Avant parenting, Japanese style

Sometimes I wonder homeschooling is a sign of madness.

Then it occurs to me that parenting is probably a sign of madness. It certainly is for the men: they could go off and do the mighty hunter routine and go find another cave to live in, but instead they stick around with us. For the women, it’s less easy. It’s hard to reject flesh of your flesh, if you know what I mean.

This comes up because I’m exhausted. Today I ran “Japanese Culture Club” for four homeschooled girls. It used to be three, but four is a definite improvement. We added an older, calmer girl to the mix and gave it a good stir. Not quite the craziness of the three ingredient mix, if you know what I mean.

In the fall we did Nature and Baking Club with the three girls. That was exhausting but also easy. When my son was four, he and I went for lots of walks in the redwood forest that I’d been living next to for seven years and learned the names of the plants. We took photos and did research and then wrote a book about it. So teaching about the redwoods was something that I’d done before, and we did art and poetry and lots of playing in the creek.

Baking also comes naturally to me. I grew up in a house where lots of cooking happened, but baking was a powerful thing. My little sister still hasn’t forgiven me for making her grease the brownie pan over and over in exchange for getting to lick the bowl.

My brother and I were once inspired to make cheesecake and we stayed up til midnight waiting for it to get cold enough to eat.

But Japanese Culture Club is something different. Instead of something from my past, it’s something I’m planning for the future. The kids and I have been interested in learning Japanese for a while, but we’ve never done anything about it. Then I got a bee in my bonnet a couple months ago and decided that we were going to study Japanese, just do it. But in order to make myself do it, I had to raise the stakes. Thus three, and now four girls coming to my house weekly, expecting me to know a few words of Japanese, a song, and a meal.

Today was good morning, good afternoon, please, and thank you. It was tempura vegetables and teriyaki. Singing “Bun bun bun” about a bumblebee. At the time it didn’t seem like much. But it was.

It has left me drained and thinking about that flesh of my flesh thing. Now, why am I here when I could be living in that quiet, orderly cave I used to know? Why am I learning Japanese rather than sitting my kids down with a video from the library?

Working on the future is so much harder than enjoying the past.