HOME AWAY FROM HOME

So, would you like to hear my latest excuse for not posting?

The truth is, I’m rarely at home. Or, I should say, I’m rarely at THIS home.

Since the latter part of my pregnancy, and even more so now that our second daughter has arrived, we’ve been spending a lot of time out at the farm where I grew up. We have been planning to move out there anyway, so this is sort of the "gentle roll-over" from one primary dwelling to another.

It has been really great for all of us, I think.

I grew up on this farm, as did my father and his father before him. It has been in our family since before Indiana was officially a state – no one else has ever technically "owned" this land.

In many ways, it feels like home to me on a much deeper level than any other geographical location ever has. It is the landscape of my formative years, the place I remember first and the backdrop of many of my dreams. I like it out there – 150 acres of fields and forests with plenty of room to run.

I really like the idea of raising our kids in such a place. It is so nice to just be able to go play outside without worrying about traffic, crime or kidnappers. They can do things like plant gardens, raise chickens and can actually have their own ponies. I loved living this way as a child and am excited about the prospect of giving that experience to my own children as well.

I also like that there are several generations of family living in community out there. My parents and one aunt live on the property with another grandmother close by. Even now, my oldest daughter (18 months) goes to work with Grandma fairly often (she owns her own business), picks spinach out of the garden, feeds the cats, dog and ostriches (she has a special bucket), gets to watch kittens grow up, helps wash dishes at night, takes laundry out of the dryer, and just generally integrates as a full member of the family.

I was really struck by the value of having children be a part of regular adult life when I was reading The Continuum Concept last year. In less industrialized / traditional cultures, children are always on the perimeter of adult life, watching, observing and learning until they are old enough to participate. By that time, they already know and understand what the adults around them do and it helps them to integrate and comprehend how they fit into the "big picture" of their environment.

In typical Western industrialized culture, we tend to segregate children away from adult activities, often disappearing to some mysterious place called "work" for many hours of the day. We also tend to assume that children wouldn’t understand or be interested in what adults do, or that they shouldn’t or can’t participate in the things they observe.

I recognized in reading about these concepts that I was raised more the way of traditional cultures, i.e. in living on a farm, I was always around adults as they did their daily work and picked up a lot from that observation. (My partner, too, was raised in this way.)

As a very young child, I spent a lot of my time with my paternal grandmother, watching her work on the farm. I learned about growing and preserving food, quilting, taking care of animals, making soap, cooking, poisonous and edible mushrooms, history, family ancestry, just to name a few topics. All of this while playing near where my grandmother worked, or joining in when something she was doing caught my interest.

I have very fond memories of my grandmother and of that time and place in general. I always said that if I ever had a family, I would want to raise them in the same (or similar, if necessary) place.

When we pull into the driveway at the farm, our oldest daughter kicks, squeals and claps, so excited to be back there again. (No, she never reacts this way when we pull up in front of our house in the city.) There are so many things for her to do and so much room for her to play. Out there she has a sandbox, pool, swings, a slide, kittens, a dog, places to explore and room to romp.

The outside is big, but so is the house – even on rainy days there is plenty of room.

Which is another good thing about moving out there…

Twenty years ago, my parents started building a house that was waaaaay too big. On paper it didn’t look that huge, but in reality it is.

They finished the downstairs and found that they couldn’t agree on much of what still needed to be done upstairs, nor did they really need the room. Partially (but certainly not entirely) because of this, they ended up separating for seven years, never divorcing, and eventually getting back together.

But the house remained unfinished. This was unfortunate since the architecture was really unique and the house itself very beautiful. My father designed it and built the structure himself, and I always thought that it would be a terrible shame if his life came and went with this project left unfinished.

It is, essentially, a two-family house with two kitchens, two separate entrances and bedrooms both up and downstairs. While we were pondering and planning building a house in the woods behind them it struck me – how much sense did it make to put all of that time and money into a NEW house when there was a perfectly good house already sitting there just waiting to be finished?

So, that’s what we’re doing. Finally, now, after all these years, the house is being completed. All of us like my parents enough to live with them in seperate but close quarters, and the girls will always be able to easily go from one place to the other. We can cook meals together, pool our resources for large purchases or undertakings, and generally help each other out.

To me, this is so much more how humans evolved to live and did live for eons. We’re not "supposed" to live alone, isolated, trying to do everything ourselves. Humans have always (until very recently) lived in family clans, tribes and groups, helping one another and pulling together as a collective unit. In traditional cultures, there was always a grandmother, aunt, sister, uncle or cousin to help out with the older children when a newborn came along, thus freeing the mother for what only she could do – nurse the baby.

And frankly, I don’t know how people with multiple children do it any other way. It is not twice as difficult to care for two children – it is ten times as difficult.

The first time that I took them both to the park was the single most exhausting thing that I’ve ever done in my life. I thought that the newborn would sleep the whole time, but instead she wanted to nurse perpetually. Every time I would get the older one happy on a swing or other piece of equipment and the younger one latched on and nursing, the older one would want down, or up, or on a different slide. We would move, get situated again, and then the older one would do something dangerous, like going down a big slide head-first.

I managed to catch her before she slid face first across the gravel – I did it one-handed while holding the little one across my chest, still latched on the whole time.

Though I stayed in very good spirits and found the entire situation amusing, I must have looked like I really had my hands full. (Did I mention that it was ninety-five degrees and humid?) Another mother, a total stranger, walked up to me at one point and said "It really does get easier." She had two daughters spaced the same distance apart as mine, but now hers were three and four. They were happily playing together and the mom had been sitting in the shade on a picnic bench reading while I was busy chasing my daredevil toddler all over the place while trying to nurse the other one as I ran.

In asking other mothers how they care for multiple children virtually (if not entirely) by themselves, most of them say 1) I don’t know and 2) the oldest child(ren) just have to get used to not getting attention.

This is not really acceptable to me. I don’t want my oldest daughter to suffer because of the younger – that isn’t fair to either of them. My partner is a wonderful father and a fully responsible parent, but he works outside of the home several days a week. But, between him, my mother, his mother and me, we have enough hands to give everyone the attention that they need and deserve.

So, I have my village, so to speak. I am really fortunate – not everyone has options like these.

The transition to the farm has also been positive for my parents as well. For starters, they LOVE their granddaughters – my oldest daughter is just as attached to her grandparents as she is to us. My father, who was generally an emotionally reticent person when I was growing up, is affectionate, attentive and spends a good deal of time interacting with his granddaughter.

Also, if Grandma is busy feeding or bathing the eighteen-month-old (Grandma is SO her favorite person in the world…) then I can do dishes, make dinner, clean, or whatever. In many ways, my mother "gets to" play with the baby (she loves kids) while I do other chores that she finds less enticing anyway. Since it is very easy for me to travel and go out with the newborn (she will go anywhere as long as she’s in the sling), I do all of the grocery shopping, leaving the toddler (who is bored in the store unless she is rearranging all of the boxes of oatmeal on the bottom shelf) to play in the sandbox with Grandma. I’m happy, the toddler is happy, Grandma is happy, the clerks who straighten the grocery shelves are happy, and the infant is happily sleeping next to my chest no matter where I am.

That’s the other thing – my mother always wanted ten kids. Okay – I should be more specific – she wanted ten DAUGHTERS. So, though I’m not planning to have ten (or five, or even four…) she’s very happy with a couple of extra since I am all she’s had up until now.

It was very interesting…. The other day we came across a paper that my mom did for home economics when she was in high school. The assignment was to design a house to be efficient and functional for the kind of family you wanted to have. Her house was specifically designed for a family of seven. At present, including my parents, partner and children, we have six under one roof, so we’ve come pretty close to her vision.

We’re also lucky in that it looks as if we’re going to be able to keep our residence in the city as well. The mortgage is low and the location is SO convenient for many of our activities. My partner does massage at three different locations, all of which are within three miles of our house. Most of the stores we do for our other job are within a few miles as well, and I am part of a homeschooling co-op which meets at a library room just up the street.

That is just one more good reason for having a residence in Indiana – in that state it is very easy to homeschool. (It’s not that difficult in Ohio – it just requires a lot more paperwork.)

I’ve looked and read and researched, and as much as I like the philosophy behind Waldorf education, I’ve decided to homeschool our kids. No matter how good a school is, it is still a school – an institution geared toward a somewhat homogenized group of children as opposed to the individual child. Not to mention that between my partner, myself and everyone we know, we could give any child a terrific education… for a fraction of the cost. And I don’t like to get up early, I like my kids and actually WANT them around me instead of sending them off somewhere, etc..

So, homeschooling it is. I am totally intrigued and excited about the idea and just can’t wait until our daughter is "old enough" to start, though it’s not like we haven’t "started" already. She is very bright and curious, always wanting to know what everything is, how it works and what happens if you turn it upside down.

She absolutely loves books and spends most of her playtime indoors looking at them. Given the choice between most toys (the exception being balls and things that stack) and a paperback book with no pictures, she’ll choose the book.

Often, she takes down and carries around paperbacks from the psychology shelf in our hallway. One day she had been carrying around and flipping through "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" by B. F. Skinner all day. Later, she somehow managed to convince her grandmother to eat a piece of cat food. Coincidence? Perhaps I should keep her away from the psychology shelf before I become the subject of her next experiment…

Her latest favorite book is "Cooking With Ground Beef." She takes it down and wants to flip through it, asking on every page what the pictures are. There are only so many exciting and novel ways to say "Meatloaf!" though I’m sure we’ve probably found them all. "Ball" is one of her favorite words and toys at the moment, and in this book she has learned that there are BALLS made out of MEAT!!! Ahh… the world just keeps getting better and better.

She is also fascinated by planets, the moon, the sun (other kinds of balls, you see…) and other things having to do with space. Every time she sees a galaxy or hears the word, she points to her mouth, which is her way of saying "food." If you ask her "Do you eat galaxies?" she nods her head yes in a very serious way.

My daughter – Kali in a previous life?

She also enjoys zucchini and will ask what it is over and over, mostly just to laugh at you every time you say the word.

Never a dull moment – why would I give this up for eight hours every day?

Oh yes… homeschooling.

I’ve been reading books by a man named John Holt, who is considered the father of the homeschooling movement. He was an educator in the middle of the twentieth century and started asking very difficult questions about the way that children learn (or fail to) and how the educational system is set up. Do children really learn most of what they know before the age of five? Or is that just when we send them to school and suck the drive and creativity right out of them? Are schools really necessary? Is it a violation of children’s civil rights to FORCE them to go to school? Are "learning" and "schooling" really the same thing?

I have really enjoyed his writing and it is clear that he genuinely cares about children. Also, his ideas are based upon observation, personal experience and "thinking outside the box" of ideas of modern educational models.

I also see how much enthusiasm I had about learning when I was younger, and how so much of that excitement was squashed, or at least not supported, when I started school. All children are curious and want to learn – they just don’t all want to learn the same things the same way at the same time.

So, for a variety of reason, homeschooling it is.

And now I must throw together a few more things and head back to the farm. We’re in and out, back and forth, a lot right now, which is just fine. My partner at least stops in nearly everyday and we always spend a chunk of time here at some point during the week.

During our "busy weeks" of working at home, we tend to be at the farm more. We work on shiny, exciting little machines, exactly the kind that toddlers find irresistible. However, Grandma is always more exciting than any machine, so we get a whole lot more work done in a shorter amount of time when we are there than when we are here.

And, soon, I’ll have computer / internet access out there anyway. At that time I will no longer have the excuse of "not being home" to explain why I haven’t posted… though I’m sure I’ll be able to think of another.