Saturday, November 6, 2010

Boxing Day

If there is one notion that underpins my self-sufficiency project, it is this:

There's an awful lot of important and useful stuff I didn't learn when I was growing up.

With this project, I'm setting out to learn those skills now. Better late than never.

And I thought (don't laugh!): "Maybe my kids would appreciate having the chance to learn some of these things while they are still young. It'll save them from having to acquire these skills later!"

Seriously. Stop laughing.

Before I had children, I had this idea about what my kids would be like. Sort of the Platonic Ideal of children. Clean. Well-behaved. They would listen to everything I said. Always fun to be around. Psychic (Yeah. Really. I mean, I realize now that that would really screw up the whole Santa thing, but what did I know back then?).

Perhaps you will observe, based on this list, that I was completely unfamiliar with the entire concept of children prior to becoming a parent.

We can add that to the list of things I didn't learn about growing up.

Now I recognize that I was envisioning my then-nonexistent children as extensions of myself. They were smaller, more perfect (and psychic!) versions of what I wished I could be. They would do what I asked because these fantasy mini-mes would want the exact same things.

Several thousand reality checks later, it's abundantly clear that neither of them is a small version of me.

Which is a fantastic thing.

My kids are great. They are funny and interesting, they have cool imaginations, enjoy reading, and don't complain too much when forced to listen to music that I like while we are driving in the car. Their listening skills are lacking... but if I weren't the one who has to clean up after them, force them to eat healthy foods, disappoint them daily with my failure to provide them with an endless supply of plastic toys, and nag them both into bed and out of it on school mornings (because, helpfully, they are always up that the crack of dawn on weekends), I think we'd be friends.

But we aren't friends.

I'm their well-intentioned (but often sorely mistaken) mom.

And sometimes things don't go quite as I'd planned.

..........
So, I wanted to bring them along on this journey to self-sufficiency, and I cast about in my mind for a while to come up with a project that we could share. Eventually, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to give each of them a garden box in which they could plant whatever (legal) plans they wanted to grow come the spring.

I still think this is a really good idea. It is a way that they can be invested in a project, see it from beginning to end, and enjoy the literal fruits of their labors. Yes, I know that the odds of inducing them to consume veggies without an undue amount of angst are approximately 3,720 to one. Never tell me the odds!

A connection to the plants. A sense of pride in ownership and production. These will be the tools I use to facilitate their peace with the peas.

When I told them of my plan, they exhibited a great deal of excitement. They are super-cute when exhibiting a great deal of excitement.

Excitement! Fantastic! It was time to figure out how to make a garden box. And then, after I completed them with the loving assistance of my children, I'd blog about learning to make a garden box. Score.

If you have read my Projects post, you will already know that I have absolutely no experience building things, and that garden boxes were first on my list. It was a good choice for first project because it was - even for me - really simple.

Especially since someone else did the hard work.

I feel like I should talk more about the fantastic landlord that I have these days. The rental experience in which I was embroiled immediately prior to this one would have made me appreciate a simple scenario wherein we had a landlord that took our money in exchange for providing decent, safe, pleasant housing and a reasonable response time to problems.

We had a low, low bar.

It appears that I paid off some vast karmic debt with that last one because we have lucked out now with Lou and Don.

Among the many fantastic bonuses that come along with living here is the fact that, when I asked Lou if they had any wood from which I could build some garden boxes, I ended up receiving expertly sawn wood (and, yeah, I don't know what kind - 2-by-somethings? - probably a fact I should figure out if I'm going to build something else), screws, and the loan of one heck of an awesome drill.

Once everything was delivered to my back porch (yes! delivered!) it took about ten minutes to get everything screwed together. My son even helped with the drilling part, exhibiting a four-year-old's innate love of dangerous power tools.

It didn't take much longer for the whole kid-participation part to go to Hell.

I could tell you all the different topics about which my children fought over the course of the next hour as I tried to get the boxes positioned, weed-free cloth placed in the bottom, and horse poop piled inside...

Okay, actually, I couldn't tell you all the topics because after a while the different topics just all sound the same. And - since I didn't go into this part earlier, I'll tell you now - I had started the day by asking my daughter to fold her clean clothes and take them to her room ("That's so unfair, mom! Why should I have to do that?"), a request that culminated in an argument about chores, followed by a denouement of cleaning out her room (to the tune of my endless rant about endless piles of little plastic toys), before we even made it to Lou and Don's to get started with the garden boxes.

So, it hadn't been the best morning ever. And, from an interpersonal standpoint, it still had some downward spiral to travel.

The culmination came when I heard my daughter sobbing from inside the house (I'd given up on getting them to help shovel poop). I went inside to find her dressed in a bridesmaid dress I wore at a cousin's wedding over a decade ago and crying over a dead monarch butterfly with a crumbling wing. Her father had given her the butterfly years ago and she has treasured it since. The wing damage, she alleged, was due to her little brother - but it is hard for me to tell how hard one would have to joggle a butterfly that has been dead for years in order to get it to fall off.

In any event, both children had devolved to a state of tears and hysteria.

There was approximately zero interest in garden boxes at that point. And no interest in family activities. Or in what we might or might not grow the following summer.

Eventually I got both of them settled, to my chagrin, in front of the TV and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was the one thing they seemed to agree on during the course of the day.

I got the boxes to a good stopping point and threw in the towel. The remaining horse poop will have to go in later this week.

It felt like a pretty big failure. Not the boxes. They are great. But the attempt to involve my children in this larger project that I would like to use to connect us to each other, and our environment, and our larger choices as a family.

..........
Then, on the way out for the evening, my daughter got to talking about what she was going to grow in her box. Apparently it's sugar cane. And flowers.

My son chimed in, excited about tomatoes, carrots, and peas (all things he would disdain if I placed in front of him for dinner).

I realized then that this project that I am undertaking is not an event: it is a process.

So they lost interest after the first screws went in. Maybe they just felt more like bickering that day. But there will come a day when we choose the seeds to plant, and start them inside in their little peat pellets. There will be days when we plant the seedlings out for the year, days when we water and pull the weeds. And then there will be the days when we harvest our crops and I have to force the kids to eat them.

There is a long road ahead of us: with this garden, with this project, with our lives together. It's important that none of us let the bad moments define us.

Let it go. Focus, instead, on the coming miracle of sugarcane in Vermont. And how I'm lucky to get to share this project with two wonderful, funny, annoying kids.

..........
I've edited to add a picture of the final product, filled and ready for the spring.



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