Identity Shift

It's been 3 years since I've posted here. That makes sense, really. This blog was started as a way to journal my life with my young sons, and it served that purpose well.

On the rare occasion that I read through an old post, I'm always grateful to myself for taking the time. Those years seem so far away.

As my boys became teens, blogging the sweet moments in their life for all the world to see felt like an invasion of their privacy. Also, my writing time went increasingly towards the fiction that took over my creative energy.

Ironically, I assumed that my writing time would increase when my kids got more independent. As it turns out, launching children into adulthood takes far more mental energy than I ever would have dreamed. 

My oldest went off to college. My youngest started the community college path to high school completion. And I began the process of transitioning from Mom-self to Myself.

Ooh. That would make a good memoir title.

I'm still in the middle of it. Finding my identity as a person who is only living one life, rather than three, turns out not to be a simple matter. As soon as I start thinking I should find meaningful work, something happens that makes the very idea seem ludicrous. Most recently, Chris's mom has been having physical and mental setbacks that required daily visits and more patience than parenting a 4 year old did.

Before that, there were various young-adult-kid scenarios that required my support. And political chaos that required creativity to see any semblance of a silver lining. And also travel opportunities (a Mediterranean cruise with my parents and sister! and Alaska!), and a choir transition, which were happy things that also upset any semblance of a routine.

The truth is, I've been doing zero writing for months. And questioning my identity as a writer because, if it's the first thing that goes out the window when life happens, how can it be at the core of who you are? I've been reading books at a rate that makes monthly book club a challenge to keep up with. My house is a perpetual mess.

My writing window is done. I'm going to post this, unfinished, because (a) then it will be finished instead of one more thing to get back to, and (b) nobody is likely to come across this anyway, so it really is just written for future me. 

Day 3.

At 6:30 this morning I woke up to the sound of my youngest getting himself up and heading downstairs to get into the shower.

After the long process we've gone through to adjust his schedule to accommodate an 8:15 a.m. start time, this felt no less profound than the first time my babies slept through the night.

Evan has commented that this feels like summer camp--getting up early, packing a lunch being led from activity to activity, making friends. Summer camp with homework. Summer camp that will continue on long past 5 days.

Evan was always pretty much ready for summer camp to be done by about Day 3, so we'll see how he's feeling by the end of today.

Summer winds down

We're getting ready to go on our 4th and final Village Home camping trip next week--most likely the last Village Home event we'll ever do.

Highlights of the summer:

Ben signed up to take the next math course in his sequence in summer school, and then dropped it. It was going to cramp his summer style way too much (Chris and I agreed with him).

Evan did the Teens on the Town activity with Village Home; Ben took a brief 2-day photography workshop, I planned and pulled off my second OHEN Convention as president and worked on finding a new president to replace me. Ben and Evan bonded over cars.

For the first time since we moved here, we finally got to go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It was a trip with my book club, though our family stayed at a separate hotel instead of trying to cram ourselves into the cottage the rest of the book club members rented. We enjoyed a couple of meals with book club members, and a discussion of Shakespeare at the cottage, and went to see The Comedy of Errors. We discovered a great pizza place, and made our way to a mountain lake where it was much cooler than the 99 degrees in Ashland. We toured Southern Oregon University's campus (too small for Ben, he says). On the way home, we stopped by Crater Lake.

Ben and I went back to take another look at Oregon State and Corvallis. He's thinking that's the place. We should start working on that application.

Evan and I went to visit my parents in Los Osos. I haven't seen them in over 2 years and that was far too long! We had a great visit with them and Linda. Meanwhile, Chris and Ben went camping and took two long bike rides for a total of 100 miles of biking.

Back in Oregon, we all went whitewater rafting (my first time since I was 17) in the Deschutes river with Zach and Katherine.

Chris and I took our second anniversary overnight getaway trip, leaving our boys home alone overnight for the first time. We went back to Carson Ridge cabins B&B, enjoyed it, and decided next time we'll try someplace new. Half of the romance is in discovering new places together.

Add to all that: Evan getting the inevitable cold feet about high school, Chris and I worrying about Ben being out with the car until 1 a.m., me trying yet again to get our garden into better shape and wondering why I always feel most motivated when it's too hot to plant anything successfully. Thinking I should be writing more, and skipping the Willamette Writer's Conference for the first time in....7 years? And feeling nostalgic for summers of old, when my boys needed me to join more of their adventures.

Onward.

Transitions

One day I hope I'll finish the story of the car. It's a story worth telling. I just haven't had much writing energy in me lately. My brain is working on other things, and there just doesn't seem to be room for wordsmithing. So today, I'm going to write about the other things.

Ben is doing great at Portland Community College. He's learning so much, and gaining confidence in himself, and beginning to invent a vision of himself, away from us. As he should be.

We've spent the past several months touring Oregon's college campuses as if Ben were a high school Junior  (he'll get a high school diploma through PCC and Baker's Early College program in June of 2015). It's been fascinating to watch Ben's progression over that time, from going along for the ride, to being solely interested in the quality of the food and the dorm rooms, to actually inquiring about what the programs will be like and what his options for classes will be. The turning point was the day we toured the U of O and he realized that, while he loved the campus, they didn't have the type of Interpersonal Communications program he's interested in and their Psychology program is much more science-oriented than he's up for. He had mentally rejected OSU after our campus visit, but after seeing the U of O he realized that OSU was worth another look. We'll do that this summer.

Meanwhile, Evan has been exploring high schools. It all started with him wanting to go to Benson Polytechnic and participate in their auto tech program. He's been tempted by that since we first attended their Tech Night two years ago. We went through the process of applying to Benson (a magnet school with a lottery system, which gets about twice as many applicants as they are able to accept). At the same time, I insisted that we explore our neighborhood high school. Knowing that there was a 50-50 chance of getting in to Benson, I wanted Evan to know what his options were for high school if he didn't get in.

When I dragged him to Madison High School's open house for 8th graders (on the bus, in the rain) . . . he loved it there. The students who volunteered to help that evening, and the teachers. were so friendly and inviting. The art program looks fantastic. The music teacher has won awards (Benson doesn't have a music program). And they have a lot of options for science, including a new Engineering program next year.

Evan has had such mixed feelings about the whole concept of high school, especially the lack of flexibility and  the idea of leaving Village Home. He learned he was on the waiting list for Benson (number 4 on the list, for our attendance area). When he shadowed a student at Madison last week, he came home with nothing but positives to say--and yet, still undecided about whether he wants to go.

I'm pretty sure he's going to go, though.

I think he should go.

But if Evan has mixed feelings about the idea, I have . . . pulverized feelings. I'm looking at the possible end of my career as a homeschooling mom, after fifteen years. I'm looking at having my "baby" away from home for seven hours, five days a week. At shifting my social world, away from the homeschool world and into the unknown. And, I'm ready for that. But I apparently can't do that and write stories, both at the same time.

Following our gut

Continued from a previous post.

When the mechanic called me two days later, at first he thought it was good news. He had a plan. If it had worked, it would have cost us about $30.

I was at a writing conference, in the middle of a busy volunteer shift, when he called back that afternoon to tell me his plan hadn't worked. "Now we can hear that the problem is way deep down in the engine," he reported. "You're either gonna need a new engine, or to have this one totally rebuilt."

"Yikes. How much are we talking?" I asked. Though, truly, I knew how much car engines cost.

"I didn't even call yet," he said apologetically. "But somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 to 5 thousand."

I spent the rest of the writing conference kind of in shock. It wasn't that we couldn't come up with the money. In fact, we had the money readily accessible, because we'd recently sold some mutual fund shares in order to pay off a home equity loan and have money available to pay for our family to join the choir tour to Ireland in 2015. It had felt like a stretch to dip into that long-term savings, but we had done so because of our commitment to experience that adventure with our kids.

A new engine for our car was not the adventure we had been envisioning.

And yet--because Chris's parents had generously offered to help fun our Ireland trip, and because my parents had been generously helping fund our kids' college funds, we didn't have to choose between Ireland and a new car engine. Not really. We could stretch even further, and manage both, and probably be okay.

"But I just don't want to," I told Chris when we'd both gotten home and had time to do more than text updates to each other.

That was an understatement, though. I didn't just not want to.

We'd done pretty well for ourselves by following our gut feelings over the years. Following our guts had gotten us to Portland, bought the house we've lived in for 17 years, set us on the path to homeschooling. It had matched us with some pretty fabulous pets, and helped us raise two wonderful young men, and kept us mostly financially solvent on a single income. And my gut was telling me--no, it was flat out screaming at me--not to sink more money into this car. Or any car.

The more Chris and I talked about it, the more reasonable it seemed to just...do...nothing.

Blackster

81 Days

81 days ago, I sat beside my 16-year-old driver as he navigated his way expertly through the city traffic from point A to point B. He'd had his license for almost exactly six months and we'd reached an easiness together as he drove the car that had seemed unimaginable a year before.

The moment that was to change our lives wasn't especially dramatic. As Ben started out from a red light, our 5-year old Kia made a screech that was so horrible, at first I didn't imagine it could have come from our car. Then we noticed a rattly-clunk sound echoing off the cement divider.

"Is that our car make that sound, or the car behind us?" I asked.

"It must be the car behind us." We stopped at another light, and I heard the unmistakable shudder of an engine dying. Ben was blissfully ignorant for a moment, never having had a car stall out on him before.

"Honey, I think the car just died," I said.

"What? Oh--" He stepped on the gas lightly to check. "You're right. What do I--?"

"Put it in Park, turn it off, and and start it up again."

He did, and the car started up just fine. So did the rattly-clunk sound, though, so we decided to take it straight to the mechanic. After speaking to the mechanic we left our car behind and walked the 20 minutes home, neither of us imagining that we were walking away from a lifestyle that we'd taken for granted for longer than my boy's entire life.

...to be continued