Got it together

Lizzy feeding Buck mango with chopsticks because we’re nothing if not cultured

Last week on my regular grocery run, there was a refreshingly patient older man in the unfortunately long line. He declined to go ahead of a full-carted customer who offered, waving her off and cheerfully saying he wasn’t in a hurry.

Caleb commandeered Buck’s tunnel that Lizzy constructed so he could move freely between the school room and the playroom (it requires an elaborate rubber-band-and-bent-paper-clip latch system on both ends to keep the doors closed up to the tunnel so Buck can’t escape to the general house, which is also pretty effective at keeping humans from being able to escape to the general house). The wire tunnel cuts directly across the bottom of the staircase, rendering it miraculous that no human has yet killed themself tripping over it. Lizzy was not pleased to find that Caleb had constructed a double train track through it so his trains could move freely between the school room and the playroom.

He ended up right behind me (and my heaping-full cart) when I got to the cashier. With mild amusement, he watched me unload my massive pile of groceries and commented, “This isn’t your first shopping trip.” 

He continued to watch as I repacked my cart with my now-full reusable shopping bags as the cashier handed them to me, getting out my wallet and swiping my card in between bags.

Whether he was commenting on the capacious volume my bags hold, or the efficiency with which I Tetris-ed them into the cart, or something else, he pronounced, “You’ve got it all together.”

Reader, I do not have it all together.

Could it be, though, that I’ve arrived at a ripe old age of occasionally looking like I have it all together?

I got a text from a church acquaintance a couple days ago asking if I would mind talking to her sometime about homeschooling older elementary kids. What curricula do you like? What is your philosophy? How do you handle grades?

I told her I’d be happy to talk to her, at which point she asked if another friend of hers could join the conversation to also hear what I have to say.

My knee-jerk reaction to this upcoming conversation was anxiety. I don’t know anything! Why would someone ask me?! What if I tell them the wrong thing? But even I see that response is unjustified. By virtue of having been alive longer, and having homeschooled for longer, I have experience; ie, the form of knowledge my friends can’t get from googling it. 

As the man in the store said, it’s not my first shopping trip.

Nor is it my first day of school. Or my first day on the planet, or even of being a mom or a homeschooler. I don’t have it all together. But maybe once you’ve lived long enough, you’ve done enough of “it all” that some of it inevitably gets itself together.