Author Archives: PearlS

Breaking Rules and Baconators

It was one of our first forays into the public school scene since we decided to keep our kids home this school year.

I’d been crushed when I realized it would make more sense to homeschool them than send them. It boiled down to screen time, that awful waste of time when technology sucks the souls of little boys. That, and masks. The boys can hardly stand them, and I’m not too fond, either.

I figured we could call it a “gap” year. You know, the age-old, tried-and-true, figure-out-what-you-love-in-life pause button. Who is to say a fifth, third, and first grader couldn’t benefit from such a notion? Ha. These are the lies I tell myself to make it through another day with rowdy kids at home. Homeschool, unschool, gap year, cartoon material.

But on this particular Saturday I drove my first grader to a free testing event held by the district. I don’t want him to fall out of practice on the public school scene; I want to gauge the social temperature. After all, I’m just a stay-at-homer now, waiting for the wave to crash and (hopefully) recede. These kids of mine are growing–I have no intention of preserving their innocence at a great cost to their resilience. I played it up to him–it was going to be a mask challenge! The test was simply a game to see who could outlast everyone else! The winner gets a baconator burger and Frosty from Wendy’s! 

We parked and I handed him the mask. 

He grabbed three sharpened pencils and skipped to the door.

 

I’ve been wondering about the mask mandates. I live in a city full of pot shops. In front of my Costco I regularly see lines wrapped around the black building with a green plus on it. Each person is carefully socially distanced, wearing masks. Ducks in a row, waiting patiently to buy their mind-altering, paranoia-inducing cannabis of choice to be smoked in their own home. How responsible, I muse. 

I think about our dear friend at church who is ninety-one years young and opens her arms wide every Sunday for a big hug from her best friend, my four year old daughter. Both Gretel and Ruby look forward to church all week. They bring each other bags of goodies: envelopes and stationery from Ruby; colored pictures from Gretel. I do not deny either one of them hugs, not ever.

I think about our elderly neighbors who scramble to the door when we take them a meal. 

“Just leave it on their doorstep, boys!” I instruct, trying to keep our distance, but I get a card later in the mail. These precious folks have bothered to stamp and mail a thank you card through the mail service, even though we live twenty yards away.
“Thank you for the food,” it says in cramped, tidy cursive. “But please, PLEASE don’t tell the boys to rush right away. We love talking with them and seeing their sweet faces.”

Another neighbor has stuffed two one-hundred dollar bills in the envelope. “Don’t you dare try to give this back,” she writes, shaky and looping, and I laugh because I can hear her saying it in her bossy-Bonnie voice.

This, to me, is where I roll my eyes at the mask rule, the social distancing, the crappy, ignorant, empty promise to keep us all healthy and safe.
I can’t feed a lie to my kids who deliver meals to neighbors and love Ruby like a grandma. We don’t play games. I’m trying to teach them to sort out what is right in a given situation, and masks are sometimes necessary. But sometimes they are not, so we pray every night for God to give us wisdom how to behave in this weird world. And especially, I add silently, me. God, give me wisdom.

Only months ago I read an article on “giving consent”–another made-up rule, a catchphrase as loaded as “safer at home”. It’s taught to teenagers regarding sex; a loophole in chastity, I guess, since chastity never was cool. If he asks, if she says it’s o.k…. Well, if consent is the magic word, I’m claiming it for my own.
Our old people, our friends–they do not want to be distanced from us, nor we from them. Bam–a greater Rule is in place. Love.

There was a rule back in the day (one of the ten commandments, no less) that enforced a strict Sabbath. No work was to be done, nothing that would promote selfish gain or distract from pure, holy, reverent behavior. Remember the Sabbath day–the words were engraved in stone. Keep it holy–it wasn’t to be meddled with, as we humans are naturally inclined to do.
Jesus broke it.

Jesus, who knew no sin, broke the Sabbath.

Did He?

Here was the situation: a man had a withered, useless arm, and in the synagogue in the middle of the church service, Jesus healed him. He asked the man to stretch it out, and it was miraculously, immediately restored. No doubt was quite a scene, since the guy probably had it hidden because a disability was seen as a curse.

Right then, Jesus declared His authority over Law. He went one step further: He made Love the law. In one motion, a self-conscious man who could only dream of two healthy arms–he stretched out the mangled one and proved Jesus cared more about people becoming whole than any flavor of virtue, particularly the rule-following denomination.

There comes a point when following the rules fails. It fails at the point it only serves to ingratiate ourselves to the rule makers. When we do it just so we don’t stick out. It fails when there is no Love. 

Here is a checkpoint: Do we look like the rest of the world, mindlessly following rules set before us? Do we even want to? Are we even thinking rationally? We do things out of routine, thinking we are crossing t’s and dotting i’s, when actually, as believers, our eyes have been opened to a greater Truth, a more consequential Law, and the beckoning of our Savior to love. 

Love is the Law.

The Pharisees tried to trap Jesus, and this is what people who hate Jesus do. Those who love walking in darkness (1 John) will try to do to us if we follow in his footsteps.

They’ll first blurt out a silly, secondary point, like a kindergartner tattle-telling: “She’s not following the rules!”

The accusation will not fit the transgression. It will fall woefully short of its target. Even though the rest of the playground children will murmur, look who is breaking the rules!–the child of God with a renewed mind holds to a higher Law, love. They recognize a superior Law when they see one, because they recognize Jesus.

Jesus was not not following the rules when he healed a man on the Sabbath. He was, in fact, elevating the Sabbath in its holiness, because He who was with God in the beginning created Sabbath. He was saying, watch this. I AM is Lord of Sabbath, not you flimsy, tassled, arrogant Pharisees. 

 

I guarantee it, the man with the bad arm rejoiced to see it restored before his eyes. He rejoiced in the breaking of the Sabbath, if it meant he was made whole. It caused him to worship, maybe even to an extent he had never been able to worship before.

And isn’t it what the Lord wants from us, to see beyond the rules and religiosity and respect? Doesn’t He want us to love Him and love people first? Isn’t it worship, better and higher?

Don’t I think Ruby and Bonnie and all my other elderly friends and my children praise Jesus when the loneliness dissipates because we follow a higher Law? Of course I do. I praise Him, too.

 

Two and a half hours passed on a cold Saturday morning. I did some grocery shopping; I perused the book shelf at the thrift store. I drove back to the school. I took off my mask and I jogged around the baseball field until my little boy was due to bust out the front door and claim his baconator and Frosty.

The air was fresh and I did not wear a mask. I maintained a responsible distance and smiled politely at the other parents. I got the feeling some of them cursed me under their breath.
But I’m training to be like Jesus, not like them.
I want my boy to see my face, not my fear.

I finally spot him, and he runs to me.

“That was the best game ever. How do teachers get to be so nice?”
and then,
“Did I win? Do I get a baconator?”

 

He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit in the center and enjoy bright day,
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts benighted
Walks under the midday sun
Himself is his own dungeon.

John Milton

 

The teachers at the not-just-a-home

I am poking my head out of the ground less and less, scampering from hole to hole as one does when they homeschool. My phone is on silent. I clock six miles through my house on the average. Mac and cheese is the only viable hot lunch option. I pray that a math worksheet will take more than five minutes, enough time to maybe visit the bathroom. I need more treats in my cabinets, more friends to call when I get lonely and defeated.

I feel like I live in a factory. A lab. A cafeteria. An art studio. A theater. A hippy commune. A war reenactment. 

Yes, we fold a hundred airplanes a day, and then we fly them. We stir up sweet tea and add kombucha, then swat fruit flies for three weeks while it turns into a bubbly elixir with a nasty film on top. Is it a scoby (good)? Is it mold (bad)? Let’s put it under the microscope and see if it wiggles.

We swab things around the house–the fish tank, dog’s mouth, knee scrape (Luke’s fitness wound, the label reads) and incubate the germs in petri dishes in the living room window seat, a tea towel covering the evidence. 
One child rips brown paper bags into long strips and hot glues them to a cottage cheese container. It is Bunker Hill, he announces, then asks me if I have any popsicle sticks so he can fortify the post. 

Cardboard boxes in the recycling bin are met with tears.
“Did you throw away my project?” they demand to know.
“No…” I lie, and tell them Daddy probably didn’t know it was special.

They have figured out how to play harpsichord and human voices simultaneously on the digital piano. Along with the preprogrammed player feature and metronome. The Entertainer blasts out, full volume, as a child ad libs, an eerie, annoying, medieval pounding vibrates the house.

Am I in a bad movie?

I look through the freezer and see a tea cup, full of water–ice now–and what is it? A cookie, solid in the middle of the mass.
“Who froze a cookie in a cup of water?” I holler through the house. Luke meekly claims the experiment.
“Well…I had a couple plans. Soak it all the way and then freeze it or just leave it and see what happens,” he shrugs. (At least they no longer pee in the basketball goal base in the driveway.)

My little girl is in the garden, picking ripe tomatoes and squash. She brings them in the house, the tomatoes to the counter for me to taste. The squash are soon wrapped in blankets. Her squash babies.

My writing languishes in bits and pieces, some pages in a folder, some chapters on google docs. It makes me terribly sad to watch it slip away, but I cannot sustain the focus when someone is describing, in great detail, how to fold a Jar Jar Binks origami puppet. Plus, bibliographies and editing–two huge mountains I can’t get over.

Tempus fugit, I texted a friend. Time is in no way flying, but it is what I tell myself. It’s what old ladies always tell young ladies like me with young kids (usually at the grocery store, when the blood pressure is high). You’ll miss this.
Maybe. I love my kids, but I unashamedly love silence. (Aaand, I’m already feeling guilty for saying it.) You are their best teacher, the homeschooling ghost of the school year present wags her finger. I’m pretty sure I am not. I was hoping this year or next might be the one where I’d get a job–but life is too absurd to counter.

Homeschool is here. I’ve never posted front porch, first day pictures of any kind of school. It’s a bit of the pride of life–that fleeting pleasure in what my kids are doing, what I am doing–and I’m ever aware of the hurt it unintentionally causes. I don’t love this world. If I need any more reason to not flaunt it, I need not look far: the struggle is all around. Our neighbor down the street will be remote learning in their rental with his fourteen year old sister while their single mom is at work. They’ll eat cold cereal again for lunch because they cannot get to the food distribution center for another meal. 

Three hundred thousand people in Beirut lost their homes and schools three weeks ago in an explosion. They have been largely forgotten.
Friends of friends lost their kids–all of them–in a car crash caused by a drunk driver. They would give their soul for it not to be so quiet in their house. When do they get a fresh start, cute pictures on the front porch?

Nothing is fair. I’m grateful for my not-just-a-home, as crazy as it feels, as buggy as it makes me. Why me, God? Why are you so good to me? Can you teach me to look forward and not back, can you help me fix my eyes on the horizon and not on myself? Can you keep reminding me that the next hard thing doesn’t depend on my ability to do it but my willingness to trust you?

I’ve been intending to add some little interesting homeschool resources, but I kind of blanch at the idea of offering something that seems so subjective to the masses. Your kids are not my kids. I know that–you know that. Do what you think is best, right? Seize the day, because you aren’t guaranteed another one.

In the feeble hopes of inspiring my own learners (and perhaps pretending I’m confident when I’m not), I’ve been reading Susan Wise Bauer. She’s the writer with whom I have a love-hate relationship. She is so wise when she isn’t condescending. I love her philosophy as a post-homeschooler better than when she wrote The Well-Trained Mind. 

Her more recent book, Rethinking School: How to take charge of your child’s education,  had some excellent points. (She’s a grandma now, and can look back a little more objectively at her child-rearing and schooling years.)

The theme I picked up on was this: kids are different, so schooling should be, too. Wise Bauer’s new and improved view boils down to a more flexible approach to education at home. It includes how to avoid the “going global” terror I frequently sink into with homeschool–where one small, miniscule action by a child ends up with my hysterical, panic-ridden reaction.


You told me you finished your math problems, but I just found the crumpled paper shoved down next to the sofa cushion and it’s not even half done.
And then it escalates.
You didn’t do the work. I know it’s hard. But you just quit. You don’t know how to word hard.
And you lied to me! You didn’t tell me the truth. If you can’t tell the truth and work hard, you won’t be able to graduate from high school. And then what will you do? You’ll never be able to go to college and get a job.
And you’ll end up in a cardboard box.
Under a bridge.

With no health insurance.

Keep in mind that when you’re homeschooling, the opportunities for going global multiply. It’s related to fear. Fear that you’re not doing a good enough job to prepare them for life…
It’s just a math worksheet, not a referendum on the rest of his life. He’s not revealing a deep character flaw. He just doesn’t want to do his math.
Rethinking School, Susan Wise Bauer

This is the kind of encouragement I need to hear. We’re doing our best here. We’re not proud. Some days we won’t do math because I’d rather be just a mom.

My kids have turned our home into a grand experiment–one where I usually hypothesize the worst-case scenario…and they show me what gratitude and wonder looks like. They fold another plane. They marvel at the tiny hairs on the leg of a fly, magnified by their dinky microscope. They wrap up squash babies and sing them to sleep. 

They are miracles, moment by moment by moment miracles.
It upends me. 

They are my best teachers, under every circumstance. Thank you, Jesus, for letting them teach me.

Common Sense

Introduction: Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them to general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

I will translate, since this was written in 1776 by an Englishman:
I doubt what I’m going to say will be agreed with by everyone, and this is because my dear readers have become so used to a WRONG that they only see it as RIGHT. Understandably, it is one’s first reaction to defend tradition. But this eventually wears off, because
Time makes more converts than reason.

Judging by our fancy, important, dressed-up politicians who rely on the support of professional athletes and actors, you might think politics a noble pursuit. You might just think your freedoms needed faces, and the scrubbed up and shinier, the better. We call them our leaders, after all, as if they charge into battle on our behalf. It’s tradition, and we gladly defend it. Red, white, blue. Donkeys and elephants.
But who is being duped? Who runs a two trillion dollar deficit and gets to be in charge of anything? What is this bipartisan baloney, when all of us can see their goal is to discredit, malign, and undercut the other party?
We can’t defend this outrageous “custom” any longer. It isn’t cute or patriotic, more wrong than right. We’ve made a full circle, 244 years, to be exact. Where is our pamphlet? What can set us straight?
Back then, Thomas Paine was attempting to rally the troops. He was hoping to spark confidence with his little pamphlet, Common Sense–enough to send King George a breakup letter.

Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least.

Common Sense kicked the tails of some 150,000 Americans who bought Thomas Paine’s words. I think they were more tired of politics than we are now, far more ready to move than he gave them credit for. Within six months they’d penned the Declaration of Independence.

Here are my questions for the average to avid American political hobbyist:
How many hours have you spent worrying over an election? How many words have you gushed, how much talk radio have you consumed? How much of a fire have you fanned into flame over the exciting topic of politics?
Was it worth it?
How many Thanksgivings and Christmases have you tainted, trying to argue to your distant relatives the character of men and women who flex their power in D.C.?
Who wears a little I Voted! Sticker as a badge of honor, as if they are an exemplary citizen, devoted to the utmost degree? Who wears a necklace? Who changes their cute little profile picture to reflect their current political stance to their friends?

Hot air, all of us. We aren’t even self-controlled or peaceable enough to keep our mouths shut over mashed potatoes and gravy. We aren’t bold enough to sacrifice our freedom to defend our country because we’ve never known what real terrible, oppressive government is like.
How much more time do we need before we can smell something foul in the water? But now several of us are finally perceiving some wrongness in something we’ve always thought right.
Politics are becoming unpalatable, and it might surprise you to hear it:
Our government doesn’t exist for our life, liberty, and happiness–it exists to stomp on those who wish to take it from us. And when it fails (and it is failing, don’t let the lipstick fool you),
We furnish the means by which we suffer.

We aren’t just touting republicans, democrats, independents, conservatives, progressives as inspiring superhumans who speak on our behalf–we are actually letting this necessary evil dictate our society. 

Let it sink in. Acknowledge your comfort level with this intrusion. We’ve become Sesame Street puppets, little idiots who turn on the TV and wait for the humans to explain what is going on and how we should feel about it. We sing songs along with celebrities, parodying evil, committing it to memory, and thinking it more American than saluting the flag. We invite politics into our social lives like it were just another silly diversion, and not a snake wanting to squeeze us to death.

What are we proud Americans so proud of now? The exciting feeling that comes every four years with “the election of our lifetime”? Pledging allegiance to a lifelong politician?
That Thomas Paine, what a pain.

Let it signal to our brains that there is an injury–let it force us to think before we act, vote, talk, potentially ruin relationships. It’s an old bandage, but I think it works–Common Sense.

As a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.
Common Sense, Thomas Paine, 1776