Growing Pains

It's crazy time for me.

I'm back in grad school, Nick is on a college trip with his grandfather. He's going to visit Sewanee. One of my favorite people at church went to Sewanee. George Holleran. He's a retired history teacher. He has a daughter that looks and talks like Gracie Allen. He has a wife who is one of the most beautiful fat women I have ever seen in my life. She radiates purity and goodness. I don't know how else to put this. Her skin is translucent and she has short grey curly hair and when I see her I always feel like the world isn't so bad after all.

When I was putting myself through nursing school, I worked as math grader for standardized tests. George had fought a winning battle with terminal liver cancer (ha! they were wrong!), had quit his job as a history teacher at a local boarding school, and was grading tests with me. It was a great job. Everyone I worked with was really smart, but they were all screwy in some way. Some of them were leftist activists who were trying to support their ummm...activities, some were bored housewives, some were students, some were retired, some were zen monks, some were working on their novels...an eclectic, smart bunch. Multi-racial, multi-aged. Since there was no hope for promotion, there were no politics. We were all there only because we were all smart. When there are no politics, no one is careful about what they say, and the lunchtime discussions would get pretty heated and interesting. It was interesting! It was like being in my freshman dorm in college again. I brought a badminton set and set that up in the empty field behind the warehouse where we all worked, and we would play that, too, and yell at each other. That's where I heard all about Sewanee and decided it might do for Nick.

Maybe if we're all poverty stricken, our national conversations will get liberated. Maybe that's a good thing.

So he and my dad set off yesterday. I got a call at Lilly's tennis match (she won--don't ask me how. Lilly plays tennis like the ball has just appeared like a magical object in front of her--Poof! Look! A fairy! Boink!) My mom showed up and watched her. "She looks exactly like Jackie Kennedy in her tennis whites--that is until she starts to play. Then I don't know what the hell she looks like." Lilly joined the tennis team expressly for the dress, and, I hate to say this, but it really shows. "Why are you both giggling?" she asks us, midway through the match. "No reason."

So, off Nick goes. Raising kids is hard. We watched Elena last night, Jay and I. It was fun, but then we had to drop her off with Hali, who was sitting in the organic restaurant, looking beautiful. She ignored me, talked to Jay about the photographs on the wall, which are by some mutual friend of theirs from their couple days, quizzed him extensively about what Elena had eaten (christ) and then looked at me, "Hello, Haley, how are you doing?" like I'm the fucking nanny.

She's in the pretty mommy/nice little girl accessory phase of motherhood. Just wait. Maybe she'll never get out of it. Dangerous.

What do you raise children for? What is the purpose of education? You raise them to function in their society, to be productive and responsible in the most quotidian sense. They can't find happiness unless they can participate to some extent in the goals of the culture to which they are born, but you also raise them with an eye to the eternal. You also try to find that seed of soul, that part of the heart that is beyond parents and city blocks and homework assignments, and clear space for it and say--this is outside of it all. This will save you. I want my children to be carpenters with the soul and consolations of the artist. I want them to be able to lose all their money, step outside the bank, and still love the turning leaf on the tree. I want them to succeed at it all in some measure, but I want them to know that it is not really important if they do or don't.

I try to give them the tools to do this. I think a liberal arts education is key, and then, I don't care what they do after that. You grow the spirit, open the mind, then your labor is informed.

Money, money, money, money.

If only it didn't buy so god damn much.

What's that funny movie, Our Man Godfrey. "Money, money, money, money, money," Don't let it get you down. WAMU just folded. Of course, that's credit card I actually paid off. Why can't Chase collapse? Lose my debt....fantasies.

OK. This post was pretty random. Got to get back to my research proposal.