Although it hadn’t been two full weeks between the last day of school and the first day back, getting everyone in gear again isn’t easy. The gears feel stiff, as if we are all in need of the Tin Man’s oilcan. The cold surge didn’t help matters; it stiffened us all, turned us sharply in. The first couple of yoga classes felt as if they were about my body remembering it could stand taller and open, the experience less an unfurling than a creaky rearranging process.
Even the Valley Advocate went through technical difficulties turning from last year to this. I had a post at the ready—and then waited.
But here we are, slowly stumbling back to “normal.”
**
Sunday, which was New Year’s Day, we had a couple of eighth graders over while their parents hosted and attended a party that was adult only. The next day, we had a third grader most of the day and part of the evening, too; his mom escorted big sister to swim practices (yes, plural). Tuesday, two of my kids were back in school and two had one last day of vacation. They ended up at a friend’s house all day long. It was like karma in action. I was filled with gratitude. I plowed through busywork and in that happenstance-luck-veering-on-miraculous way thought of a faraway friend and then she popped in, requiring a quiet reunion, and there was quiet to greet her.
I didn’t think I remembered how to write. Wednesday, during my tiny writing window, one kid melted down and another followed and then the dentist’s office rang with a last minute opening and off we went… I wrote into the night and discovered gaps in sentences early the next morning, that exhausted and that determined. I remember and however kooky, I even had an idea!
**
And one more thing:
During my fallow, holiday hiatus, much was written about the girl Lego and boy Lego how unlike 1981, 2012 is, in Lego’s marketing at the very least. I’m sharing the image and the link to Peggy Orenstein’s wonderful piece on the gendering of toys spurred by the Lego brouhaha. Here are the two sentences that made much of what else was written simply verbiage: “At issue, then, is not nature or nurture but how nurture becomes nature: the environment in which children play and grow can encourage a range of aptitudes or foreclose them. So blithely indulging — let alone exploiting — stereotypically gendered play patterns may have a more negative long-term impact on kids’ potential than parents imagine.”
There’s a piece about contradictions, though, or maybe complexities, tucked in there. Simultaneously clear Orenstein is right, I can agree with K.J. Dell’Antonia’s assessment (definitely shared by me) that the Lego-specific problem may be as much the rigidity of kits versus old-school free-form bins of blocks to build things from imagination rather than toward a preset idea—and I can feel much calmer than I’d ever thought possible about my three-year-old daughter’s accruing sparkly silver shoes, a magenta tutu festooned with flowers, purple nail polish, and a pink sequined fairy wand over the holidays. I even gave her some of that stuff. There is the larger world and the smaller self and the ways those realities mesh can be complex. Too often, we get stuck on either/or when the truth of our lives more truthfully skews toward both/and.
