It’s only seven lines.  It shouldn’t be a big deal.  But it means I have to stay out at night and can’t be be home for my 7pm bedtime.  It means I have to stuff myself into some frumpy 1920s dress.  I don’t own a dress.  It means I have to wear something on my feet other than hiking boots or slippers.  I don’t have anything else.  

In the next week, I think I’ll need to go shopping.

I didn’t audition for the role.  But the actress dropped out. So the part of Mrs. Deyo is mine.  Saoirse is making me do it.

That’s home schooling for you. 

I thought, when the letter from the Middleburgh School Superintendent arrived over the summer of 2020, I was finished home-schooling Saoirse.  She was 16 then, and stepped in to help us run the farm through all the initial upheaval of the pandemic.

Now she’s 18.  She’s still helping us run the farm.  In addition she’s getting ready to start college online, and she’s directing her first play with The Theater Project of Schoharie County, a one-act performance, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

And lately it feels like home schooling is somehow just getting started.  

Only now, there’s no lesson planning, no curriculum, no gathering colored pencils and drawing paper and disappearing to sketch wetlands, no singing morning songs, no balancing chemical equations, and no sitting together over math books. 

Now, as she juggles the farm and theater, I’m learning that homeschooling is about assisting her with integration into the strange world of adults.  

Like most folks her age, her cell phone is never far from her hand.  But she is shocked by the number of texts that come flying in as she tries to pull this show together.  Simultaneously, she is experiencing the baptism by fire that comes with being asked to do a job that she’s never done before — The knowledge that she must show leadership and competence, the embarrassment that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, the confusion about the politics that unfold back stage, the humility of having to accept help when she didn’t anticipate needing it….and the perpetual insecurity of trying to be prepared, not knowing exactly how to be prepared, investing hours in being prepared anyhow….and then learning she is not prepared. 

I want to be Ol’ Mama Battle Ax on the set.  I want to take control, run interference, make sure everyone is nice to my daughter, make sure everyone listens to my daughter, make sure my daughter knows exactly what to do and when.

But I don’t.  I show up, do my best not to trip over my seven lines (believe me, it’s hard, ok?), then slip away with a book, half watching the rehearsals, half immersing myself in reading.  

And while I stumbled through most of her home-schooling education, now, finally, I’m confident this is one lesson I can teach.

Because I didn’t know how to teach wetlands ecology.  And I didn’t know how to teach writing.   And I didn’t know how to teach art or music.

And when it came to the rest of my life, I didn’t know how to do most of that, either. I didn’t know how to homeschool. I didn’t know how to sell at a farmers market. I didn’t know how to run a farm. I didn’t know how to build a cafe.  I sure as heck didn’t know how to run one.

And goodness knows, I didn’t know how to write books, either.

At 48 years old, I feel like, watching this play unfold,  there is one thing that I SOLIDLY know  that I can teach my daughter.

I know how not to know.  

It used to DRIVE me crazy to come across as anything less than completely authoritative in my younger grown-up life.  I wanted to be an authority on grassfed meats.  I wanted to be an authority on nutrition, on cooking, on business, on farming.

But trying to prove that authority was a waste of the precious energy that I needed to learn.  

And the learning is where the fun is.  Better still, when I was having fun, suddenly I seemed more competent…I lost my attachment to perfect outcomes.  I realized that, if I failed, I could depend on learning something.  If a recipe failed, I learned what happened that made it go wrong.  If we lost a lamb on the farm, we learned more about nutrition, or parasites, or intervention techniques.  If a chicken died, we autopsied it to learn what happened.  If I failed to please a customer, I learned how to forgive myself.  If my timing got off in the cafe and we started screwing up orders, I learned to stop, clean, breathe, laugh, and start again.  

Learning is one of the best parts of life. 

So if failure results in learning, there’s really no need to fear failure. 

….Which also means that, Ol’ Mama Battle Axe has no place here.  If one of the keys to a good life is to lose the fear of failure, then I need to let Saoirse get comfortable with this world of not-knowing, with a world where failure is just part of life.  So I wait until she’s ready to talk about all that she’s experiencing.  And whatever I’m doing, I stop and listen.  And when she needs to cry, I sit with her.  And when she needs a hug, I hug her.  And for every moment of failure she bemoans, I shower her with tales of my own foibles.  

And slowly, I’m seeing a change in her.  She’s learning to enjoy the help she gets, soaking up lessons like a sponge.  She’s worrying less about convincing everyone she knows what she’s doing and focusing more on bringing a show together.  Each day, she juggles more and more, the cast gets better and better, and I see her eye on the prize of the performance this coming weekend.

And then her attention turns back to me…Where I still haven’t figured out what dress I can stuff myself into.  I’m trying to learn how to enter from upstage left  — I mean, right, deliver a line while walking down steps without tripping (wearing HEELS???), cross to the middle of the stage and stop at the right point and not lose my place, finish my lines, then walk off stage right — I mean left…  I’m doing my best.  Really. Nevertheless, it’s quite possible that casting her mother in a role will be this show’s only great failure.  

But she and I already know.  It will definitely be a performance to remember.  And no matter what, we’re going to be ok.  

If you’re in the area, The Theater Project of Schoharie County will present an evening of Rule Breakers and Writers: Two One-Act plays about Evolving Women and Unconventional Femininity: Bernice Bobs her Hair, and I Remain, J. Austen.  The performance will take place at The Waterfall House in West Fulton (formerly known as Boucks Falls House), located at 256 West Fulton Rd.  Tickets are $10.  The shows will be Friday and Saturday, May 13 and 14th, at 7pm; and Sunday, May 15th, at 3pm.  

 

 

The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow podcast happens with the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Ruth Tonachel & Roseanna DeMaria.

Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!  If you’d like to help support my work, you can do so for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.