Hooray Mana!

Some of you will remember the recording from which I am quoting for the title of this post.

Since she's the mother I have known the longest, it's hard to know where to start and finish. She is, of course, the one that "wrote the book" on being a mother as far as I'm concerned. Of course I mean that metaphorically, and I've been encouraging her to write it literally, but then she's been to busy taking care of my kids to do anything that ambitious!

Many of you have noticed how crazy our family schedule is. People say that thing about "angels dancing on the head of the pin", and sometimes it feels to me like we are trying to do that, Sam and I, when we try to balance our teaching, and writing, with our family responsibilities. It is the calendar equivalent of the trust exercise that challenges a group to balance on a single stump. The only way to do this is to lean out impossibly far, holding on to the hands of at least one other person who is leaning out just the same amount in the other direction.

In most families it is two parents doing this together. In our case, Mana willingly and seemingly happily jumps up on the stump, or the pin, and leans out with us. It is a crazy exercise, because there is really no way to be sure that everyone else is leaning as hard as you are, we just have to trust that we're doing it right and that each person is doing the right amount.

In fact, I think the best image would be one of us balancing up on that stump surrounded by a big rubber band that stretches around us. Sometimes we feel someone else leaning ever further, and we have to just stretch back, to keep them upright. Really I think it belongs in the X games.


All this in addition to the parts of being a grandmother that I expected to see her do: mixing endless bunches of bubble stuff, stitching up fabulous costumes of the "hero of the moment", dredging up just the right kind of glue from the basement to enable her to do surgery on a beloved Pokemon while Julian takes a nap. All of this with such generosity that the boys have absolutely no awareness of how much they are being given. Well, some day they will realize how lucky they are. In the meantime, I hope the heartfelt gratitude of their parents will suffice.

Hooray, Mana, Indeed!