When I feel unsure as a mother, teacher, person, I often come back to science.
Weird, for someone who never outright pursued science academically (though I tried, as an undergrad, and switched when my confidence wavered).
But not so weird when I look at my patterns. I always come back to it.
When I chose to leave publishing to pursue teaching environmental science on Bainbridge Island. Then continued my second year of grad school at UW and loved my Community Forest Ecology class most of anything I learned that year.
When I started water quality testing programs for kids on Spectacle Island as a park ranger, and when I helped adapt Thompson Island Outward Bound's curriculum to Boston Public Schools science standards with hands-on, place-based experiential activities.
And when I decided to become classroom-certified in middle school science through Boston Teacher Residency, and undertook the hardest year of my professional and mental health life. We started that year off by reading "Science Matters" by Robert Hazen, and I could take that message and basically apply it to my life.
But when I became a 7th grade lead teacher at Christa McAuliffe Expeditionary Learning charter middle school in Framingham, I often reminded myself and my students that science is wonderful, but it is even better when complemented with artistic pursuit and appreciation. Incorporating creativity into the engineering design process, and to the creation of products that exhibit their learning, enhances the life of curiosity, experimentation, and observation.
I left the teaching world when I was faced with obstacles of my own mental health, yet again, and my ambitions to start a family. I went into a wholly unknown world, grappling with a different way of being that had nothing to do with achievement and intelligence, and everything to do with nurturing the heart, soul, and body. This was very scary new ground for me.
Mixed with the arrival of my son, my husband and I threw ourselves into a phase of cross-country moves for his work, and I brought along Rajan as my buddy, my partner in conquering the world one West Coast city at a time. This tumultuous time was a backdrop for my new personal mountain to climb: becoming a mother and reckoning my old identity with this abrupt and very new and different one.
I found a part-time job as a curriculum developer and educator at an nature preserve that married these two worlds quite well, so it stemmed the uncertainty for a bit. But nothing was ever quite the same when I had my whole world waiting for me at home while I went out and taught other people's children during the day.
Before long it was time for another move: we made the decision to move north to the Bay Area mere weeks before we discovered we were expecting our second child. With both new big events looming, we stopped thinking and went into emergency planning mode. I planned to finish out my job for the summer while Santosh moved northward ahead of us. A plan that makes sense on paper but sucks in implementation. We had one chance to apartment hunt over July 4th break, and that pressure damn near broke me, hormonal, first trimester crazed, and on our last day, panicking in the car demanding we make a decision right then.
It seemed like that was the beginning of a cascade of difficult events for a small family. Eventually moving to said small apartment (but huge and fancy by Bay Area standards), coping with pregnancy and a high energy 2.5yo boy while hubby figures out the new job, all while frantically looking for a permanent home before new baby girl arrives.
Teagan was born in January, with white pear blossoms blooming outside our first story window (spring occurs in January in San Jose, apparently). We had one year of positive growth, beautiful weather, and me getting high on learning how to be a mother of two in the best way I knew how: getting outside as much as possible. Teagan became the constantly carried baby, and had plenty of fresh air her whole first year, tagging along with brother on every schoolday at nature preschool, playgroup, soccer class, grocery trip-- the works.
Then, at the one year mark, the pandemic began. We thrived comparatively because of our neighborhood bubble of little friends, but there were harrowing times when I could see wildfires in the mountains from our window and I felt the anxiety gripping my heart to the point of chest pain. During this time, another move was planned, the final one (so far), to Seattle. While waiting for case counts and restrictions to fall, we had no idea when this move would actually happen, only that it would. A permanent-seeming limbo.
I'll fast forward through the predictable stress and anxiety (which was perhaps also covid-affected) of moving states, staying in an apartment for 6 months while house hunting during a very very expensive and competitive time to buy, and the multitudes of schools I tried for both kids as we went (not to mention the supports for me in health, social life, and fitness that I cycled through), to us being here now. We've been in our home, a big home, with a yard, in a suburb, for one year now. Things are starting to feel settled.
And here we are again, expecting a baby, our third, a boy, arriving in 10 short weeks. I have both kids in a school that seems stable and predictable enough to think (knock on wood) maybe we won't have too many other crazy changes coming at us as we get ready for a whole new person to join our family.
But we're also at the stage where, how do we keep life interesting?
How do we avoid phoning it in, letting family life feel old and stale?
The interesting challenge we're met with because of our history, is that we've never really lived anywhere long enough for this to happen. We've never stayed put enough to try things, see how they turn out, and then tinker with it till it's approaching a "swimming" ideal.
We've never planted seeds and stayed with them long enough to see them bear fruit.
We've never watched crystals grow long enough to see their beautiful full expression.
And here we are just starting to see those crystals form.
In Rajan's folder yesterday, he had a stapled homemade "Book About Whales" that he created in his free time at school. He said his friend Keller made one about machines. But they weren't assigned it as a project, it was just something he wanted to do, "because I like whales," he said.
I cannot hide the fact that my inner science nerd is just beaming about this creation. It made me think of that time my brother made a joke in his speech at my wedding that it was no surprise that the girl who liked to "breach like a whale" in our swimming pool went on the be a science teacher. Now her first-grader is making books about whales, with one fact and accompanying illustration per page, such as "Whales are mammals," "Whales take big breaths," "Whales eat plankton," and "Blue whales are the biggest mammal," and my heart is doing somersaults of glee. Like, I really want to publish this book and share it with the world.
The kids and I did a crystal experiment the day before yesterday, with a kit given to Rajan by Santosh's parents' church, which we attended on Christmas Day in Chicago. I had never done this before, so my inner science little kid was right with them in my curiosity. We read what crystals are, colored in cardboard trees, and poured a mixture over top of the tree and in a basin below it. Then we kept it still on the counter and watched the crystals grow and turn color over the next 12 hours.
The result was aesthetically pleasing, funny to the touch (like foam), and very gratifying (time wise). Then it was quickly destroyed with pleasure and tossed in the trash, but not without photographs taken to prove our accomplishment.
These are things we've been doing more of since we decided to cut back on screen time. I had been slacking off the month or so before Christmas as pregnancy dominated my bandwidth and travel and gift preparations took priority.
Yesterday we did basketball drills in the driveway as a family at 8p.m. at night, before that we played chess for the first time in awhile, though my memory is the one that has suffered, not Rajan's. We read his new "Level L" book, "The Greedy Python" by Eric Carle, and he triumphantly sounded out the word "astonishing" which was an appropriate word for that moment.
Some of these new things lately are helping me to locate a familiar part of myself, that science-curious soul, that holistic educator, that investigative journalist that lives deep down inside me. That person that has been there since I was a rookie girl scout planting beachgrass in the freezing rain with my mom and a bunch of strangers. That girl on the dock at a lake in Maine with the ponytail braid and relaxed, stress-free smile, who my dad saw in a photo and told me, you haven't changed a bit. That weirdo who like to leap out of the water and splash back down like a whale to the giggles of my siblings. That middle schooler who IM'd a marine biologist on AOL to interview her about her job for a school career exploration project. That writer who penned an autobiography from an imagined me at age 85 who lived in Australia, wrote children's books, and beat breast cancer.
When you become a mother, your tendrils of self, especially the most indefinable parts, become buried. At first. But maybe they are reseeding themselves. They are taking safe harbor while I build brand new parts of myself. The parts I never learned how to grow: humility, acceptance of failure, a giving of myself to others like I have never known, a way to become not just proficient at the hard things in life, but the basic things: like keeping a home clean, organizing a lifetime of material stuff, figuring out what relationships to keep, nurture, or revive. When the dust settles, maybe those old seeds will take root again.
