I have been adjusting to life these days. Naomi and Caleb are off in school, both of them in new worlds that I can only look in on from the outside. I regularly swing between unhinged and deranged and have been spending my days doing minor errands that seem to accumulate to nothing. Piles of laundry that satisfactorily get hung and then folded and then exuberantly strewn across a room by a child instructed to put them in his drawer.
Naomi’s preschool teacher sends daily photos of the activities she’s doing, crafts, and fooling around outside, and I sometimes go back and scroll through them, wondering how she’s doing, if she’s listening, if she’s learning, and then I have to wonder about what she would think about me, sitting here, looking at pictures of her. A teacher once told me how she had set up this cubicle area for a parent who wouldn’t believe that her son was misbehaving during class. She had put the parent in there, and then covered up all the walls except for a tiny peephole. Now that I’m a parent, I sometimes wish each classroom had a set up like this, although I’d probably regret asking for it shortly after sitting in it.
In any case, I’m also reading more. Maybe not more, it might be more like I’ve re-allocated some of my reading to during the day, when the kids are in school. Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, Everything Here is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee, Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries. I’ve also been listening to audiobooks and podcasts while I’m hanging laundry, vacuuming, sorting through cupboards. I recently finished Michelle Obama’s Becoming which took two years for me to get through the library holds system. Lots of stories, lots of ideas.
making wild rice 