Gray

I think that this is a time better than any other time to think about how crazy our lives really are. What I used to believe was that one moment we are happy and free and another moment we are sad and despairing and there is hopelessness and there is rejoicing all wrapped up in packages in our closets separate. What I know now is that you may find me in a room full of mourners laughing at a line from an obituary wondering if the fluid running down my face is filled with joyful cells or sorrow. Life is not easily catagorical. I know a lot about this. I have learned a tremendous amount this year. Grampa John now has a chronic cough that is so debilitating that when he laughs he runs the risk of coughing himself right in to a grave but do you think that stops us? We can still be found from time to time playing "gotcha last" or reminding him about a famous wharf story about some Gloucester character that was mistaken for a dog in a motor vehicle by the police. Now that's funny.
I have learned that just because I kept my children out of school for so many years didn't guarantee that they would not be subject to the schooly way of life and that I can only hide them out here for so long. One day or another someone somewhere was going to grade them and I was going to lose track of where they were exactly anyhow. And they were going to live, and live quite happily or sadly or both.
I have learned that really it had nothing to do with school in the first place but everything to do with the people that they were born to be and the family that we create. I have joined the ranks and the herd. I am no longer alone in the museum the day after Feb vacation but totally immersed in a crowd of brown and white and fat and skinny and muslim and jewish people all running about taking their school vacationing kids to the same place. I took time off this week from my new job just like most of my office did and I will resume the joyful sorrowful difficult, exciting and boring depending on the moment employment that I have just like most of America on Monday. I am no longer swimming against the current and I am floating of a raft toward the warm sand.
That is not to say that my homeschooling world was a sham or that the joy was not there. I am grateful for every moment of it and my children are too. It's just not so one sided. Life is a heavy duty amount of gray. My mother came in to tell my my grandfather was hospitalized again and I pocketed that information for later. There was just too much in the way at that moment. I had a bill in front of me, a bunch of hyper children about me and food to think up, get out and create.
I cried later.
Right then I smiled, I think I even cracked a joke. I looked at Jonah who told me he was a honey badger today and I thought about my dying patients. I smiled and laughed on my face and cried and mourned in my heart.
My daughter Nora learned a perfect Ode to Joy today on the violin. I thought we would never have time for those things if we did school but of course we do. She ran to play it for Grampa John but he couldn't stop coughing. She cried because she was mad and then she smiled because there was a cookie waiting for her and a hug from her mother and Jonah had decided to strip down and lay on the floor and grunt like a pig. Sadie was curled up in a ball reading Harry Potter for the thousandth time and Gary was cooking.

The coughing stopped and we breathed a sigh of relief and held our breath for the next moment.