Onward and Upward

Easter Break is here (can I tell you how happy I am?) and the newest wee one is due to arrive any day now.  It would be just too easy to have the little squish show up when the kids are on a break from school, but they're excited by the possibility of a few unscheduled days off after Easter, too.

We wrapped up the third quarter of our school year last week, too.  We do quarters, and at the beginning of the year I set a calendar showing the kids when the quarters are and which days they'll get off of school.  It's a little artificial, but they like getting "holidays" and knowing exactly how close they are to finishing up with school.  If we didn't have a schedule we'd get nothing done, so it works well for us.

And with third quarter we wrapped up a few other things, too.  SweetPea - technically in kindergarten - finished first grade math and grammar.  We've been careful not to push her through the work, but she's enjoying it, and so she just marched right through the textbooks and did just fine, and we're not about to hold her back because of the grade numbers on the books.  After Easter she'll start the second grade books, and we'll keep a close eye on how she's doing and go as slowly - or quickly - as she's ready for.  She's loved being in Daisy Scouts this year and at a recent meeting the girls had to write down one thing they were afraid of.  She wrote that she was "scared of first grade" - until we pointed out that she was almost finished with it, and hadn't even noticed.  She wrote her first-ever book report this spring, and loved writing about a horse book - and celebrated with a ride on her much-loved pony buddy.

SweetPea has been racing ahead academically, and we appreciate that homeschooling is letting her move at the right pace for her, but I think it's Sprout who has really benefitted from learning at home this year.  Last year was so, so hard in many ways.  We were all adjusting to our new roles, and we were all at odds with each other a bit.  The learning curve was steep, expectations were (perhaps too) high, and the nuts-and-bolts of getting through the work sometimes seemed impossibly hard.

This year we've been able to relax a bit, in part because Sprout knows his job - and is less likely to blow up when his lack of focus means that he's still working on math problems at dinnertime.  I'm also more flexible.  He needs more work on his multiplication tables and grumbles about how dumb, and stupid, and hard, and awful they are - but he happily practiced them for almost an hour today as he tried to get a high score on some eyeroll-inducing math app called "SushiMonster."  I've also been less hesitant to ditch what isn't working for us.  He started reading The Black Cauldron and it was over his head - so we switched gears and did Harry Potter instead.  Neither one of us was frustrated, neither one of us felt like we'd failed - we just set the book aside for another day or year and went 

.about our learning

And as Sprout approaches the pre-teen year, I'm more happy than ever that SSHH and I are the primary educators in his life.  He's encountering and noticing hard things that weren't on his horizon before, and I'm glad that we are the people he's coming to with questions - not his teachers, not his friends - his parents.  Whether it's moving from "how will the baby come out of there?" to the much harder "how did the baby get in there?" (and yes, his nine year-old self got a straight answer to that), or "why did someone post a comment on this computer game that it "is so gay it makes my f&*^ing eyes bleed?" - and what does that mean?" or "I read a Garfield comic and someone said Jon dances like a retard.  What's that?" or  "what's an abortion?" - we have been able to navigate the answers with him.

Sprout just finished reading Maniac Magee and put together a short but pretty incisive paper, for a nine year-old, on the portrayal of race in the book.  We had a lot of talks about it, and about how people form opinions of each other, and what things are important about people and what things aren't, and how to form respectful friendships across differences.  He read, and answered comprehension questions, and learned about topic sentences and finding quotes in a book - but it was full of little life-lessons, too, and I'm glad that those happened around the dining room table and not in a classroom.

When we started homeschooling I read a lot about the "growing up" aspects of it.  I was concerned that our kids not be "sheltered," that they not be limited to our sometimes-insulated Catholic homeschooling group, that they learn about the diversity of people and beliefs in the world and how to encounter them respectfully and openly while still maintaining their own faith and identity and not succumbing to relativism.  And I think that we're accomplishing that, in a small way.  But that involves running up against hard questions, and navigating hard answers, and while I trust many people to teach my kids math and writing and geography, I don't trust them to guide my kids through those questions when they are prompted by a book or article or conversation read in the context of school.  I don't trust that when those hard questions come up, that a kid who spends most of their waking hours and most of their learning time with other people will automatically turn to their parents first for advice and answers.  And so I'm glad that while Sprout is out there getting his feet wet in the big wide world, he's able to stay grounded and connected to the moral compass that his family and faith should be for him.

Leaning Out

So the next wee one is due to arrive in just a few weeks and yesterday was my last day in the office - I'll be working from home until baby arrives, and on twelve weeks of maternity leave after that.  I'm thrilled.  Ecstatic.  Did I mention happy?  I work from home about 70% of the time anyway, so it really shouldn't make that much of a difference, but dropping the mental burden of having to get dressed up, drive into the office (Washington DC traffic is fun), and smile and generally be pleasant and "on" all day is huge.

I am blessed and grateful to have my situation.  I work in an extremely family-friendly place, and while folks are generally a bit confuzzled by the fact that I'm having a fifth child, they are mostly supportive and happy for me.  But I do get crabby when people tell me that I'm "lucky" to be in this sort of situation - because luck has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Working where I work with the family-friendly options I have was a choice, and one which required (and still requires) sacrifices of other nice "job things," and one which I worked darned hard for.  I work from home, have a very flexible schedule, and a lot of freedom to spend time with my kids and schedule my day the way it works best for me - but I also carry my work phone/e-mail with me wherever I go, 24/7/365 and if I'm awake - I'm never more than a few minutes behind on my e-mail.  I make a fraction of the money I would in the private sector.  I'm using a PhD I worked darned hard for in a non-traditional way well outside of the field I studied in.

And it took a few years of hard work before I reached the point of having proven my competency, trustworthiness, and availability to my coworkers so that they didn't turn me down when I asked to start working from home part-time.  And to be honest, I've turned down and passed by multiple promotions in the years I've been with this group, because the increase in pay and status would have meant less time at home.  Right now - it's a job.  Maybe later there will be time for a career.  Maybe later I'll want one.

I've been told I'm being "mommy tracked." And I'm cool with that.  I've read some articles lately about how we're all supposed to be "leaning in" and being driven and focused, and how women can have a stimulating career and a great family life.  And maybe they can - but I can't.  I know that I couldn't be the mother I want and need to be if I spent any more time and energy on my work.  I can only lean in one direction at once - and that's my family.

Which is fine, and if other women can manage both, then that's super.  But being open to life as we feel called to be, and believing that it's important to be the "primary educators of our children," and heck, just being there for breakfast-lunch-and-dinner, means that I am going to stay firmly on that mommy track, if that's what it is.  If I needed to be in an office away from home every day, or if I needed to travel for work, or if I needed to work late more than once or twice a year - those things that are so important to us would suffer.  And we're not about to let that happen.

So our family operates a little differently than some do.  I have this nifty job where I've traded some money and some prestige for a lot of flexibility and a bunch of nice folks to be around - my boss, actually, turned down a promotion last year because it would have meant he couldn't find the time to coach high school football and his daughter's soccer team.  SSHH (and all the fancy letters after his name, too) is at home with the kids, giving me the ability to sprint to the home office for a conference call in the middle of making sandwiches or reading a story.  We may not ever be able to afford a vacation to Disney - but we feel like the choices we've made are the right ones for us and reflect our faith and our values.

Last summer a prominent female CEO made waves in the media when she said that she was a lousy mother because she was a CEO.  And you know what?  I think it took a lot of courage for her to say that and not pretend like she "had it all."  She was very honest about how many piano recitals and soccer games she'd missed, and how her kids had to go through her secretary if they had a question about homework, and how she didn't see them most days because she was at work.  The feminism of the 1970s and 1980s undoubtedly made great strides for women's ability to find equal footing in the workplace - but it also fed women a line about "having it all."  Maybe some women out there really have found a way to do that, but for most of us mortals, it's a balance.  You can't have it all and do it all equally well - at least, I can't.  That maligned CEO decided to tip the balance towards her career.  I've decided to tip the balance towards home.

So I'm going to spend the foreseeable future leaning out, not in.  I'll work from home, I'll snuggle my sweet new little squish, I'll take my kids to the playground.  I'll spend my evenings going through math worksheets and making lesson plans, not prepping the next day's briefings.  I'll continue to tell my bosses that I'm not getting on a plane to fly around the country to conferences, and I'll continue to be home every night for dinner and baths and bedtime stories - and most days, for breakfast muffins and lunchtime sandwiches, too.  And if that means that I end up with a less than astonishing career when all is said and done?  Well, that's just fine with me.