Letters to my children - Calendars, Inaugurations, and Healing Lemons

Over winter break Bean you made a calendar. Twelve (which we learned recently comes from the fact people used to say, “one, twoo, three”) different pages were filled in by you with the correct number of days (from our month of the year song), starting on the right day of the week (from our days of the week song), and decorated with seasonal doings (or birthday cakes if that was appropriate). As such, every morning we cross off the day before and you tell me the day, date, month, and year. I find it really fun and so far it seems, so do you. 

Hard to believe we are almost to the Inauguration of our new president. In other years I would say that we would go to DC and join the party, stay in a hotel, bundle up, mingle with the chaos on the streets and be part of history. Not this year, this year there will be National Guard troops as the crowd. There will be uniforms and guns and stern watchful faces on the Mall ushering in this new era. It breaks my heart for the necessity and it also breaks my heart for this potential slippery slope. So many changes have happened to Capitol Hill since my childhood. 

When I was your age, I could play hide and touch the walls of the Capitol Building and the Supreme Court. Now you are not allowed anywhere close to the buildings - courtesy first of the Oklahoma City bombing and then September 11. It was after September 11 that they put in 6 foot metal posts 3 feet in the ground 4 feet apart all around the grounds of the Capitol to prevent tanks from driving onto the grass (I guess). Then they put flower pots on top to disguise the posts. 

I remember seeing them do this work as I would commute to my job at the restaurant - thinking to myself that once you put in those posts it is almost impossible to take them out… then it becomes normal to see ugly concrete flower pots all around the grounds. It became normal to see closed streets and guard sheds all over - like the one on the corner of 1st street and East Capitol where the bus used to be able to stop when I was coming home from school. 

When your father and I first were dating the changes were still somewhat new and I would get so angry and sad for the fear and the perceived necessity of such precautions. “Why is there a man with a AK-47 on the corner looking at me as I eat my muffin? Do I live in a police state? What is going on? The Magna Carta in England is protected by one layer of glass in a church that probably has lost the key to the room where it is kept!!” I would burst out as we are walking. Your Dad would shush me and squeeze my hand. 

Deep breath, Corinna, things change. Things change. So my beloveds, I am hoping that this odd year of National Troops as the main audience for this Inauguration is not a permanent change or the start of some terrible tradition - because that doesn’t feel like a good direction to go. 

Now I am crying because it makes me so sad, and this is precisely why I stopped reading the newspaper the night before the election in the first place. Though, even without feeding my curiosity by constantly checking on the latest news developments - I still hear enough of the terrible highlights to be appalled, saddened, and affected by what is going on right now. Wow, breathe Corinna, this is why I am so grateful to be your Momma right now. 

As I spoke about last time, you two are my ballast as the maelstrom shirls and whirls and flops and flouts and catapults life about in this nutso time. This is why, my beloveds, we do the Bean’s calendar every day, we do math lessons every day (not Monday and Wednesday, I know Bean, smile), we have snack, we do dishes, we make granola, we read books, we chase, we play games, we go for walks, we have rest time, etc etc. The metronome of the home nurtures us all. 

Sometimes it even heals us… (wait for it…hehe)

Dragon,on Monday, you asked me for a lemon 5 minutes before dinner was going to be ready.

“I am sorry darling, I can’t give you a lemon to eat, we are going to have dinner in 5 minutes.”

“NO MOMMA.” (You seem to have two volumes these days, rock concert and library.) “I want it so I can make it into a Healing Lemon.”

“Oh well in that case, here you go.” I hand down a lemon from the counter. “A Healing Lemon?”

“You hold onto the lemon and the juice moves into your body and goes to any ouchie you have. Do you have any ouchies Momma?”

I pause as I am stirring. “Sure.” Dragon, you hand me the lemon.

“Now hold it and the juice will go where it needs to go.”

“Even to my toes?”

“Yup.”

“How about my elbows.”

“Yup.

“Wait,” Bean, you enter the scene, “I want a Healing Lemon.”

“Of course you do, hold on.”

So that was the evening, holding citrus fruit so the juice could make our ouchies better. Pretty awesome. Thank you both for being my children. I love you so so much.