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Sit. Stay at home, mom. Stay.
I chose to be a stay-at-home mom. I willingly gave up grading vocab quizzes, rousing snoozing students from drool-slicked desktops, signing crumpled hall passes, planning creative ways to entrance hormone-fogged minds with Whitman, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Wharton. I found I could, with some effort, turn away from the trappings of high school education, but it turns out, I couldn’t turn away from the creative drive that pushed me there in the first place. I couldn’t ignore the need to know.
I love the phrase “lifelong learner.” There are many of us out there, individuals infected by some brain fever that is often mislabeled as “artistic” or “type-A” personality. We are driven by this need to experience and know more, and still more. To know for the sake of knowing. The stillness of being a new mom deadened my lifelong learner drive like a strong dose of laudanum. I’d sit in Little Friend’s nursery, watching her legs bicycle in the air, my eyes loving each new crease in her thighs, but my mind detached itself and beat about the room like a trapped moth, stopping now on the streak of sunlight on the wall, pausing then on the dust-crusted window ledge. I tried, in this newborn world, to find a place for my mind to roost, just as it had brooded over the eggs of Transcendental ideas or Puritanical writings. The best I could find was planning an afternoon walk or picking out a new outfit. I did these things with a feverish intensity.
The command to wait.
I have now elected for a studied calm. Wait, I whisper to my brain quivering with pent-up energy. Wait. As Little Friend has gotten older, so her activities have complexified. The afternoon walk has now turned into an afternoon swim. More details for my brain to fret over (“swimsuit, sunscreen, towel, pool money, snack” instead of just “running shoes, stroller, snack”). It helps. But there is still a void of mental activity in this stay-at-home life that’s enveloped me.
Even the phrase “stay at home” contains a command to cease activity. “Stay” I tell my dog, and he twitches an eyebrow in understanding, and more likely than not, pulls ahead more strongly. “Stay,” I command again with a jerk this time, and he stops but strains, his desire leaning into the leash with a tension of arrested momentum. At least in this scenario my dog can blame someone else for his confinement. At the end of my leash, waiting to be released back into movement, I find that the captor on the other end is…me. I began this musing with the sentence, “I chose to be a stay-at-home mom.” And I did. I snapped on the leash and am holding myself at bay.
Really, I’m not complaining. Promise.
I’m not intending to complain. Just explain. Because what I’m finding is that we of the lifelong learning fever cannot be contained. Our minds are wily, slippery, shrewd little things. They find cracks to slip through. They ease, slowly and imperceptibly away, like a glob of inert-looking silly putty. They adapt. My mind has adapted, almost without me realizing it, to my new life. And I am cautiously finding I love it.
Beginning one chapter. Closing another.
Before leaving for vacation, I closed the final page on the chapter of my teaching years (not that I won’t return eventually, but for now, it feels so final). I walked through the deserted halls, floors shiny with new wax, locker banks battered but ready for the September battle, the unique smell of a thousand textbooks and teenage sweat permeating, perpetually, the classroom air. I took away my notebooks. I packed up my files. I threw away dried highlighters. I rolled up my posters. I gave away my plants. I walked away without looking back over my shoulder. I
