First Day, First Grade

I know she's nervous when she has a meltdown simply because I ask her to throw away her trash from breakfast.

I'm nervous too.
I want her to have a good teacher,
and not that curmudgeon from her summer class who didn't even like children.
I hope she makes a good friend -
just one good friend -
who fights by her side,
unlike that little blonde brat from kindergarten who treated her like a pariah
(don't let people treat you like that, sweet girl!  They're not worth your time).

People are mean.  I want to protect my sweet babies from mean people.  I want to keep them from my childhood heartaches.  First day, first grade, is hard on me too.

Uncovered

From a very young age I learned the importance of knowledge; mainly because I discovered that when you couldn't verbalize an experience or emotion, the world punished you.  It was your sister who started it, but you who got the spanking; there was a real sorrow in your heart or pain in your body, but you were told to go to your room and cry because the adults around you didn't want to hear about it.  I hated childhood, because it was so isolating; I would never go back.  The world does not bend to understand the heart of a child, it works instead to bend the heart of her or him.

So, I learned to read when I was three years old and by age eight was reading everything I could get my hands on, including my mother's 20-year collection of Reader's Digest.  I didn't know what sex was, but I was reading about kidnapping and rape when I ought to have been reading about Barbar the Elephant and Ramona Quimby, Age 8.

Thus it began: my life-long project of grabbing Knowledge and wrapping it around me as a cloak against the winds and the rain of the angry world.  In adulthood I have pursued subjects at which I excel, in which I can own my coveted Knowledge.  I write, because I read, and I understand the written word. I am a linguist, because I understand people's hearts and can wrap my own heart around their burning need to communicate, to be heard.  I travel, because it gives me Knowledge of the world and its people, which in turn makes me a better linguist, which in turn makes me a better writer.  I have jumped off cliffs and lived in boldness in so many ways, but always in ways that produced more Knowledge, without too much pain to myself.

And now I am 31, needing a more steady income than being able to pick out an accent in a crowd can give me.  So I am back in school to become a sonographer.  Great income, get to work with people (which I'm relatively good at), and have travel/ministry opportunities.  It's a good path for me.

But.

The program requires physics, and physics requires algebra, and I haven't taken algebra in 10 years.  Not only that, after I finished algebra at the age of 21, I turned and started running away from it as fast as I possibly could, because I didn't understand it and couldn't (quickly) excel. In short, it was too painful.

So this summer as I study physics, my cloak of The Right Answer which has protected me for so many years has been stripped from my shoulders, and I am found beneath it to be naked and three-years-old, shivering and crying.

I'm baaaaaaack!

Well my dears, I privatized for a while and thought about deleting, but here I am again.  I like this outlet.  I like looking back at old posts and remembering my life.  It is good.

You know what else is good?  My life.  I've had a good life.  I've lived, and that has made it good.  Kierkegaard talks a lot about venturing and risk; I think, as a young man, he did not risk enough in life and later regretted it.  I, however, am a master at risk (with both success and failure) and have no regrets.  (Well, very few, and the ones I do have would be silly to most people.)  I don't think you can live with regret and live with heart at the same time.  Risk and venture are part of life and we can only work with what's been built before.  So if I step out and risk something and it fails, what have I lost?  Nothing.  I have gained everything.  I have gained knowledge from my failure, I have gained boldness by learning how to fail.  I have been broken of perfectionism because failure has taught me I am imperfect.  I've learned to give grace to others in their failures, and I've learned to let go of the ideal for the sake of the real. 

I love risk and I love failure.  Because of this, looking back, I love the life I have thus-far lived. Even in the hard times (Endo!) I have lived fully, and to die today would be no loss.  What a lovely life I have been given.  How beautiful life is. I am content.

(Of course I must acknowledge my parents, cause they never held me back with fear or caution.  This is a great rarity among parents, I think, and I am blessed.)

Mitochondria

A&P is the most fascinating class I've ever taken. Ever.

I hate school.