A Spring Haiku

If your life were a Haiku poem, what would it be?

You may remember that Haiku is a Japanese style poem that has 3 lines and the rhythm of 5 syllables, 7 syllables and then 5 again. For a person that loves to write long, flowery sentences, Haiku feels like the equivalent of naked writing.

What's cool about Haiku is how much you can say in a tiny bit of writing. It usually gives you a sensory surprise and a sweet picture of an experience -- like turning the corner and pow!

My writing life has been "dry" lately --- so the idea of Haiku has been a fun inspiration. You know those dehydrated sponges in a flat shape -- that is me. Too many projects, too little inspiration makes a dusty, uninspired writing world.

But back to the Haiku. My friend recently encouraged me that "some is better than none" -- so to get my writing back on track, I decided doing a little is where to start. So in honor of the season of spring, which offers the hope of lovely summer, I start with my "spring haiku."

Gray spring morning

Birds don't notice dreary

Song everywhere.

Lovely Freedom

I just bought freedom. It was only ten bucks.

There is something oxymoronic about saying "I just bought freedom." It has the same funky feeling as "grandma, put the saw down." It simply does not go together. Yet, I gladly paid my ten dollars for it.

If you haven't heard of "freedom" -- it's a new application you can download to your computer that will not let you connect to the Internet for a certain period of time. (www.macfreedom.com) Some super-genius is now getting severely wealthy over the fact that I (and probably you too) cannot get anything done anymore because we are constantly distracted.

I really bought it for my 9 year-old son. Please don't tell him though. I secretly love turning freedom on and then walking away from the computer. Minutes later I hear the frustrated sighs and then "mom, the Internet's not working!" I fake the irritated face and say "darn that Internet! That thing never works."

Then he is forced to do the amazing -- find something to do. Something wonderful without technology -- like read a book, use his imagination, make a paper airplane or draw. Not only is this forced Internet break great for 9 year-olds, it also works perfectly on adults.

What's ironic is freedom is something I have had all along, yet it took paying for it to see how much I was missing. Now if I could only get it to work on the TV....

It's a Wonderful Lasagna

"Eating a warm meal nourishes the body, preparing it nourishes the soul."

I wish I had written that -- but I actually read it in a magazine today. I think it's amazing that not everyone feels this way. Actually, I don't always feel this way. Cooking is one of those things that I find sometimes satisfying and other times overrated.

Recently I was sharing with a friend my plans to make smoky cheese lasagna this weekend.

"It got four forks on epicurious.com! I can't wait to make it -- all the e-mail reviews were awesome," I beamed.

"I have never made lasagna," she said.

"Never?" I asked.

"Never. I have better things to do with my time than make complicated dishes or anything requiring a bunch of ingredients. I just don't cook," she said.

Well. That sent me thinking "wonderful life" style about what my life would have been like without having ever made lasagna. Then I imagined a world without all the meals I had made as a family, with my siblings and friends. All the effort spent on recipes, testing out ingredients, reading gourmet magazines and swapping awesome dishes with friends.

I briefly considered the freedom it would bring not to really stress about dinner, family gatherings and always trying to outdo myself every holiday. Swatting that thought out of the way, I circled back to my original thought. Cooking has been the fabric that has woven many sweet happy memories together. For me, the best of times were the ones wrapped around the kitchen.

No, I can't imagine a world without cooking lasagna. I think it would be a sad world indeed. Yes, it is a lot of work and with little reward. Yet for me there is some sweet touch of satisfaction knowing that I created something wonderful with my own hands for the people I treasure.

Yes, the magazine was mostly right -- preparing the food does nourish the soul. But only if the cooking is done with a loving heart and grateful company.

My Holiday Pinata

I like order. I especially like it when it comes to the holidays. Tradition trumps chaos as a theme of comfort to me during this season.

I think that’s why singing the 12 days of Christmas song is so much fun. I know what comes next and I enjoy putting things in their perfect rightful order. Partridges before Turtle Doves and so on.

Yet I hate order. Especially when it comes to my siblings. As the youngest of five, order means I will forever be the baby. Always the one that was last to do anything, always the one who needs constant advice and care from the olders. Or so they think.

Despite the fact that I am 41, a mom, a wife and responsible grown up, the minute I return to my hometown, I somehow morph back to being seen as the baby. For the moment, I’ll call it “birth order disorder” to sound cool.

I love going home – there is a comfort in returning to my youth and remembering all the places and spaces of those days. Yet the recycled youth trips send me returning to my most awkward days.

It’s probably because my siblings are there to remind me of every stupid mistake I ever made, like the time I set the house on fire (not my fault), putting the cat in the dryer (total accident) and driving the car into ditches (bad tires). Despite the fact that I should be able to enjoy the emotional pinata of joking – the truth remains that pinata parties are only fun for the whackers, not the piñata.

So as I return to my current home, relief sets in as I leave all the inadequate days and times behind. I return to the comfort of the life I have now, despite my past. My perfect order – no piñatas allowed.

The End of Mid Life Crisis Cooking

Today I gave up cooking like I'm having a mid-life crisis.

It began with the meatloaf. Kindly, my lovely neighbor brought her extras from dinner to spare me the trouble of cooking. I called her blessed as I was relieved of having to come up with a meal for one less day.

As my husband came home from a long day, he casually asked "what's for dinner?"

I replied "meatloaf, courtesy of our awesome neighbor."

Then came the look. Now if ever there were a sweet spot in my husband's heart, it's for meat loaf. And mashed potatoes, and Jell-o salads and pretty much anything that Betty Crocker ever uttered. Yes, my husband is a plain and simple, meat and potatoes love kind of guy.

I am not. I am a spice it until your lips look like you just had Botox sort of cook. I am season it until it wants to get up and do a dance in a red hot dress sort. I love every kind of exotic food, weird spice, unusual and strange fare that sends my husband's Prilosec-loving stomach into flips just thinking about it.

So there was the meatloaf. Love at first site by him, a side of jealousy sauce bubbling in me.

It occurred to me that maybe I was trying too hard and needed to give it a sweet rest. Those were not my words, but words that were inspired in me as my son was reading the 10 Commandments as part of his devotion time.

It went something like this.... "Thou shalt not be jealous of what your neighbors have...or what your neighbors possessions are or your neighbor's meatloaf!" I swear I read meatloaf jealousy right in the Kid's Adventure Bible.

I decided to give it a rest as instructed by the 10 Commandments. I was trying too hard. As I put down my Bon Appetit magazine and picked up Betty's handbook of 1950s perfection, I decided sometimes the simple things truly are the best.

Going Off the Grid

One Mom’s Adventure into the Wilds of Homeschooling

Homeschoolers are weird. They are the people who make meals out of dryer lint, wear clothes from hemp seed and study the sonar tracking of bats. Or so I thought. Until I became one of them.

This week, I read that according to the United States Department of Education, an estimated 1.5 million children in grades K-12 were home educated in 2007. This number grows by almost 10 percent every year. The real kick for me was reading this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine calling homeschooling “suddenly chic.”

As I read that line, I got a huge smile on my face. I even had to say it out loud -- “I am now chic! The New York Times says so!”

This adventure began when it dawned on me that no one “got” my son. All the things I felt were his assets were considered “problems” at school. We had tried it all -- public school, private school, tutoring, testing, extra work and support at home to constantly help our son succeed. But no amount of shaping tooled his square peg self in the round hole of traditional education.

Day by day, I watched him come home from school and the gregarious, creative, joyous boy slowly began to fade away. As the months wore on, I noticed he began to shuffle like an old man, burdened by school. He had trouble sleeping at nights, having unsettling dreams about school. This began to evolve into uncharacteristic behavior like cheating, hiding his work and sabotaging his efforts by throwing work away before it could ever be graded. He was in a downward spiral and nothing helped right his course. This was no life for an 8 year-old boy – to be this burdened by school at such a young age.

I began to look at other options – there had to be somewhere, some place that my son would thrive. I began to imagine my dream school – I wanted my son to first learn about his faith, I wanted him to love learning and see it as a joy and delight. I wanted dynamic learning for him – not to sit at a desk all day, only to speak when he perfectly raised his hand. I wanted him to learn outside, at a museum, at a garden or a café. I wanted to be able touch, explore, see, and experience life as a learning lab – not as simply a worksheet to fill out, another checklist to complete.

I wanted to take him places, teach him life skills like how to cook, how to be a supportive young man for our family and community. I wanted him to have a service project that was more than about selling something or collecting pop tabs. I wanted him to spend time helping in a real way where he could experience the joy of making a difference. I wanted him to speak the language of my Spanish heritage.

Where could I find such an amazing place? Home.

Homeschooling became an easy choice when I began to look at all the research. Simple things like the fact that most kids only get about three minutes of individual attention for instruction per day. Surely I could do better than three minutes. The fact that pure academics only took up about 2 hours of the day – the rest was busy time, waiting in line, going to the bathroom, playground, library, art, computer – things that I could easily do on my own. I was spending more than that on my commute alone. Not to mention all the extra hours of volunteering, hours of homework after school, hunting down a project doo-bob or a colonial costume. Before there simply wasn’t time to do all that I wanted for him as a family. Now I could design his education to make it our own, based on the priorities we had and what he was passionate about learning.

Will we do this forever? I don’t know. Will I be any good at it? Will it rain a year from today? Who knows. What I know is that this is the right choice for our family right now and I will continue to evaluate my son based on his love of learning, the life and faith skills he is building.

I know homeschooling isn’t for the faint at heart. I like to think of it as “going off the grid.” Saying it that way, it has sort of a cool, James Bond mission style sound to it. It certainly sounds better than we have decided to give up all we know about traditional schooling and do it on our own.

Coming home to school is not for everyone, but for our family it was the only choice. Going off the grid gives us the freedom to encourage our child in a loving, enriching way. In our hearts, there could be no higher calling.

Gaps

When I hear the word “gap” I think of Leon Spinks and fourth grade.

If you don’t remember Leon – he was the heavyweight champion of the world, amazingly defeating Muhammad Ali in 1978, exactly when I was 9. You probably remember him as the unlikely winner with the huge gap in his front teeth – not a slight gap, more akin to a Grand Canyon-size spacer. In the peak of Spinks fame, timed with the cusp of my awkward pre-teen years, I also had a funny-looking gap.

Thank heavens it was nowhere near Spinks size. But all the same, it might as well have been. It was the most embarrassing thing ever to be compared to a heavyweight boxer. I don’t think I smiled once after Spinks won the title. I never forgot the humiliation of the ugly “gap."

Recently I was reminded of gaps again at a writer’s conference. In a field of 600 other women writers, it was easy to start the comparison game. In my head are all the gaps screaming out at me “her shoes are nicer than yours” or “she looks more professional than you, she probably is a better writer” to the ultimate take down “what are you doing here thinking you can write?”

Even though my teeth have since grown together (thank God), I still am constantly reminded of my gaps. The places in the heart that no matter how hard I try, never get filled in. No amount of compensating, positive thinking or smart wardrobing covers their places.

The very first speaker of the writer's conference must have picked up on the “gap vibe” as she immediately talked about how all of us feel inadequate. She reminded us that everyone has gaps and it is only our Creator that can fill them perfectly. She reminded us how wonderfully made our Maker designed us. Yes, despite our gaps, we are perfect in His eyes. My soul breathed a sigh of relief with a “thank you for reminding me.”

As we prepare for the fall season and school year ahead, it’s a great time to remember we all have gaps. Our kids have gaps, our families have gaps, our friends and teachers have gaps. But divine love fills in perfectly. So next time we start focusing on our spaces, we can breathe a deep sigh of relief. With that breath, we can remember gap-filling grace.