the next stage begins

slightly dark iPhone photo of her room.

we dropped the child off at her efterskole today. it's a boarding school about a half an hour away, where she, along with 199 other 9th and mostly 10th graders, will focus on academics and gymnastics for the next school year. she was packing for days and was very much looking forward to going. i think the only thing she's worried about is missing her friends, but she made sure she spent loads of time with them over the past few weeks and it's not like she isn't still in a group chat or two with them.

we helped her unpack her things into a single small cupboard and make up her single bed in her 3-person dorm room. the other girls and their parents were there doing the same and there wasn't much chat between us, but that's typical in denmark. i think they were probably freaked that we were speaking english, which sabin and i always do and that made them hold back even more than usual. her roommates seemed like sweet girls, so i'm sure she's going to be fine.

they gave the parents quite a stern lecture about allowing their young people the freedom to unfold and truly experience life at school and not text them all the time and expect them to come home every weekend. i didn't really feel that the lecture applied to us as sabin's parents, since we have been known to leave her unattended in the country (just for a few hours when our flight paths crossed) or to put her on an 8-hour plane ride by herself or let her take the train to copenhagen for the weekend to visit friends or go off to italy with a friend on summer holiday. we're not clingy parents and have spent her first 14 years preparing her for this day.

looking around the room, there were parents (mostly mothers) with tears in their eyes at the prospect of letting go of little anders and little camilla, but i didn't feel sad, what i mostly felt was excited for her. i think i've said it before, but it feels like the next step. it's what she should be doing. getting very into her interest (gymnastics) and working on it intensively with the support of talented teachers/coaches. learning how to buckle down and study. learning to rely on herself and find her own inner strength. figuring out who she is and who she wants to be. we've given her a strong foundation, she's a good kid and she's going to have a n awesome year.

it will be a bit quieter around here, but we'll be ok. and so will she.

pondering the ways of teenagers

teenagers seem a bit like raptors at times

the child came home from italy more of a moody teenager than when she left. i guess two weeks of sunshine and eating real pizza and lying on a beach and staying up too late will do that. she was, in any case, tired and not really that happy to be landed back in this little town in the middle of nowhere. apparently, she's convinced that within her beats the heart of a city girl, or at the very least, the heart of a copenhagen girl (little does she know that copenhagen, with a population of only a little over half a million, isn't really a city in the strictest sense).

over dinner, she expressed dissatisfaction with plans to spend a year in the states (school year 16-17) in the little town where i grew up. apparently going from one middle of nowhere town to another isn't appealing when you're tired and have just been hanging out in italy. but i imagine she'll go willingly when it comes down to it. we may have scared her last week with talk of extreme religious nutcases and long distances to amenities like movies and proper shoe shops and apple stores. but then, i got out of there non-religious and there's always the internet for shopping, so she'll be fine.

initially, her negative reaction to studying for a year in my little hometown hurt. it felt like a rejection of me. i think it's important for her to know her roots - to get to know the extended family still living there and to have a taste of what it means to be a member of our family and to have a sense of groundedness in that place. but then i realized that rejection is a natural part of the rebellion of growing up. and i had to admit that i too cannot imagine ever living there again, so how can i expect her to imagine it, if only for a year?

but i'm also confident that she'll get over it and will undoubtedly want to go and look forward to going. she'll be able to get a driver's license (something she can't do until 18 in denmark, to my great dismay), make new friends, spend time with family, participate in competitive cheerleading (after a year at a gymnastics-focused boarding school, she'll be awesome) and try a whole host of other things that you can only do in a small high school, where the very life of the place is dependent on everyone participating in everything. and she will get in touch with a part of where she comes from. it will undoubtedly be uniquely her own perspective and grounding and that's ok too.

in a few weeks, she's off to boarding school. it's only 30 minutes away and she will come home some weekends. people keep asking us if we're freaking out and sad about it and i keep looking within for those feelings. and they aren't there. i love seeing her taking flight, setting goals, working towards them. it's the natural progression in her growing up into the person she will become. i think i've felt all along that as a parent i'm witness to something magical, but which i have only had the smallest modicum of control over. and i feel privileged to be there for each stage of a natural progression of this amazing child coming into her own. going to the gymnastics boarding school for her final year of primary school is exactly what should happen next. she's ready and so are we.

the formative years - on wonder woman and barbie

i've always loved wonder woman. especially in the form of lynda carter's portrayal of her during my formative years. she was so brave and true and tough and beautiful, all at once. and man, those wonder woman jumps. i practiced those by getting the swing at the park going as high as i could and then leaping off. i'm sure i was very graceful and strong, just like wonder woman, tho' i'm glad that video mobile phones were not ubiquitous then, so that i don't have to sacrifice that memory. i too wanted bracelets that could deflect bullets, a lasso that could make people tell the truth and an invisible jet of my very own. wonder woman inspired me to greatness. i've probably let her down, but she was inspiring to me just the same.

charlie's angels were around in that same era and with their beauty and bravery, they inspired me as well. i know charlie ultimately took care of them, but they seemed so strong and capable by themselves. they were tough and beautiful and they had great hair and clothes and they always caught the bad guy in the end - what more could you ask?

speaking of great hair and wardrobe, i'll admit that i loved barbie as well. she also had great hair and clothes and those shoes, they were awesome. my cousin had a fabulous barbie collection that burned up in a fire and i missed those lost barbies for years afterwards. they'd never been promised to me and i'd only been allowed to look at them, not touch them (being much younger and probably much stickier), but i adored them anyway and lamented their passing. of course, i had barbies of my own, but her collection was something special.

i read this morning about a very thin study suggesting that playing with barbie limits girls' career opportunities. at least in their own minds. and i have to say i think that's crap. barbie always had way more going on than ken and we all knew it. she was the brains and she had her own car and house and he was a mere accessory, who she didn't even really need (my barbie personally liked johnny west way more and in fact, she taught him a swear word or two (goddamn son of a bitch, jesus christ almighty was her go-to swear phrase of choice). yes, her feet were forever stuck in high heeled position and her waist is abnormally tiny, but she was fabulous. like wonder woman and charlie's angels, she was strong and capable and the leader of her pack. i don't feel at all that my love for her has held me back or made me not pursue a career in science or math. what kept me from that was the fact that i spent most of my time reading dostoevsky during physics class in high school.

30 days of lists: day 8

i remember a grade school classmate of mine had to don rubber gloves and scrub and scour the house with her mother every saturday morning. i found that so strange. aside from dishes, my chores were pretty focused on the horses and other animals outdoors. it seemed every time i had to do dishes, i managed to cut myself on a knife hidden in the sink under the bubbles. i always wondered if it was passive aggressive on my mother's part, wanting to see me bleed. i'm pretty sure she thought i did it on purpose to get out of finishing the dishes. the truth is probably neither of those.

slipping through my fingers

as i write this, sabin's landing in st. petersburg. yes, we did let her go in the end. if it had been just her, i would have easily said "no thanks," but her best friend, who turns 13 on thursday, was going as well, and that would have left her all alone on the trip with a bunch of kids from other schools who she didn't know. i just couldn't do that to them. and i felt completely better, delivering her to the airport at 4:30 this morning. she was so excited and so relaxed and confident as she made her way through airport security. the kid is a seasoned traveler, after all. she's going to be fine. i made her promise to take a million pictures.

i'll admit i listened to this in the car on the way home...

growing up with guns

i really do hate to use one of my last posts leading to number 2000 on the connecticut shooting, but i find i have a bit more to say, so use it i shall. tho' i do think that what jenna said about it is so well put that there's not really more to say.

i got a mail from a friend about the way that he, like many of us americans, was raised around guns.  and i have to admit that i was too. we had a really lovely rather bauhaus-style pistol in the buffet drawer and a number of shotguns standing down at the bottom of the basement stairs. i remember peeking in the drawer at the pistol to scare myself or show it conspiratorially to some friend, but never actually daring to touch it. it wasn't loaded anyway and i don't recall any bullets in the buffet drawer, so i imagine it was quite harmless. and i also imagine it's still there, tho' i didn't check when i was home last summer.

i loved (and still do) the story about it - my mother had inherited it from her aunt, who had been married to a banker in sgt. bluff, iowa. back in the 50s, someone had tried to kidnap her - it was such a wild story that it was written up in a one of those 50s detective magazines, mostly because as i recall, aunt mimi was feisty enough to escape from the kidnappers. but afterwards, her husband bought the pistol to protect her, in case it happened again. and we ended up with it in our buffet drawer. i think my dad tried to sell it to someone at one point, but it came back shortly afterwards, so that didn't really stick.

i also remember as a kid going with my mom to trap shooting competitions - she was pretty good and could compete with the best of the men. i always thought that was pretty cool. and a little bit as my sister often says, "mom is such a boy." i spent a lot of time reloading her ammunition with the reloader we had in the back room - a little dose of gunpowder, some bb's, a cap and a crimp (probably not in that order). i quite enjoyed that as a child.

pheasant hunting is a big thing in the area where i grew up, so hunting was a normal thing to me. many a meal was spent spitting out shot bb's from bites of meat. i never tried shooting pheasants myself, but i remember both of my parents doing so (that was in the days before they were all pen-raised with little sunglasses on). my folks weren't deer hunters that i can recall - dad always said something about how it would really only be sporting when the deer had guns too, but we did occasionally get deer meat from someone else. even today, i'm by no means against hunting (we have a friend who we allow to hunt on our lake - and we thoroughly enjoyed some ducks not long ago), i just don't do it myself.

i remember some raffle or other where dad won a gun, which only added to the 3-4 already at the bottom of the basement stairs, but i don't recall those guns being used that much after mom stopped trap-shooting. sometimes against the odd rabbit that was eating the apple trees or a nasty opossom or skunk that came around. i know i never had any desire to either mess with the guns or use them or even learn about them. they were just there, a fact of life. and i had no interest in them at all.

in the second grade, i was given a bb gun for christmas. we still lived in town at that point and i was told that it was meant to be used to shoot the dog next door, who was a really annoying barker. i probably did plunk him a couple of times (he was really annoying), but mostly, i think we shot at cans with that bb gun. and it certainly couldn't have killed anything, at least not with my shooting skills.

last summer, while we were back home, my cousin took sabin and her cousins out shooting at cans and jars. sabin thought it was fun. and i think it's a fine activity as long as there is adult supervision and proper instruction, which there was.

the fact is that most americans grow up around guns. they're a fact of life, they're in people's homes. we also all know someone who had an accident with one...a kid in the grade ahead of me shot off his toe (it must have been where he kept his brain, because he never amounted to anything after that) and one of my sister's classmates accidentally shot his little brother in the eye and wrecked his vision (but fortunately, didn't kill him).

but none of the guns in our home were assault weapons or semi-automatics. there needs to be more rules surrounding the possession of such guns - because it's just unnecessary to have them. you don't hunt with such guns, there would be nothing left to eat. it seems ironic that there are more rules surrounding obtaining a driver's license than a gun permit and more paperwork for registering a car than a gun.

and completely absurd that there is more support of keeping deadly guns in the hands of people than in ensuring that they have proper health insurance. a skewed set of priorities.

* * *

on a less serious note, how much do i love this?
read the follow-up post as well.

she was born in a small town

since i feel a little bit like their fairyblogmother, i am going to take the liberty of doing a 5 things i love about growing up in a small town list ala VEG & extranjera over on Ocean (and to think i was calling it siamese. my bad.). plus, you know how i love lists. and need an assignment. i've written about growing up in a small town kind of a lot of times before, but i'm not sure i've ever really thought specifically about what was good about it.

1.  getting to try everything

in a small town school, you don't have to choose whether you're a band person or a cheerleader or a theatre person or smart girl or a sporty girl. you can be all of them. and in fact, the only way the school thrives is if everybody does everything. so you try it all and find out what you like and what you're good at. and you learn not to be afraid of trying new things. and that will get you a long way in life.

2.  getting a driver's license (learner's permit anyway-able to drive without an adult between sunup and sundown) at 14

there was nothing to run into. it was flat and the ditches were wide.

3.  having horses

i grew up with horses. we always had them. we showed them, and i've written about my horse trainer before. she was awesome. and having horses is just a wholesome thing to do. you learn responsibility. hard work. caring. getting up early to feed. mucking out stalls. and that standing in the barn at dusk on a summer night, listening to the snuffling and munching of a horse is just plain good for your soul. and your sanity.

4.  big old house with a front porch

the house "in town" that we lived in 'til i was 10 or so had a front porch with a porch swing, big columns and it was all covered in vines. i loved sitting in there in the cool shade, protected from prying eyes by the vines, watching people go by. that was great. there was a silver milk box there and i remember milk being delivered into that box (yup, i'm old). ice cream jim came up on that porch dressed as santa one christmas. lots of good memories and some not so good. it was on that front porch that our dog stella bit my friend tracey on the nose. tracey kinda deserved it, she had totally gotten in stella's face and stella was an old crotchety shetland sheep dog. and there that time i got a huge sliver in my foot and my dad had to sit on me to hold me down while mom got it out with a needle and a tweezers. ouch. but for the most part, it was awesome for dressing up and playing laura from little house and just swinging on the swing.

5. always feeling safe 

it was a totally safe place to grow up. i don't even think our house had locks on the doors and if it did, no one had seen the key in years. you knew everyone and they knew you. and you trusted each other. and looked out for each other. i think it has made me a person who, for the most part, feels at ease in the world and isn't afraid. it's grounding to grow up feeling safe like that. i'm glad i had that ground to grow up on.

so those are my five things. what are yours?

just call me snow white

once upon a time a very, very long time ago, this little girl was dropped off to attend a week of bible school at a church in the little town where she grew up. now her family did not attend this church, but bible school was thought to be for anyone (thankfully very little of it stuck, except for a strange ability to, when pressed, remember the order of the books of the new testament). plus her parents thought, hey, free babysitting and a week of peace without the kid!

so her mother dropped her off outside the side door of the unfamiliar church, and despite her being quite small and never having been there before, just sent the child in without accompanying her. the child has a very clear memory of the crunch of the wheels of the stationwagon driving away on that little gravel road beside the church and how daunting that unknown door seemed. said child eventually plucked up the courage to go in and some people talked to her, inevitably asking her her name. feeling a bit shy and out of place and perhaps even having a vague feeling of having been abandoned out in the woods as well as having a healthy imagination, she informed them that she was called snow white.

she was pretty steadfast about the snow white thing and it took those people 'til mid-week to figure out who she really was. i guess someone finally spotted her mother, who didn't appear to be accompanied by seven dwarves, picking her up.

and they all lived happily ever after, but she still really hates going in alone to a new place full of new people who already know each other. and the man who owned the local pharmacy teased her about it for years afterwards, as he apparently found it such a sweet and amusing story. she got so she really hated to run into him. if he were still alive, she's sure he'd still remind her of it if she ran into him when she was back visiting that little town. some things you just don't live down.

pros and cons

just to think about something other than politics (how ARE we going to survive another month of this campaign?), i have, in usual monday fashion, decided to compile a list (or lists). so, i give you:

stuff my parents could have done better:

1. they never insisted that i brush my teeth (as a result of which i have about 15 fillings).
2. they cut my meat 'til i went to college. this created many embarrassing situations for me when i  went out in public and actually had to cut my meat by myself. not good.
3. i have really bad eyes. i'm like one diopter from needing a dog. we're talking -7 here! (at least in my left eye, with the right not far behind at 6.5.) that's just bad genes. tho' strangely, neither of my parents' eyes are that bad.
4. made me think one shouldn't throw things away because you just might need them someday.
5. told me that people were "just jealous" when i wasn't getting along with them (this may have given me an inflated sense of myself and an inability to see what was really going on).

but, to be fair, they did lots of stuff right:

1. gave me an abiding love for reading.
2. and writing. (that's also good genes.)
3. and music (9 years of piano lessons, almost as many flute and years of singing).
4. the fearlessness with which i face the world.
5. taught me there was a world outside that small town i grew up in.
6. my only rule growing up: "win or don't come home." (my sister's rule: no pot in the living room (more about that another day)).
7. an expectation that good things happen, not bad and things work out for the best.
8. anything is possible if you work for it (this is generally an american thing, isn't it?)
9. education is important.
10. raised me democrat, which made me open to the world. (thanks, dad!)
11. raised me to question things, rather than just accept things at face value.
12. raised me to love animals (not dogs, but cats and horses).

what did your parents do for you?