In Which My Christmas Tree Becomes a Metaphor for My Life

First of all, happy St. Lucia Day! If you don't happen to  have ever lived in Sweden or be of Swedish origin, you've probably never heard of this day. St. Lucia was a young woman from Sicily in (I think) the 4th century. She was ultimately martyred for her refusal to marry a powerful Roman who was a pagan. She has become the patron saint of the blind (because her eyes were reportedly poked out before she was killed) and of Sweden. She's probably patron of a few other things I as a protestant don't know about.

Sweden adopted Lucia, I think, in large part because her names means light. St. Lucia Day takes place on what (before the calendar was changed) used to be the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year. Her arrival (in the form of girls and young women dressed in white and wearing a evergreen crown with candles) heralds the return of the light and the fact that the days will gradually begin to get lighter and Spring will eventually come. Given that in parts of Sweden it is dark all day long at this point, that's an important reminder.

Facebook posts from my Swedish friends indicate that the commercialized Christmas season has crept further back in the year there just as it has here, but, when I was an exchange student in Sweden in the mid 1990's, the arrival of Lucia heralded the beginning of the Christmas season. Advent had already begun of course, but Christmas decorating, baking, etc., began in earnest after the 13th.

Years ago, before Squirrelboy was born, I was taking my writing more seriously and I had a story published in Spider magazine about a little Swedish girl celebrating St. Lucia Day after her family moved to Peru. When it was first published I didn't have kids', but I offered to come read the story to the classes of my friends who were teachers. Once Squirrelboy started preschool I read it to his class. That continued until 3rd grade. I've now read the story to Kittygirl's class every year since kindergarten, and today was the day. Since I most often come in to read about diabetes, I really enjoy reading something entirely different.

The story was always well liked by Squirrelboy's classmates, but it polls especially well at Kittygirl's Spanish Immersion school. There are both teachers and students at the school who were themselves born in Peru or whose parents immigrated from Peru. It's also particularly gratifying when I read the author's name and the students realized that I, Kittygirl's mother, wrote a story that appeared in a real magazine. I think writers are these far-off mythical people in their minds. Inevitably someone asks if I want to write a book. I was happy this year to report that I've written a book and am researching the best route to get it published.

I've been immensely gratified by the way my kids have reacted to my intention to start taking my writing more seriously, even if it means that there may come a time when I have less time to devote to them. Kittygirl, in fact, social butterfly that she is, would be over the moon if I a) spent enough time writing and b) made enough money to send her to the afterschool program. However, I'm not counting on that since she only has 2 1/2 years left of elementary school. The kids are super excited that I'm working on a book, and both of them have asked to read it when I'm done. Kittygirl even told her gymnastics teacher that her mom is writing a book.

This season has reminded me that my life is a work in progress. I think that's really true of all of our lives, even if special needs of any kind don't figure into them. It feels especially true if you're in the season of actively parenting small (or even taller than you but under 18) humans, but I don't think it ends when your kids leave the house, and I think it applies even if you  never had kids to begin with.

Our Christmas tree this year served as a metaphor for this. Mr. Engineer and Kittygirl left to get a tree at about 2pm Sunday. The idea was that they'd be back no later than 3:30, the tree would be up a little before 4, and all the decorating would be accomplished by the time the kids went to bed.

That's not what happened, however. It was almost 4 by the time the tree-procurers returned, but that wasn't the main obstacle. They had chosen the biggest tree we've ever had. Somehow it didn't occur to Mr. Engineer that our small tree stand might not support a larger tree.

It took him a long time to get the tree balanced in the tree stand. By the time it happened, in fact, we were sitting down to dinner. Five minutes into dinner there was a crash from the living room we all rushed in to see the tree tipped over onto an end table. Thankfully, there were no highly breakable decorations in the path of the tree.

Mr. Engineer made a detour to Meijer after dropping off Squirrelboy at youth group.  He came home with the most expensive tree stand, reasoning that a heavy metal stand would be more likely to help the tree balance. After a lot of work, we realized that stand was also a failure. Mr. Engineer made a trip back to Meijer for a third stand. This time he get one intended for a tree measuring up to 10 feet even though our tree is only 8 feet high. The good news is the new stand was plastic and only half the cost of the metal one he returned. The even better news is that it finally worked.

By the time this was all done, it was time for the kids to get ready for bed. I convinced Mr. Engineer to work together to string lights on the tree. This is an activity that's impossible (or nearly so) for one person to do alone in the position in which we put our tree (up against the picture window in the living room).

It wasn't until Wednesday that I actually finished the tree. Given that I'd expressed late last week that I was going to start taking my writing more seriously I had to actually spend some time editing my long-neglected novel. I also had to grocery shop on Monday and do a handful of other errands. In the end, though, the tree really was the most beautiful one we've ever had and I think it was worth the trouble.

We didn't realize when we set out to get a Christmas tree on Sunday afternoon that it would turn into a multi-day ordeal involving three tree stands, two trips to the store, and a tree crashing down in the living room. If we had known what this tree would bring, Kittygirl and Mr. Engineer might have chosen a smaller tree. I'm sure this hypothetical smaller tree would have been nice, but it wouldn't be the thing of incredibly beauty that our current tree is.

I think life works like that more often than not. We often set out with a particular plan for the way our lives are going to go. More often than not, that beautifully crafted plan crashes around us just as our tree crashed down in the living room.. We could have conceded defeat, tossed the Christmas tree in the backyard, and bought a smaller, easy to decorate artificial tree. It would have looked fine, and I imagine there are families out there for whom this could have been the best choice because of a variety of other stressors operating on their lives.

Most of the time, though, it makes the most sense to persevere and figure out how to reconstruct our plan in a way that fits our current circumstances. That might look like accepting our child's or own diagnosis and figuring out how to fit it into our lives. It might look like realizing our original dream (having healthy kids, or kids who are brilliant in school, etc.) isn't going to happen but learning to find the hidden blessings in what we do have.

As I discussed more in depth in a post back in September, my theology doesn't teach me that "everything happens for a reason" or that God purposely orchestrates every single aspect of every single person's life. What I do believe wholeheartedly, however, is that, at the end of time, everything will be redeemed and that, while we live in time, God can use our circumstances (as horrible or simply annoying as they may be) to teach us and to bless us even though He did not directly cause them and He grieves over the tragic things in our lives as much as we do.

God desires to shape our lives into something beautiful. However, this takes time. In fact, I think we may actually be reshaped into different beautiful things at different stages of our lives. Right now, though, some of us are caught in the messy middle. Maybe we realize we are being shaped. Maybe we even firmly trust that God is shaping our lives into something breathtaking. However, right at this moment, we feel like an undecorated Christmas tree tipped over in the living room. We're afraid we might just be tossed away to make way for something simpler and easier to put up.

In the end, though, God will lift us up, balance us, and decorate us appropriately if we allow Him to do so.

In Which I Put On My Own Oxygen Mask

Parenting is a lot of work. I don't know a parent who wouldn't agree with that. If you're parenting a child with any type of special need, be it social, educational, intellectual, behavioral, health, or some other category I haven't thought of, it's exponentially harder than normal parenting (which, as I already mentioned, is no easy jaunt through Candyland to begin with).  Because of this, it's easy to lose sight of who you are outside of being a parent. I think this is especially true for stay at home parents.

For nearly 15 years now, my primary identity has been as a mom, first as Squirrelboy's mom and later as Kittygirl and Squirrelboy's mom. I had to deal with a little bit of extra stuff fairly early on when Squirrelboy failed to start talking on time and I had to get him evaluated and eventually get speech therapy. As Squirrelboy's dyslexia and then his ADHD became apparent as he went through school my plate got even fuller. With Kittygirl's type 1 diabetes diagnosis, my plate was so full it no longer really resembled a plate but rather a huge pile of stuff that might possibly be hiding a plate underneath it.

My mom identity morphed when Kittygirl was no longer a preschooler and it was a little bit less acceptable to be "just a stay at home mom", but I saved myself a lot of judgment by homeschooling Squirrelboy for the next three years. Now that both kids are in school for 7 hours a day I've been getting a lot of questions about what I'm going to do next. Granted, if I had a penny for every time someone had asked me that I'd only have about 20 cents, but that's still a lot of questions.

There are a lot of things I might enjoy doing. Raising a kid with diabetes has gotten me interested in the medical field and I've toyed with the idea of going back to school to become a nurse, particularly with an interest in being a school nurse. I've also started subbing very part time as a helper at Kittygirl's former preschool and I've been reminded of just how much I love preschoolers. In that same vein, I really enjoyed teaching at Squirrelboy's homeschool coop and I've toyed with the idea of getting certified to teach.

All of those ideas have some pretty big flaws, however. In nursing, the only thing that's really interesting to me is helping kids with diabetes, and the fact is there's no guarantee that any school that hired me would even have students with diabetes and that wouldn't be my main job even if they did. In order to teach in any realm long term I would need to go back to school. Ditto with nursing. At 44, I'm just not keen on fitting school back into my life, let alone paying for it. Mind you, I haven't totally discarded those ideas. I still may go in one of those directions eventually.

However, what really gives me joy is writing. I've always considered myself a writer, even when I wasn't actively actually writing. I had a few magazine pieces published before Squirrelboy was born, and I finished a middle grade novel that was summarily rejected by a slew of publishers when he was a toddler. At that point, I shelved both the novel and my writing dreams and concentrated on being a mom.

I'm beginning to realize, however, that who I am as a person and not just as a wife and mother has gotten buried over the years. Don't get me wrong. I've loved all the time I've been able to spend with my kids and I don't regret it. What I do regret is not carving out even a little bit of time for my own pursuits, including writing. A large part of the reason I started this blog was to force myself to write regularly.

The blog has done its job. I have recently begun learning what it takes to submit your work to an agent, which is the route that might have been best 14 years ago, but is definitely the best choice now if I'm serious about getting my fiction published. I've dusted off my novel, joined a critique group, and realized that the manuscript I thought was ready for submission 14 years ago needs some serious work.

To that end, I've realized that I'm going to do that I can't dedicate quite as much time to my blog. Don't worry, you handful of faithful readers. I'm not giving up the blog entirely. I'm just no longer planning to write every weekday. I still plan to check in at least once a week, sometimes probably even two or three times.

Keep reading, and, if you too have allowed parenthood to bury your identity, find your own way to begin digging your way out. It will probably look entirely different from my way, but that's okay. Oh, and about the title.... Remember how in the emergency instructions on a flight you're told to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting someone else? As you've probably heard, that image has been used as a metaphor by more than one writer to encourage people to care for themselves before pouring themselves into caring for others. I'm nearly 15 years late, but I'm finally putting on my own oxygen mask.

In Which I Am Greatly Surprised By My Dyslexic's Favorite High School Class

Due to a combination of dyslexia making reading a writing a lot of work for his brain, ADHD making it difficult for him to a) concentrate in the school environment and b) force himself to be interested in the writing prompts his teachers gave him, Squirrelboy came out of elementary school basically hating to write. In the state writing test he took at the end of fifth grade, he scored on the novice level. That's the lowest score possible. I don't think his teachers were incompetent. The methods they employed worked to teach a majority of their students to write well. However, they did not work for Squirrelboy. Unfortunately, what they did was make him hate writing.

When I started homeschooling Squirrelboy, I approached language arts in general and writing in particular as slowly and gently as a I possibly could. The writing for the first program I tried involved the rewriting of fables, which is a hallmark of a particular stage within classical education, a style that is very popular within Christian homeschool circles in particular. The idea is that the student learns to write by imitating good models. There is nothing wrong with that model for the right student. However, Squirrelboy was not the right student. He hated it with the burning passion of a thousand suns. It turns out they had spent a brief amount of time in fifth grade rewriting fables, and the idea of spending an entire school year rewriting fables was anathema to him. I decided to back off the fable rewriting and just focus on the other parts of the program, which made it at least slightly palatable to him.

I hunted around for another writing program and landed on Susan Wise Bauer's Writing With Skill series. This is another curriculum from the classical education viewpoint, but it approaches the teaching of writing in a very methodical manner, teaching students to notice key details in reading, write summaries (well, actually narrations, but they're similar), make outlines, and eventually write paragraphs about a nonfiction topic. This program didn't create a lot of excitement around writing for Squirrelboy, but he didn't hate it. We used it on and off from the end of 6th grade all the way through the end of 8th grade and he definitely gained some valuable skills from it.

Through a friend and neighbor who has homeschooled all of her kids, most of whom have learning differences, I learned about the Bravewriter program. This is a language arts program started by a homeschooling mom and professional writer that focuses not so much on developing specific skills in a methodical manner as helping a child find their own writing voice and making language arts in general and writing in particular an enjoyable, joyful experience. First I borrowed the basic handbook of the program, The Writer's Jungle, and took Squirrelboy through the process detailed in it. It wasn't a cure all for his hatred of writing, but it was a nice break from the useful but fairly dull skill work in Writing With Skill. Two things we picked up that we used regularly were freewriting, in which Squirrelboy wrote for a set number of minutes about any topic he chose, with no attention needing to be paid to grammar or spelling. This helped him begin to get over his fear of doing writing wrong. Not directly related to writing, we also began to have regular poetry teas, during which we would enjoy a treat together and read poetry to each other. This time gave him an appreciation for a style of writing he previously disliked, though it didn't make him fall in love with writing poetry.

As 8th grade approached, I knew I had to prepare Squirrelboy to write for others. I attempted to do that by a) signing him up for two Bravewriter online classes and b) putting him in a writing class at our homeschool coop. Both were good experiences for him, but the online classes were particularly valuable. Having feedback from a professional writer on what he did right in his writing and how he could improve and having very concrete steps to follow to complete a specific project on a topic he chose was very helpful to him. He came out of 8th grade still not really liking writing, but not hating it, and able to do it competently when he was willing to put the work in.

Even with all the work I did over three years of homeschooling Squirrelboy and in 8th grade in particular, I was still nervous about how his freshman English class would go. He had had fairly limited experience writing for others, and none of that writing had been for a real grade. I was afraid that he would get overwhelmed by the requirements of the class and shut down. To my great astonishment, the exact opposite has happened. English is Squirrelboy's favorite class by far, and, while he's doing fairly well in all his classes, he's doing astonishingly well in English. His teacher has used his work as an example for other students (amazingly, this does not seem to have made the other students hate Squirrelboy). How has this miracle occurred? It's all about a passionate, supportive teacher who drew Squirrelboy in from day one, engaged him, and made him care about doing his best work all the time. That's the thing about people with ADHD. It's not that they can't concentrate. It's that they have a harder time than the average person concentrating on something if they don't care about it. If they're passionate about something, they can, in fact, give even more to it than someone with a typical brain. Squirrelboy's teacher has, to my great astonishment, made him passionate about the writing for his class. The other thing he has done is to choose assignments that are applicable to the real world and that show Squirrelboy and other students that being able to write well is a valuable skill for life. Squirrelboy has spend the past several weeks writing a grant proposal that will actually be presented to a community foundation and may result in funding for a drone for the journalism club (which the amazing English teacher also encouraged Squirrelboy to join).

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Squirrelboy's new passion for writing has not transferred to his other classes. He has had to do a decent amount of writing for both Health and Civics, and he has complained loudly about it. However, he has at least done it competently. Perhaps in another year of high school a different teacher will get Squirrelboy excited about their subject and he'll be able to transfer the passion for writing well that his English teacher is fanning into flame.

There are a lot of successful people in this world with ADHD and/or Dyslexia. What most, perhaps even all, of those people have in common is that someone, at some point in their life, believed in them and pushed them to do their best and pursue what they were passionate about, even if it was hard. Mr. Engineer and I have always tried to do that for Squirrelboy, but it's always better for parents to have other adults in their child's life as partners in this effort. Squirrlboy's Freshman English teacher is proving to be a great one.