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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Martha

SO, Friday night we spent at a house relatively nearby but hundreds of years away and I am flummoxed by how plastickyandoverloadedandtrite my childrearing has become, not to mention my life. my god, don't mention my life. (i mistakenly typed lie instead of life and am choosing not to leave it there but my god!)


The mother of the family of five, four boys and an almost 4 year old girl, all of whom were born at home, is named Martha. She is Brazilian and German and smackdab beautiful . She is 45 and showed me what she remembered of her capoeira dancing in the kitchen and then proceeded to do a full split. yes, she did. She is going through menopause and told me she'd been hiding in the basement all week crying uncontrolably but had to come up for the school lessons. Yes, th
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ats right. She has homeschooled all those kids. The oldest is 16 and is in Brazil currently living with friends. And by friends, I mean, community brothers and sisters. And by 'community' I mean the sort of community that people in the community are slightly scared of. yes, i did say that.


I think the people in the community who are afraid of the community are misguided, but it is definitely an alternative lifestyle. She currently shares her house with another family, and all their food is shared with all of the community houses in the surrounding states. seriously. AND, for all those kids, ALL those kids, there was one, ONE, box of toys, almost all of which Martha had made herself, WITH the kids. YES. They had balls and instruments and puzzles and drawing materials and so on. did i mention its four boys and the OLDEST is 16? There were no weapons in the toybin...and they don't actually beat the crap out of Martha or out of each other.


I am not making this up.


I came home today and literally unplugged the television. and I'm looking at our hundreds and hundreds of figures and organizing bins which are never organized and I'm embarassed. I'm embarassed that my four year old did not recognize the question, 'who's your favorite hero?' because it did not include the word 'super'...

and so I have some work to do.

those kids lead a lifestyle which few would even believe exists anymore. They spent all day in the frigid weather on saturday camping outside, making a fire without firestarter and skating on a local frozen pond and trying to ice fish. all day, the whole family, planned by said Martha.

and I like her, a lot. she does not judge my life and also made me the best lasagna of my life when baby E was born. I could still drool over it, now.
and so I have some re-assessing to do. and maybe a run to the salvation army with a BIG donation bag of toys. you want some?

4 comments:

Viv said...

No! Dear God! No MORE toys, especially the ones that foster catastrophic meltdowns when their batteries run out. Half of my time is spent dodging toys.

Amateur Author said...

I keep saying I want to get rid of every piece of plastic and just get a couple of ridiculously expensive wooden toys- and that's it!
We don't have battery operated toys- not really a conscious choice, just happened that way. The kids go gaga over them when they see them elsewhere and I wonder if we're depriving our kids somehow...

Jen said...

Oh by all means, please send those toys my way. Especially if half of them are from McDonald's Happy Meals because we just can't get enough of those. In fact just the other day we came home with a stupid chipmunk that says "It's beautiful!" Everytime you touch a button on her head. You can only imagine what we've been doing with that.......

Kate Hall said...

hee hee. mcdonalds toys make up the bulk of our crapload... that, and random things we pick up here and there... and there aren't battery operated things here because deafie mom CANNOT bear to search for the beepbeepbeep of the toy in the middle of the night... batteries NEVER EVER get replaced over here...