has appropriated for itself I will have to trust that that trend will continue and that I have nothing to fear but fear itself as I learn to think without walls and safeguards.

Surviving the First Week of School

I went to my writer's group with nothing. I've been so immersed in school I just can't get anything decent down on paper.
We're surviving this first week. The summer is such a relaxed time that it is difficult to get back into the classroom rhythm. My mother used to joke that you should never let your students see you smile until Christmas. Well, I'm my students mother, so I can't get away with that one, but classroom discipline is certainly much tighter than it is at the end of the year.
Our schedule is tough this year. Other years I've worked it out so that I had an hour or two where the kids were responsible for their education while I did other things that I needed to do. This year we have too many players for me to get a break.
We start with Mass, though getting the youngest to behave has been challenging. I'm determined to stick with it as I can't think of a better way for them to get their Bible time in and learn how to behave in public. Then we move on to a daily writing exercise and math drills.
Quiet school this year is pretty involved. 3 and 4 have worksheets to do and read aloud time. 2 is doing SOS. 1 is doing the Omnibus program and Saxon 8/7. I try to squeeze in a little time to work with 5 on shapes, letters and numbers, but it isn't easy.
Loud school is equally packed with Geology and Astronomy followed by Spelling Power. Shurley English is now being done on two levels. Then we're working through The Story of the World history curriculum. We are quite delighted with history and science this year, but then we always are. ;)
I'm also shoe-horning in Music, Art and Latin, but we don't get nearly as much time with them as I'd like.
The general reaction of the children has been one of delight. The new cottage bear decor was a tremendous hit. As was the large stuffed bear I found for story corner. He's been christened Snuggly Bear and he does do a lot of snuggling. 1 says her brain feels like its going to explode, so I think we're on track. If I can get through this week, it'll be a good year

Acceptance

It's a strange thing when you decide to be who you really are. Some people don't notice anything different. Some like the change, and some feel sick. But I suppose the most important thing is that you've finally accepted yourself, no matter how others might feel.