Befores and Afters

A friend recently told me that from afar my life looked idyllic. I had to think about that. Idyllic;  Adj.: Extremely happy, peaceful or picturesque. 

Hmmm. I guess it could look that way.  I’ve always tried to be honest in my social media posts. I never use a filter or photoshop on people, especially not myself, and only filter other photos to bring the color up to the vibrancy of real life.  But one thing I recognize is that I am a master cropper. A castoff shoe, a cluttered countertop, a basket of laundry, all end up on the virtual cutting room floor. 

I crop stories, too, to protect my family’s privacy. I way over-share my own stuff, as you well know, but their stories are not mine, even though the pain they can cause often is.  It’s not at all that we don’t have trials.  We have scrapes and snags like everyone; marital fussing, belligerent offspring, embarrassingly deferred maintenance, and shocking sinks towering with three days of cereal bowls and soup pots. 

 I guess I don’t need to justify anything. We are a pretty typical family in most ways. I will admit that the Littles have an unusually close relationship. I thank God everyday for sending Nano for Jonah.  But we argue and fuss and get our feelings hurt and feel lost and alone and overwhelmed, just like everyone else. 

By cropping out some stories I guess my life can sometimes look like a glazed donut, but trust me when I say there have been heartbreaks and tragedies. Doughnuts have holes.  I’m not trying to depict our lives as one big “After” picture. Sometimes I just forget you haven’t seen the “Before”. 

*****

Before: our garden area, long neglected.  Last year at this time I was still nearly bedridden after three months of severe shingles and the the sledgehammer of Hashimoto’s. Neglected weeds send down deep roots. 

 This is AFTER two days of weeding!  

5 days in:

The never ending burn pile...

My goal had been to get all the prep work done during the week so we could plant that Saturday. We lost a day to rain, and the near equivalent to lollygagging, whining and faux weeding (which is when children look like they are weeding, but upon close inspection are counting the stripes on rolly polly bugs). 

That Friday, Guy and I had a date night, toodling around Lowe’s gathering cinder blocks and fence poles, but our plans for lush garden plantings were thwarted by endless racks of tomatoes and not much else. We got some takeout and watched the tail end of the sunset from the Petco parking lot.  Dating in the era of covid.  

In vegetable desperation, on Saturday we hopped over to the little garden center here in town. I seldom stop there, guilty of opting for low price over local.  It was so amazingly beautiful!  One might say... idyllic.



The nursery’s weathered, hand-built shelves were loaded with heirloom-this and hybrid-that, and held aloft over dozens of volunteers; Blue Columbine popping up at the bench corners, Hostas and stripped creepers blanketing the shady ground under benches, and sprays of Alyssum tumbling like giggling babies from old clay pots stacked in rusty wheelbarrows.





It looks like gardening perfection there. Of course, one doesn’t see the late nights spent over hundreds of weeks since this place came into being, or the bin out back of brown stems and dry, crunchy leaves on plants that didn’t make it long enough to find their forever home. 

(What the heck are my kids doing in the background? I didn’t see that happening when I took the picture!)

We bought veggies, mostly just the food we will eat, and a few that will become bug food for sure (I know, I know, cayenne and soap. I remind myself to get around to it every time I see a chewed up leaf).  And each child chose a pack of flowers, for our spirits. 

Then it was back to work...
 

When kids start fighting I should tell them to go get in a garden box. 

A transplanted lavender that is not happy. 

A volunteer!  Miner’s lettuce. To some, a weed, but not to me. It’s cute, the deer don’t like it, so I’m leaving it!

My sweetie, my smiling garden gnome. I’m really grateful to him. Outdoor work is not his favorite. Bugs. Specifically, mosquitoes.  He’s delicious to them, you see.  But he has been very willing. We are setting new fence posts to enclose the entire garden (I have been UNimpressed with the individual wire cages on the boxes, as my arms are not nine feet long). We weeded the beds on the landing and are moving ferns from the creek, which is cheap and exhausting. But he’s been a trouper. 

Blessedly, there are plantings around the property that we inherited. Thank heaven. It’s nice to have someone else’s Afters to give us some courage for our Befores. 

The Hush of Ladybugs

They came! Oh, glorious little things, they came! I somehow missed them last year and thought they were gone for good, but after cold and rainy winter, and a long chilly spring, the earth has warmed and woken up the ladybugs. And here they come, floating through the sky, their silent, milling traffic over my head, and clinging by thousands to the posts and plants and walls of my house. I love the migration.

Maybe I missed it last year because I was sick. That’s possible. Their migration doesn’t last long, less than a day or two. And I had worried that we had also missed it this year, or that they had chosen some other place to call their homebase. But yesterday while gardening, I noticed a small abundance of them here and there and was hopeful. 

Then, today, I looked out the window.

Normally, the site of thousands of bugs filling the air might give one pause, or likely the heebie-jeebies, but this is beautifully different, wondrous even. Silent and reverent. I am sitting on the porch at this very moment, hearing the creek, the breeze in the trees, my song birds, and feeling the hush of the ladybugs.

I learned that ladybugs come to this place every year, having never before been here in their lives. They follow some mystical map, a geographic spirit quest, returning to the place where they were conceived, having never seen it before. They steal away each fall to some hidden den to hibernate, then come out one warm spring day. 

Today.

After mating here, they will head out into the world, some of them flying hundreds of miles, to lay their eggs, and live their lives, and die. Then, when the time comes, their children will return to this very spot; a place they have never before seen, by route they have never before traveled. 

The reverence I feel sitting here as the red speckled procession flows like an unphotographable river over my head is so immense I can scarcely breathe.  It is pure peace. I wish I could share this hush with the world. 

Treading carefully, as ladybugs have landed on the ground. 

Doing a “ladybug check”, before going inside. We don’t want any hitchhikers!

An Uncommon Song

It's probably been there  all along and somehow I just never noticed.  With Covid having reduced our daily pace from frantic and frenzied to somewhat placid and peaceful, there are more pauses, more deep breaths, more hushes, and many more breezes in the treezes.  As a result, I’ve been spending more time on my balcony and out in the yard lately, enjoying this beautiful, long-awaited spring.

As this is our third mountain spring, I have by now grown accustomed to the constant tree-chatter.  Our bedroom is on the third floor, and with the windows open we get a bird's-ear perch for the morning chorus.  Now, much in the same way that one learning a new language goes from hearing a flowing stream of sound, to identifying syllables, and soon, words, I have come to understand that much of the sky song I had been hearing was coming from a single virtuoso.

It rings out from the trees; five or six short bursts of melody, each sung-syllable unique, but strung together like a necklace of precious pearls. This ballad is followed by a silence just as long as it's tune, and then a new refrain warbles and trills; a new strand of pearls, the same bright tones, but arranged in each phrase differently. Sometimes, somewhere off in the distance, there is an answering call, similar but not the same to the one nearby, that fills the silent spaces perfectly.  A sonorous Yin and Yang.  Kindred carolers.

I have become obsessed with trying to see this magical musician. Certainly, it must be one of the beautiful, bright-orange sky dancers, or yellow breasted lovelies I have seen dashing from tree to tree. Maybe the one with the sleek black head and dove grey chest, or perhaps the darling with peachy cheeks and stripes on its wings that can only be seen when it’s flying.

But alas, try as I might, I could never see my mystery cantor.

I had to go about this differently! I reached out to my friend, Roy, a wild bird aficionado. He was the one who helped me identify the marvelous White Kite with red eyes that had floated above the trees, motionless, coasting on the wind as though held in place with an invisible string. As large as a hawk, it glided in stunning contrast to the Mediterranean blue sky.  Roy would know.

I sent him a recording, then waited.

He answered.

"It sounds like a robin, but could be a Rose-breasted Grosbeak.  More likely a robin."

No, no, no, no.  Unacceptable.  How could my marvelous minstrel, my bold and booming songster be a common (with-a-lower-case-R) robin?  They are the worm-pullers in every coloring book and cartoon, the pot bellied old men of the bird world.  How uncouth.  This breed is a step above the pigeon and a notch below the grackle, and if you don't know what that is, just look around any Walmart parking lot.  You'll see them fighting over cold french fries.

I refuse the verdict.  I deny the diagnosis.  I rebuff the ruling!  I vote grosbeak.  At least.  If not something much more elegant and exotic (and without the word gross in it's name).  I have caused myself many a disappointment in life from my elevated expectations. You'd think I'd learn.  But I held out hope for something special.

But I looked it up.  It was.

It was just a common robin.

I will allow you to be shocked and disappointed at my reaction, as in the ensuing days I certainly have become.  There is nothing wrong with common, and it's actually pretty amazing when something sort of regular and normal steps up to being magical.  Who knew there was a clandestine crooner there all this time, bellowing it's bright tones from within the branches of a tree not 10 feet from my window, disguised as a common robin.

A few days after his first text, Roy sent a follow-up.  He was responding to my comment that I was surprised at having never heard these lovely songs, despite seeing these birds my whole life.  He said that he is hearing them all the time now too, but he thought it was just happening in Utah.

Perhaps they have always been there.  Maybe the robins haven't changed, but we have finally slowed down enough to listen, to actually hear them.

I don't know, but I think the Robin just earned itself an uppercase R.

Thank You, Calvin

“He’s probably the worst case I’ve seen in 20 years.”

That’s what his reading specialist said. Nine year old Jonah has extremely profound dyslexia.  He sees everything, wood grain, water stains, even burned toast, in 3-D pictures. That includes letters. They levitate and spin on the page. Words create patterns and pictures before his eyes. The word “bed” actually looks like a bed to him (do you see it? The headboard and the footboard sticking up?).  In his brain, it’s like the letters are cut out of thick pieces of wood, rotating in front of him, revealing their sides and back, upside down, sideways, and diagonally. He doesn’t have the luxury of print that stays in one place.

It would be pretty hard for you and I to read if we had to chase the words around in the air above the page, don’t you think?

A few years ago, I was struck with a sudden awareness that the reason I had been prompted, before Jonah was even crawling, to homeschool our kids was  for this little boy.  The feeling was powerful, an instant paradigm shift. In one moment, I became suddenly aware that this child, with his very unique temperament and astounding creativity, would have been destroyed in an environment of arbitrary assignments and communal expectations made with no regard to his interests and talents.  And this came before we even knew he had a learning challenge, which is part of the blessing. Whenever I doubt myself as a homeschool mom, I have that moment to look back on. 

In the process of learning how to teach Jonah, I’ve been learning so much about dyslexia. I’ve even learned that besides Ellie, who we already knew had it, that Ethan and I both have it too. Mine is a story for another post, and I only wish I had known about Ethan’s back when he was in school.

The other kids might have done well enough in public school. Tessa grows beautifully wherever she is planted, and Ellie’s sweetness gets her through a lot of tough situations.  Nano is a spaz, but super smart and quick to learn. She’d do well, as long as the teacher didn’t mind having a singing grasshopper in class. 

But sweet Jonah is a different story. He is perhaps my most sensitive child. If he is feeling shame or embarrassment for any reason, the whole factory shuts down, rendering him unable to function. Rage can loom just beneath the surface, and it doesn’t take much for it to break through.  He has a tender soul, which can attract bullies. Being given multiple of directions confuses him, and he doesn’t do well with several adults to focus on. 

Learning how to be the best mom for Jonah has been an exercise in balancing my own emotions. He’s a barometer, and feels everything around him. He’s an investigator of facial expressions and body language, and studies people’s emotional state (dyslexics are masters of pattern recognition), reacting strongly to any negativity. If my voice elevates, if my expression shows even slight distain for his behavior, he crumbles.  I have become an expert poker player, learning to read his tells -which are very subtle- and reshuffling the cards before he shuts down.  

On top of it all, Jonah has a profound creativity. I have never seen a child so artistically inclined. His artwork is amazing, his engineering clever and sophisticated, and his problem-solving, eloquent.  He is a brilliant collector of knowledge about all wildlife and nature.  He studies biology for hours on end.  There’s just one problem…

His brain was not built to read. You have never seen a child work so hard to achieve so little on a daily basis. I have held him in my arms as he wept in frustration, learning the same letter or the same tiny word over and over again, only to forget it again the next day. And the next. And the next.

I started with the usual things that had worked with my other kids, moved on to the brain training that Ellie had found success with, and then found a kind woman, that reading specialist, at church who worked with him for a year out of the goodness of her heart. He progressed some, but true reading was still an elusive goal.  We got additional resources from the charter school, and have worked with several different reading programs, each offering its own tools and helps along the way.  We are finally seeing progress, albeit very slow. 

One of the hardest things about having a child with dyslexia is that their reading abilities are far below their intellectual ones. Books that are easy enough for them to read are “baby books” in their eyes.

All but one. Well, one collection, I should say. Calvin and Hobbes.

Thank heaven above for Bill Watterson, the cartoon creator, over whom I have literally prayed with gratitude.  Somehow he took a little boy who is smart and funny and wild and who struggles, and wrangled him into the pages of those blessed books.  He gave that boy a companion; a conscience, who is wise and noble, and a little bit naughty, with a sophisticated sense of humor. They are everything Jonah needs right now.  

Jonah and I read Calvin and Hobbes every day, jumping from strip to strip based on how Jonah feels in the moment, which you can do, because every strip is it’s own tiny story. The font is easy for him to read, and having it all in capital letters somehow helps him. We even find ourselves talking about things like science and politics as I explain why a certain strip that he’s not understanding was funny. Calvin is a pretty awesome little boy.

In the past few weeks, Jonah has finally begun to blossom. He’s reading words like, people and snowball and feathers, which is huge considering a few months ago he still couldn’t consistently read him or and.  He calls the word the, “that stupid little word”. 

He’s come such a long, hard way. 

Jonah has recognized that if spaceman spiff is in the pictures, he probably won’t be able to read those frames. Words like despicable, adversary, and mertilizer-laser are a little complex still. 

But I’m not worried anymore. When he’s ready, I know Calvin will be waiting for us.

(If you are worried about the bean bag being too close to the stove, don’t be. It’s an optical illusion. It was two feet away.)   

Resources we have used:

Other Traits of dyslexia:

https://www.dyslexia.com/about-dyslexia/signs-of-dyslexia/test-for-dyslexia-37-signs/

Book: The Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald Davis

Linda Mood Bell reading program

Brain Training by Diane Kraft 

All About Reading program by Marie Rippel

And of course, Calvin and Hobbes, by the wonderful Bill Watterson.