(ps. I haven’t forgotten about the giveaway! We just got back from Texas and I’m still returning to regular life.)

I do sometimes — only for tiny wriggling little gruesome moments — understand why schools and corporations and governments are so eager to hammer out creativity. Everyone likes creativity in theory… oh creative people, we are bored! Do something surprising or write a novel or a movie or a comic book for us! Man this problem really has us stuck. Can we get a creative type in here to solve it?
Creativity looks fun, too, right? so everyone says “I wish I was creative.” or “Oh wow, I love how creative kids are!”

But people also know that creativity is horribly inefficient. If the people you hire to paint your house show up with tiny watercolor brushes, you aren’t going to be excited about their creativity.

And that’s what school is like around here whenever I focus on skills. If we are listening or exploring or discussing the topic or doing activities together, we have no problems. The Ard School rocks for that kind of thing. But when it’s time to simply practice writing the letter C until you form muscle memory, creativity becomes a right pain in the cussword.

When it’s time to write, Nicolaus stops between every word or sentence. He tells jokes, discusses themes found within the book Emily’s Moo, adds funny pictures, makes his words talk in fake voices, adds curls to every letter, changes the rules, strikes a bargain, tells a funny story, and/or suggests an alternative to the right way to do this. Graham does this too with almost any game or anything with a dry set of rules. Their brains never shut off, they never take any instructions at face value. That is good! Creative!! But oh my god, I am going to deliberately become an alcoholic just to survive the process of watching Nicolaus write a single swearing paragraph.

I said that with love in my voice, could you tell?

The other day Nicolaus was writing about a bird flying around, so he wrote the word SPLAT all over the place until his narrator finally said SPLAT I give up. His writing is always silly like that. It’s awesome and frustrating and awesome. And frustrating. And AWESOME.

and frustrating.
Yesterday in the middle of his handwriting practice, Nicolaus started working on a Lewis and Clark style map and was outraged when I asked him to stop working on it, save it for later, it’s time to work on your handwriting book. Please write the letter C thirty or more times so your hand muscles will learn how to make that curve, how to swoop counter clockwise. Wax on, wax off, paint the fence!

He finally worked on the letter C and went back to work on his map. Out of meanness I interrupted him again and asked him to write a straight-laced piece about his trip to Texas. Just one plain boring sentence. Please. He started to argue then sighed, shooed me away. After a long time, he called me over to inspect his work.

“You aren’t going to like it,” he told me, “I did make it a little bit fancy. Sorry.”

He had written “Texas is a desert and deserts are hot.” No funny stuff, no crazy font, no first person narrator screaming about the heat. It was perfectly boring, except that he had drawn a cactus in between each word instead of a space.

“Good,” I told him, “good work.”

“You aren’t mad?”

“About what?” I pretended not to notice.

“All the cactuses and succulents?”

“Oh! Nah. I can read everything else.”

“Ohhhhh! So it’s just the actual letters you don’t want me to make fancy. I can put whatever I want around them?”

“Hm. If… well. The problem is it takes a lot longer to write a sentence that way doesn’t it? I think I’d prefer it if you didn’t decorate the sentence like that but I’m not mad either.”

The drawings were cool. I hear myself griping at him to focus and move forward. I interrupt him, I clamp down fire doors all around us to stop the rushing creative stuff from getting all over his work. Later I looked at the map he drew at the beginning. It is beautiful. My god. What is wrong with me?

But sometimes you have to put down your fascinating life’s work and just sit down and pay all the bills, right?

This is something that’s normally an amusing background non-problem problem; haha poor me my kids talk all the time and pretend to be from ancient times and other planets, they invent languages and solve problems and build things and tell jokes and draw elaborate narrated scenes from movies they want to make someday. But I’m struggling a little bit with the impulse to impose discipline. Is creativity something that can or should be shut off sometimes? Is there a time and a place? Can I sternly shut it off for awhile without making them feel like their ideas aren’t as important as good handwriting?

Part of me isn’t worried. I’ve hit this kind of parenting tangle before, and this is how it always feels. I over-worry it and then later look back and see that it was never a real problem. Just the age, just the phase, just temporary and normal and natural… it works itself out in a way I never expected because it turns out that my kids’ DNA is way smarter than I am. It knows what to do and keeps on building a kid whether I fret or not.

With that in mind, it really doesn’t matter whether I make Nicolaus sit and practice boring cuss for two hours every day. He will be fine either way. I know that. But in the meantime, he really does need to work on his handwriting.

We are out of town this week, so you are at home with nobody to harass you except for a weird little dog and a bird who would really like to have some of your cheerios tweet? TWEET? TWEET? But it’s Father’s Day and 800 miles from your kids for a few days doesn’t exempt you from the annual public father’s day blog thing. Sorry.

So first of all I want to say that your children are enormous and what the hell did you do to the little kids we had a year ago? They were adorable and tiny and more portable than these that are kicking me in their sleep while I type this. I blame the new Karate Kid movie for the kicking but that wouldn’t be an issue except that they’re SO BIG. Remember when I asked you and Nicolaus to make a wooden stepstool for the bathroom to replace the ugly bright plastic one? Nevermind. Graham outgrew needing a step stool to brush his teeth. Enormous.

This year was mostly made of good stuff, don’t you think? I’m not you but to me this seemed like the year you realized that you aren’t half bad at this dad business. You had frustrating days where they wouldn’t leave each other alone in the car or where they were fighting all day over nothing, but there are fewer of those days now.

And where before you would worry and stress over the discipline side of this job, now you can simply become Sternly Bossdad for a minute and then move on.

You have found your groove somehow. Maybe you’ve realized that the kids have survived your parenting and seem pretty much okay. That or you have a secret stash of valium somewhere. Either way, go you!

So. Here’s my list of big ways you were awesome this year.
1. You got on board the homeschooling train. Thank youuuuu. This school year has been amazing. Not perfect (I’m still learning) but amazing. The kids are very proud of the Ard School and it helps that you are supportive and involved. Especially with the stuff I suck at like building bridges.

I also love that we essentially have parent teacher conferences, where you ask me how they’re doing on different things and we talk about problems or challenges and you remind me that if this ever isn’t working, it’s okay to admit that and send them to school. No, not that it’s okay. You remind me that it’s critical. But for now it’s working, and so we move forward. Chooo chooooo!

2. I love the apprentice-style teaching you offer them; they learn a lot from you that no school could offer without serious litigation exposure.

They definitely couldn’t learn this stuff from me. A lot of it is a matter of moving with calm confidence to do something because science tells you that it’s safe.

What’s safe to eat in the wild. How to make jewelry. How to fix things, how to find out how to fix things. The idea that anything can be manufactured. How to try new foods without being neurotic. How to build a garden bed and plant seeds and take care of them.

How to be outdoors with no shoes on, looking at everything and noticing all of the plants and animals and bugs and holes in the ground and dead stuff and water and everything that I would somehow miss. How to be hilarious.

Using Graham as a marionette

Graham’s face when he found out you were making the dinosaurs eat the little animals which is NOT THE RULES OF THIS GAME.

3. The house. The house the house the house. Moving blows. It blows BAD. But this was such a good move for the boys. You gave up a week of vacation, considerable money, and worked your living booty off just so your kids could have a yard to play in. Not because they’d die without it or anything, but because it was within reach and a yard is something that will give them a broader understanding of the world than you can get in an apartment.

4. Your work schedule! Oh my gosh I almost forgot. You jumped at the chance to change your work schedule to one that no sane person would ever choose just so you’d have more time to spend with the boys during the day. Man. Thank you.

5. Your total acceptance and respect for who your kids are. They are damned weird. Not many dads would help their son make a wig for his halloween costume so he could be Susan from Monsters vs Aliens.

I’m editing this because I was being rushed and forgot to say really the one thing I wanted to make sure was in here: Look at them. You and I were both shy kids, right? Our kids have overcome their shyness in the last year. Now we look at waiters with pity who make the mistake of asking “Any questions?”

Nicolaus makes friends everywhere he goes. It’s not easy, but he has the confidence to try talking to people. They move through this world without feeling like parts of it are closed off to them. They don’t ever seem to be slowed down by a feeling that they aren’t good enough or aren’t the right kind of person or aren’t able to do that. They collaborate. They laugh at themselves sometimes. They try new things even though they are nervous. They talk to strangers, not in a terrifying afraid-of-no-one way but in a functioning-and-participating-in-society way. They ask questions, they aren’t afraid to say they don’t know, they know it’s okay to screw up. Their home is a safe place to experiment and try out ideas, personas, beliefs, and/or sparkly fancy nail polish.

Thanks for everything you do — you do it so naturally I’m not sure you even realize — to make that all happen.

A couple of weeks ago Nicolaus and I were talking about jobs and interviews and how that whole process works. Somehow it came up that parenting is a job that you cannot have experience for until you get the job. You can babysit, but that’s like eating grape lik-m-aid as practice for operating a vinyard. Not same. So maybe it’s just that seven years is a decent amount of confidence-building practice? Whatever it is, I hope you are enjoying these days as much as you seem to be. I know we have a lot of boring grown up problems and pressures and things to do, but in between all that you give your kids every tiny speck of your energy and time. It’s awesome.

Nicolaus struggles with reading and writing, which is a shame because he loves books and comes up with some great stories. Today for his writing practice, he told me he wanted to write a story about an amazing superhero whose amazing powers include:
Able to lift amazingly regular amounts of pennies.
He can see right through glass windows!
He can FLY. In an airplane. But only if he buys a ticket.

And here is the INCREDIBLE AMAZING STORY of how he became a super hero:
He was born from his mama’s tummy.

And his amazing super hero costume!
Is a suit. Sort of basically like a tuxedo.

And his NAME?

___________________.

At this point I stopped Nicolaus and said, so wait. The super hero doesn’t have a name?

“No he does. That’s his name. ___________________. It’s just not talking for a few seconds. It’s a pretty long name actually.”

There was more, but now I can’t remember it all. Oh man. He was giving himself the giggles over it. Of course when it was time to stop talking and actually write his story, he pared it way down:

“A super hero had special powers. And his name was . Now that that’s over, we can tell you about his amazing super powers. .
And now that THAT’s over, we can show you a picture of him.”

That was supposed to be hilarious, you’d read it and go wait — that was it? Hahaha. He says it’s funny because the person who wrote the story is basically picking on the people who are reading something. Not that I would EVER do something like that to anyone who was reading anything I wrote, but he’s not wrong. That is funny.

Here’s the problem it turns out with making a fun contest about the single most horrifying and depressing environmental disaster in recent historical memory: it’s not as fun for people as you might think. Damn. So! Not a ton of entries but that’s okay… I really appreciate you guys humoring me and will pick a winner tomorrow after breakfast.

Anyway. I keep wanting to do a post about Nicolaus, this kid who we are lucky enough to get to hang out with every day.

First of all, to be fair, he is seven. ALL seven year olds are great and I solemnly recommend that you go out and have a kid right away and then send it to live with relatives until age seven. Oh wait! You have to also have your child with you between the ages of 18 – 30 months because there is nothing funnier in this world than a human in toddler form. But then, back to Auntie Spiker’s place they go until oh oh oh wonderful age seven. Because you know what’s awesome? Seven.

Seven can think more than one step ahead. Seven can worry about safety the right amount: Be careful with knives, but don’t be scared to go in the bathroom by yourself. Don’t cross the street alone but don’t freak out and start crying and pull away because cars exist on roads.

Seven can remember what you meant to get at the grocery store, can keep you honest, can find your keys for you. Seven has a suddenly more subtle sense of humor. Not that there aren’t still a lot of jokes about peeing, but they’re wittier. A little.

So that’s why I like your seven year old. But! Ours is so perfectly tuned to my own personal wavelength that it’s extra great. And it’s even MORE extra great now that he can handle most of his own minor problems, especially the ones that involve toilet paper. He still spills things and accidentally draws on tables and leaves cars on the floor and interrupts, but he tries. That’s new! Just seeing him put in the effort eases some of my daily energy allotment that I reserve for nagging and hassling.

We are now six years into the era of continuous narration of whatever Nicolaus is thinking. The talking pauses only briefly at night and only then if I wonk him on the head with a brick so he goes to sleep. Which I don’t do because I want the talking to stop! No no no. The talking is more entertaining than any movie that’s come out since Ghostbusters. I’m not trashing Ghostbusters 2 or Back to the Future, I’m saying he is very entertaining. It’s just that if we don’t make him be quiet long enough to sleep a little, he is dramatic and angst-ridden the next day and it’s exhausting for all.

But thanks to his live streaming audio feed, I now know that…

• he likes when we are sitting at a stoplight where a lot of cars are turning left because it’s like peeling a banana. When he says things like that I feel like I wrote a computer program that has somehow started inventing its own functions and responses.
• “When words have something like a silent G or a K in them? To someone who is just learning to read it’s like if a dog was chewing up a nice crunchy chewbone treat and there was a little chunk of metal in the middle of it. Oh yum chomp chomp chomp CLAYANGANG OW WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO MY TEETH?”
• What frustration feels like: “I just feel like I am TRYING to string a long piece of tape out a certain way and all around me everyone is waving and snapping scissors!”
• “It would be like if someone gave a bird her very own really expensive computer. She would like it but pretty much just chew it up and poop on it instead of ever learning how to use it. That’s what it feels like when I do something nice for Graham sometimes.”
• “the words appreciative and generous basically mean the same thing. All you have to do is turn one of them inside out and you get the other.”

Sometimes he is talking directly to someone, sometimes he isn’t. A lot of times when he is concentrating on building or trying something or drawing, he is rapid-fire talking to himself. “The roots are what caused the flower revolution. The main flower was a king. He was a tyrant and he used all of the blades of grass in the yard as his soldiers and he used his – his roots were the way he communicated with everyone and spread out his commands and told everyone what to do. His colonies of little puff-ball flowers finally had enough and they rebelled! You can see how little they look because they are farther away AND they are actually much smaller than the king flower. And all of my pictures tonight are going to be about how the colonists defeated their own king mostly by firing this puffy pollenish stuff right into his face like this hahaha! And it really was a total flower revolution…”

I was talking about one of his outside teachers and how she wouldn’t mind if he wore his kimono to class. I said, “Miss Beth won’t mind, in fact I think she’d like that. She’s one of those rare grownups who really understands the importance of wearing costumes.”

He said, “And you are one of them to. Know how I know? Because if you weren’t you would have said that she is one of those rare grownups who doesn’t understand the non-importance of wearing costumes. Get what I mean?”

I had to think a few seconds. Yyyes. Okay, yes. I get what you mean.

I don’t know. I can’t explain it, so I’m trying to get at it with little examples. He’s just more even lately. Still himself, still non-stop moving and talking and thinking and jumping but there’s something about him… this new sense of calm. He’s no longer at the edge of a cliff looking for reasons to storm over it which those reasons by the way are ALL YOUR FAULT BECAUSE YOU ARE JUST A MEAN MAMA WHO HAD KIDS TO BE MEAN. It’s nice. Less arguing, less whining, less bursting into tears because Graham changed the name of an imaginary animal or won’t use the correct sound effect for their pretend bombs.

He is enjoying seven, too. Every time we say yes to something we would have said no to a year ago, he opens his eyes really big and says, “Yay!” He actually says the word “Yayyyy.” as he runs off to perform the nonurgent appendectomy or whatever it was. Then a lot of times he’ll run back in the room to tell us, “Seriously? Thank you so so much!”

Last week Kevin’s dad sat him down and showed him how a swiss army knife works. The demonstration was followed by an intense safety lecture. And then this trusted family member gave my son the knife.

Alright, Zoloft can only carry me so far; I really wanted to say What?? Look I’m sorry, old man, but your son — my husband — has scars from where he cut himself with a pocket knife three WEEKS AGO what the hell are you giving a first grader a mother-loving I don’t even what. just. happened.

Kevin and Nicolaus reasuured me that it was okay because Papa told him not to open the knife blade at all. I wasn’t convinced that a seven year old could really walk around with a knife and NOT be tempted to open the knife part of that knife, but I was wrong. He takes it very seriously, pulling out tiny screwdrivers or scissors or other things that anyone might need. And he says that he has not once opened the knife blade, and I believe him. If you think that makes me stupid you might be right. But the kid seems serious enough that I trust him. He’s seven afterall. Why would seven lie?

And now that we have a basement, he has built his lifelong dream of a workshop. He set it all up using whatever he could find, and Kevin gave him some scrap copper. Right away he started making jewelry by hammering out copper sheets and cutting them up into interesting little shapes. Then he’d twist the shapes around a piece of black cord and run upstairs and present it to me. A present! A necklace! And I say oooo thank you! It’s beautiful! And I put it on and it stabs me in the neck because duh, seven year olds are a lot of great things but metalsmith is not one of those things. But he works hard at it, hammering and bending. His work table is already covered with papers full of sketches for things he wants to make, including a series of ideas for a dog collar. I’m trying to politely stall him on that project. The dog won’t be as understanding about wearing a sharp scratchy copper necklace. But give him a year or two to improve and we’ll have one fancy-collared dog.

Real life started before I was ready. I sort of knew it was happening, but I think I thought it was one of those things where the car next to you is rolling backwards a little and so it looks like you’re moving forward but you know you really aren’t? Except I was.

I think my generation might be more self-conscious than most, in a big general oh my god everyone-will-find-out sort of way. We grew up watching sitcoms and after-school specials where ordinary life was framed with heart-tugging guitar chords and poignant ironic consequences. We saw the birth of talk shows, reality shows, 24-hour sensationalist news. Therapy and dealing with personal issues stopped being a taboo topic. Movies, songs, books, everything had a way of reminding us that little things matter. Other generations had what? Saturday Night Fever? See, that there is a generation that wasn’t worried about their narrative.

Everything I do is part of my only-ever life.

Which you would think would make me run out and try to climb all the mountains and save all the children and become CEO of everything, but no. It’s not ambition. It’s a simple awareness that this is my actual life, and every day is part of the whole story. One day it might turn out to be important, it probably won’t, but it matters because it’s mine.

Does this make sense? I meet people who live life without ever thinking about this. They just do what needs to get done, no self-consciousness, no worry that they aren’t taking their story in the direction they want it to go. Those people seem very unburdened. Luckies.

Where I’m going with all of this is: think about your childhood. The word childhood is so much more than a handy way to mark time, especially in the era of childhood-worshiping Baby on Board stickers and Disneyland and diaper commercials that remind us that childhood is valuable and critical and magical, so don’t blow it by buying inferior pee-pants. Marketers are rat bastards for saying so, but they do have a point: childhood matters a bunch. Every person uses their impression of their own childhood to create the foundation of the story of themselves. It’s where you get the mythology of who you are and who you have to be and what you have to act like when things are exciting or disappointing or really, really hard to do.

So now I am a grown up. I think about my childhood in a thousand little ways every day, without even realizing. I’ll eat strawberries and remember hot summers and cold strawberries mushing into blobs of powdered sugar. I’ll hear cicadas and remember that sound echoing all up and down the street because the day was over, it was time to find my jelly shoes in the grass and ride my bike home before the sun went behind that one line of trees. I remember walking my baby brother and showing him flowers and teaching him the word pretty. I think about staying up late on a school night drawing a silohuette of a deer in the woods, sitting at a low table and working on it until my knees and legs were so stiff it hurt to stand up. I remember my fears, my stresses, my shyness.

And now I am a mother. It all goes around again, new batch of childhoods.

We mess up a lot. When Nicolaus and Graham are in their 20s they will tell their friends that oh my god my parents used to do this and this and that and the house was always messy and we had to make our own lunches and this one time my mom made a big deal about taking us to the new Lakeshore store and we went there and it hadn’t opened yet and then a homeless lady harrassed us in the parking lot and it was weird.

We are bad at potty training. We are bad at consistent schedules, bedtimes, and remembering to give allowances. We spend too much time in the car. We eat out too much. Maybe I spend too much time with them. And not enough. I’m disengaged, on the phone, working on drawings, packing orders. I’m too involved, too over protective, too fussy about what they eat. How can I seriously worry about high fructose corn syrup going into a kid who eats boogers?

Tonight the power went out during a big thunderstorm while Graham was in the bathroom. It took us a minute to feel our way across the house and by the time we got there with a flashlight (okay, an iPhone) he was so scared that he was sobbing and couldn’t stop. Will he remember it? Should we help him forget it? Or maybe life needs emotional experiences like that to help mark out the days?

I know I sound exactly like the naval-gazing, horrible child-obsessed mommybloggers that the New York Times says will ruin a generation. But how can I help it? Whether I pay attention to it or not, all of these days, toys, games, arguments, injuries, stories, baths, dinners, gardens, errands, outings, road trips, pets… it’s all their real, actual childhood and if I think about it too much I start hyperventilating and calling 911 to say hi, I have an emergency, my child is seven and has never played any team sport. And this is Georgia right so they wouldn’t consider it a frivolous 911 call. They would say “Just hold on, we are sending help RIGHT NOW. Please try to stay calm and try to keep your son as still as possible until the coaches arrive to show him which thing you bat with and which thing you use to catch.”

Of course whether we get it all right or all wrong doesn’t matter. It’s their story, and they are sketching the outline of it every day. We have no control over the way they remember it later on. Will they remember only the days when I was cranky and frazzled and couldn’t get them to class on time because I locked my keys in the car but didn’t know they were in the car so I spent an hour stomping around like dumbzilla RAWR I SUCK AT STUFF upturning furniture and emptying drawers and CAN’T FIND KEYS and retracing my stomping steps through the apartment over and over? Or will they remember finding a giant limb in the back yard and draping sheets over it to make a fort, and eating strawberries, and laughing at their hilarious parents’ hilarious jokes? Will they be glad that we homeschooled? Will they be grateful for our choices, or resentful? We can’t know.

So we hedge our bets and try to just do our best with the energy that we have on any given day. And we make sure we are honest: Some lucky people have perfect parents but you don’t. All you got is regular messy humans who think you are the coolest thing they’ve ever made.

So yeah. That’s part of why I keep this blog. It’s something the boys can read later to fill in the details and to support whatever conclusions they have come to about their childhood. Hi, now-grown kids! We did our best. Sorry and also, you’re welcome.