In Which I Grow Up A Little Bit

Last updated on: October 10, 2014 at 8:40 am by Anne Kennedy

In Which I Grow Up A Little Bit 2014-10-10T08:40:01-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I wrote a nice long blog post with pictures yesterday, about Matt's birthday, and the beautiful tree on my walk and this and that, and then it wouldn't post. Anyway which way I tried, all the technology resisted me, Completely. So, faced with the clock ticking at me and reality piling up, I walked away from it. I shut the lid on my technology, got in the shower and didn't look at it again all day. And, I have to say, I was a tiny bit surprised at myself. All week long I have been, in the most uncharacteristic fashion, choosing to do that which I ought to do, even though it hurts my head and sensibilities to do so.

You know how it is….well, maybe you don't, but pretend with me so that I don't feel isolated and sad….you feed all the children breakfast and tell the child whose job it is to clean up, and you go out into the school room and start the school day, and then at noon you come back into the kitchen to make lunch and discover that it looks worse than ever. You pause. In your old failing homeschool way you could stop everything, scream, and then deep clean the kitchen and make bread, telling yourself that “you'll keep the children in their work while you clean” because “you can multi task”. You mull this option over in sorrow because this is very much what you want to do. The kitchen is a wreck. It's just gross. No one should live this way. But for six years you have always chosen to clean the kitchen and look where it has got you. The kitchen is still dirty, but also, and more devestatingly, your children can't spell. You thought there would be a magic spelling program on the Internet, every year you tried to find it, but it turns out it's not there. So, swollowing your soul, you make lunch on top of the filth, you beat back some of the chaos, you don't give the children a break because they don't need one, the break is always for you to read the Internet anyway, and you call them back to work. You, and this is a huge big shock for everyone, get through everyone's school work. Everyone, everything. You are so so tired because you're used to bailing when you get tired and bored, so when you go in the kitchen to make dinner, you can't even beat back a little more chaos. You make the children unload and reload the dishwasher but you don't deal with the filth. You make dinner. Take them to fencing. You go to bed.

And the shocking thing is, this choice goes on through the week. Eventually your husband notices the kitchen and, amazingly, knowing that you are making the right choice not to cope with it, he cleans it. Totally. And as you come in towards the end of the week, day after day having chosen, in the small things, to do school and to do school all the time, you discover that you have made actual progress. It turns out the children can learn. They are bright and smart and motivated. They want to read and write and succeed. They enjoy the various things you're all working on. They don't think their lives are a meaningless broken failed wandering around in a circle. That's you, not them.

I so envy the people that intuitively understand the task of educating their own children, who know by feel the balance between order and wonder, who know how far a child should be pushed before backing off, who know how to make choices about life balanced with school, who don't seem troubled and angst ridden at every point, on every side. I know these people have other troubles and struggles that I don't have, but very often I wish I could swop them. I'll take ______ and give you _____. More than that I'd like to just have it altogether. I'd like to live a perfectly holy life where all the different components work together for good and at the end of every day God congratulates me on my perfection. The scpecter of failure looms over me at every turn and I'd like it to go away so that I can just happily carry on in smug self righteous competent satisfaction.

I'm not writing this out so that the interwebs will leap over here and rush in to say, “you're doing great! You're wonderful! Don't be so down on yourself!” Or on the other hand, “what a miserable wretch you are! Put your kids in school! Or something!” I'm writing this out because I've noticed it in other areas of life, like the church, and my internal life with Jesus, and gardening, and now, in a big way, with the Education of my Children. Like everything in the Christian life, it's not about the great measurable triumphs or even the huge defeats, although sometimes both of those help. Certainly, they bring both encouragement and holiness. No, it's really the day to day moments of decision. The small, sometimes imperceptible turnings towards truth and order and duty. A lot of small decisions add up to an actual path, an actual direction down which you're actually walking. You look back, suddenly, and see, oh, all these decisions to clean the kitchen were the wrong choice. Now we have a giant task to turn all the way around and go the other way. In the same way, these few small decisions to do the right thing do amount to something. They are the right choice.

This week they accumulated themselves into a bundle of satisfaction and relief. Several times I found myself sitting with Elphine and Alouicious, laboriously drilling something unpleasant, but all three of us having a good time about it. At another moment I discovered Romulus working very hard writing something he wanted to write, not because I was driving him forward. Somehow, in just this week, Gladys has leapt over that great precipice to discover that she can read even if I am not right there, and that she can read anywhere she finds letters together, in her math book, in her piano book, on a sign.

They came because I threw myself on the mercy of Jesus, because I repented of the sin of putting myself ahead of what God has called me to do, because I didn't rush in and do the thing that most satisfies me, that I value over all others–a clean kitchen. They came because God heard my repentant and devestated cry, because he had mercy on me, because when he said he wanted me to “be perfect as God is perfect” he wanted me to fall, flat in the death of myself, as I have done, and let him be perfect and merciful as he is.

So, I am super grateful. I had this week the text of Abraham taking his son up the mountain, and the son asking, “here is the fire and the knife, but where is the lamb” and Abraham saying, “the Lord himself will provide the lamb”. At every point, at every moment of this week, God not only provided the lamb, but also provided everything else–the patience, the time, the way, and even, as a cherry on the top, a clean kitchen.

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