you.”
So no bread and no pasta, but lots of butter. Which tasted good—I’d forgotten how good. At my mother’s house, there had only been margarine. And Olestra.
Anything different from life at my mother’s had to be beneficial, I told myself, by definition. I told myself the same thing about the sudden disappearance of TV, which was also a shock to my children’s systems.
TV had been our go-to transition activity in the city, as well as our go-to time killer. Not to mention babysitter, cheerer-upper,and put-to-bedder. Suddenly, here we were doing all those things on our own, wobbling through our daily activities like someone had stolen our training wheels. Because keeping busy is a learned skill. As are: exploring, playing pretend, and running around outside. Jean just expected my kids to know how to do all that stuff. That first week, she’d say, “Go outside and play,” and they would dutifully troop outside. But then I’d watch them stand around in the yard, not quite sure what to do next. I’d give them a few minutes, the way you do with a fussy baby, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d go out and give them a suggestion.
“Why don’t you water the garden?” I asked over and over in those early days. Before long the rain barrel was empty. “Why don’t you feed the chickens?” I suggested next.
“Mom,” Abby said, “Jean says only one cup of pellets per day. We don’t want them to become obese.”
Our third night there, which we called our three-night-aversary, Jean let the kids set off firecrackers in the farmyard, since we’d missed New Year’s Eve. We bundled up tight in our parkas and knitted hats and stayed out until we got too cold.
Abby worried about the goats. “Won’t we scare them?”
“Nah,” Jean said. “They know humans are crazy.”
Afterward we went inside to warm up and roast marshmallows for s’mores in the fireplace.
The same week, I got the kids enrolled at the giant public elementary school that served three counties at the point where they all intersected. I had been imagining a little one-room country schoolhouse for the kids à la Little House on the Prairie , and so the sight of the prisonlike 1960s structure of concrete bricks was disheartening. Also disheartening: the student-teacher ratio of thirty-seven to one and the budget cuts that had eliminated all teacher assistants, art classes, and music.
I fretted in bed until three o’clock the night before the kids started their first day. Tank would be okay, but I worried about Abby. Her leg was officially healed. We’d finished physical therapy a year before. She had a scar that ran down the side, but that was easy to cover up with pants. But she still limped just the tiniest bit when she walked. Sometimes I thought it was noticeable, and sometimes I didn’t. It wasn’t bad enough to keep her from doing anything, but it was bad enough to keep her from doing many things well. The issue surfaced more and more as the kids got older and stronger, and I heard Abby criticizing herself for being slow.
I didn’t know what to say to her about it. How do you tell a kid that she’s always going to have to work twice as hard as the other kids to be half as good? I didn’t have the words for that. All I knew was that watching your children survive their childhoods was so much worse than surviving your own.
Thrashing in bed, I beat myself up for pulling them out of a city school that wasn’t perfect but where, at least, they were settled. Now they’d have to go through it all again—meeting new people, finding new friends, figuring out who to talk to on the playground and what to play. And I didn’t know what kids wore here or what toys were cool, or have any other insights that might help them fit in. And how would a teacher give them any help or attention with thirty-seven kids to manage? It felt like I was just turning them loose in an empty pasture to fend for themselves.
The day-to-day plan was
So no bread and no pasta, but lots of butter. Which tasted good—I’d forgotten how good. At my mother’s house, there had only been margarine. And Olestra.
Anything different from life at my mother’s had to be beneficial, I told myself, by definition. I told myself the same thing about the sudden disappearance of TV, which was also a shock to my children’s systems.
TV had been our go-to transition activity in the city, as well as our go-to time killer. Not to mention babysitter, cheerer-upper,and put-to-bedder. Suddenly, here we were doing all those things on our own, wobbling through our daily activities like someone had stolen our training wheels. Because keeping busy is a learned skill. As are: exploring, playing pretend, and running around outside. Jean just expected my kids to know how to do all that stuff. That first week, she’d say, “Go outside and play,” and they would dutifully troop outside. But then I’d watch them stand around in the yard, not quite sure what to do next. I’d give them a few minutes, the way you do with a fussy baby, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d go out and give them a suggestion.
“Why don’t you water the garden?” I asked over and over in those early days. Before long the rain barrel was empty. “Why don’t you feed the chickens?” I suggested next.
“Mom,” Abby said, “Jean says only one cup of pellets per day. We don’t want them to become obese.”
Our third night there, which we called our three-night-aversary, Jean let the kids set off firecrackers in the farmyard, since we’d missed New Year’s Eve. We bundled up tight in our parkas and knitted hats and stayed out until we got too cold.
Abby worried about the goats. “Won’t we scare them?”
“Nah,” Jean said. “They know humans are crazy.”
Afterward we went inside to warm up and roast marshmallows for s’mores in the fireplace.
The same week, I got the kids enrolled at the giant public elementary school that served three counties at the point where they all intersected. I had been imagining a little one-room country schoolhouse for the kids à la Little House on the Prairie , and so the sight of the prisonlike 1960s structure of concrete bricks was disheartening. Also disheartening: the student-teacher ratio of thirty-seven to one and the budget cuts that had eliminated all teacher assistants, art classes, and music.
I fretted in bed until three o’clock the night before the kids started their first day. Tank would be okay, but I worried about Abby. Her leg was officially healed. We’d finished physical therapy a year before. She had a scar that ran down the side, but that was easy to cover up with pants. But she still limped just the tiniest bit when she walked. Sometimes I thought it was noticeable, and sometimes I didn’t. It wasn’t bad enough to keep her from doing anything, but it was bad enough to keep her from doing many things well. The issue surfaced more and more as the kids got older and stronger, and I heard Abby criticizing herself for being slow.
I didn’t know what to say to her about it. How do you tell a kid that she’s always going to have to work twice as hard as the other kids to be half as good? I didn’t have the words for that. All I knew was that watching your children survive their childhoods was so much worse than surviving your own.
Thrashing in bed, I beat myself up for pulling them out of a city school that wasn’t perfect but where, at least, they were settled. Now they’d have to go through it all again—meeting new people, finding new friends, figuring out who to talk to on the playground and what to play. And I didn’t know what kids wore here or what toys were cool, or have any other insights that might help them fit in. And how would a teacher give them any help or attention with thirty-seven kids to manage? It felt like I was just turning them loose in an empty pasture to fend for themselves.
The day-to-day plan was
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