work is love made visible

I love anything that comes from the hands: the garden's fruit, the well-risen bread, the hand-quilted blanket, the drawings my daughter offers up after all of that painstaking detail.

I love how, in the realm of Montessori, we don't necessarily praise the child for a result, a product, but instead say: "That was a big work." We acknowledge the process, and I'm learning how to have a relationship with that beautiful concept of "the friendliness with error." This, too, is a big work.

We turned in our albums on Thursday, and before I let mine go, I gave it a little embrace and kissed it--this is what I do to submissions of poetry; I kiss the envelope before I drop it into the box because I want to wish it well into the world and love it no matter what the results may be--and that 340-page monster joined the slippery pile of other monsters of varying length. At one point, some topped to the ground, causing this impressive collective gasp-groan from the room and much lunging from the nearby Montessorians, but they are well, intact, and in the hands of the graders, who have a great deal of my sympathy as my least favorite thing about teaching older students was the piles and piles of grading. Fortunately, the system is pass or resubmit, rather than a complicated A-F, scribbled with red kind of deal. We're given commentary that is rooted in the desire for us to actually improve as opposed to justify the letter grade we got.

I've always kind of loved the want/need/wear/read philosophy of gift-giving, and that's been heightened after reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Simplicity appeals to me, which is perhaps why Montessori appeals to me. (And yes, those of you who have seen my house, I know. I'm working on it.)

But I'm fluttering around what I really want to get at, which is how the act of work with one's hands can represent such a deep manifestation of love. Maya draws something with her hands, out of love for the person she draws for. Each drawing often has a narrative--one she's made while she draws, sometimes with the birds and fish and whatnot conversing with one another as they come to life. And I looked at one and thought, "I want to have a relationship with that." It's a collaboration, between me and my bear, these little embroidered illustrations. I'm working on another on my travels to Maine (hello from the Bangor airport!) that I will reveal later. My fingers stitch over her illustration, fiber over embroidery pencil, my hands repeating as best I can what her hands originally did.

Above is the result of what got me to finally put needle into fabric. I'd puttered around with handstitching on birthday crowns but hadn't embroidered before and knew it was time because I had swooned a few too many times over other people's work and daydreamed about what I could do myself--imagine the ways in which I could marry fiber plus pocket nature finds plus poetry!--and here is my second embroidered work--Maria Montessori's bulb of development, but the one done in her original handwriting because there's another layer of handwork that I love. (Before she passed away last October, I'd write a letter to my grandmother nearly every day, though it slowed a bit after children, sadly.) This bulb was a gift to our foundations course instructor, who, much to my relief, loved it, and now I'm itching to keep doing this, the tiny intimacies that come from fingers moving over a palate, over all of the space that is my deep appreciation, my love for what four weeks can do to a human being. My way of bowing and saying thank you. Of saying namaste. I bow to the divine in you. The Buddha in me sees the Buddha in you.

And the ones with Maya are my favorites, because who doesn't love that kind of collaboration? I asked her who we should give the first one to, and she was very insistent that it was a gift to me, so I've framed it and put it up against the wall right next to the first family portrait she drew (so much has changed in her fine motor control!) and Finn wanted in on the fun, so he gave me some glorious scribbles, and when I return home, I'll sit down with that and collaborate with my son as well.

(PS: title of post from Kahlil Gibran)

stewardship

My daughter has a special passion for those things bright and small. And large and cumbersome and fluffed out and sleek and scaled and all the other adjectives you can apply to the animal kingdom. It's her calling, as far as a five-year-old can have a calling, and I've always known her getting her very first her-own print would be a big day.

And, apparently, when your mama is in training to become a Montessori teacher and just spent some time touring the classrooms full of the sweetest of class pets, and you've had these discussions of stewardship, then you might stumble into a conversation with your daughter about your own class pets and might somehow transition into her very own first pet--I don't know where the turn came. I think it might have been when we started watching guinea pig videos--when she asked what they were, so I asked Ryan to look it up, and suddenly we were calling a pet shop to make certain those sweet critters were, you know, around.

This fellow is named Max, and he's a bearded dragon, and he's actually mainly Finn's pet. His full name is Heartsy Love Max, because Maya calls everything Heartsy Love and Finn's begun adopting that name. And Max is the name of his imaginary friend.

Ryan told Maya that if she read to her friend, it could become a reading companion--that her little critter loved being read to. This was after I told her all about the Flemish rabbit that roams the Children's House and is read to by the children. We were hoping, you know, a nudge. It worked!

It just was Finnegan who went straight to the bookcase to get some books to read to the new pets. What sweet little voices he used too.

Maya's new friend is a guinea pig she named Luna. Luna is a boy, but Luna doesn't mind so much.

Luna makes this wonderful yerp yerp yerp noise which I think seems to mean contentment. He kept cuddling into Maya's lap, nesting in, peeking up, snuggling.

The guinea pig is 100% her responsibility with a little side-kicking built in. We make sure all the things happen, but when Grandma asked her, "Who's going to take care of the poop and all the bedding?" Maya pointed at herself. Before we went to the store, I sat her down and said, "OK, you get that this is your pet. You choose it--you pick which one, you pick what you want to go with it, you pick where it goes--though it has to be somewhere in your bedroom, you name it. You're its mama, in a way. So you will have to make sure he's fed and has water and you have to take it out every day and love it. It needs attention too. Are you ready to take this on?"

She feels quite serious about this task now, so the work, from our part, is helping maintain the momentum. After all, this is a thrilling new addition to our home, both pets (Finn didn't get "the talk" because we are co-parenting in this case--I let him name him just the same and we are trying to acclimate the bearded dragon to him as well, but I do know that I am the caretaker and we aren't communicating the same things to Finn as we are to Maya--he's three, she's five).

Maya didn't want to fall asleep tonight. She didn't want to put Luna back in his little hutch. I told Maya the story of the night she was finally born--after 42 hours of labor, she was in the world, nearly ten o'clock at night, and I wasn't about to surrender her to the bassinet, so we became instant co-sleepers, and from that night on, she never slept in a crib, save one strange afternoon nap in which Ryan got her to sleep and slipped her in. But every other attempt, even in the co-sleeper, was loudly rejected, and we let it be. I know attachment parenting doesn't gel with the Montessori inclination towards independence, but there are places in my parenting where I will deviate, and I'm going to make peace with that.

For now, she can look down from her bunk and see the soft sweet form that is Luna, and I am going to hope like heck that her little brother doesn't lift the latches and let him out because who knows where that little guinea pig will scurry if given the chance! It'll take a while before he realizes this is his special space, that this is the safe space we have set up for him. It's hard to understand that with little kids in the room, but it's an important skill for my children, for any children--developing that respect for the act of stewardship not through lectures but from authentic experiences in their own lives.