School here started three weeks ago now, but we’re still at home. It seems that knocking on new doors doesn’t always meant that they will open. The local school board knows that we’d like school places for our two school-aged children, and we’ve been told that we’re on the waiting list. So we wait.
This is hard.
And then the lectionary this morning reminds me that whoever welcomes a child welcomes Christ. Which is also really hard. Hard because my kids are desperate for a welcome and hard because my own patience is wearing down, and because I hear myself using less than welcoming turns of phrase with my tired-of-waiting kids. We’re all getting prickly. We need structure and friends and a sense of real life beginning again after the move.
So, while we wait, we’re homeschooling. Or trying to homeschool. Because I don’t know how long this is to last, we aren’t really jumping into this style of education with two feet. I picked up math workbooks from the magazine rack at the grocery store and the kids take time after breakfast and between Harry Potter chapters to puzzle through a page or two. We’ve set up a weather station in the garden and researched cacti (Beangirl’s new thing), written fairy stories, and perhaps more crucially written letters to people we love.
On Friday, we met up with a homeschooling group in a local community centre. These are more intentional folk, but there seemed to be space for us accidental homeschoolers, too. And it was a good space, with a wide range of ages and some interesting activities going on. We learned about codes and codebreaking, and wrote invisible ink letters. (Orange juice works better than milk or lemon and no one would volunteer to pee in a cup so we didn’t get around to testing urine…strange that.) My kids voted resoundingly to go again this coming Friday. Yes, it was a good space, I told them, but yet again I couldn’t promise anything. We had to take things one day at a time. There’s another hard thing about waiting. You find yourself churning out platitudes and rehab advice.
The new Sunday School year started yesterday – a long anticipated date on our recently-relocated calendar. As I said, my kids are desperate for familiar structure and, if there’s no space in the schools, well, there’s always Sunday School. But that first day – that day when everyone has just come back from their scattered summers and rediscovers all their old and beloved friends – that wasn’t really the best place for new kids to be. Blue, my in-your-face social kid, escaped to the chilly churchyard to play around the grave stones. I didn’t have the heart to force him back inside. There’s always next week.
Then in the afternoon, the sun came out and we were adopted by two families from church who kidnapped us for a picnic in a glorious historic garden. Eight kids all around ours in age, a generous potluck picnic, and time and space for good conversations. (With plenty of commiserating about schools). My diligent Blue found plenty of feral blackberries to share, and Beangirl discovered a stunning cacti collection in one of the greenhouses so she also won. (I suppose you might say that Plum won, too, in that he successfully dodged his afternoon nap. The little imp.)
But today we flipflopped again and had another hard day at home. Another rainy Monday and the kids seemed to take turns falling to bits. Maybe I should have signed up for a slot in the cranky rotation, too. Patience was hard. These still-new days are a mix of good and hard, and I’m finding the roller coasters are exhausting. It often feels like we’re still just visiting this new life of ours. When does normal start? How do we live faithfully in the prickly discontent of waiting? These cactus days seem to stretch on.
One of Jean Sprackland’s poems rings true for me tonight. She writes about the first week in a new house. A young mother has been out with her baby and comes back exhausted, and the baby is mad with hunger. But the keys to the house don’t seem to fit the lock. She ends up calling In the end, she calls the police who come to her rescue and break down the door so that she can go home.
“She hadn’t reckoned on resistance, Happiness, then,
is not some delicate gift, but a locked and stubborn thing
you have to break open. Now for a sleepless night
of rain and wind before the making good.”
So that’s what I hope tomorrow will bring. Space for the making good. And, if it can be managed, a more balanced happiness.
