Affluence is everywhere today

Affluence is everywhere today and I can't be at home or on the internet or in my own head without feeling it expanding in every one of my cells and it is boiling through my body, overflowing here in this writing. Last night, I'm canning peaches at 10 pm but because I want to, not because I have to and when I got home from ten days away on Monday I threw out two ice cream pails of rotten produce to the chickens. Because why not let it go bad, we aren't starving, I planned poorly before our trip and we can buy more.

We flew on a plane to visit my parents because driving by myself with three kids for 12 hours is a lesson in sending me to the loony bin, but we can still go, plane tickets for four please. I ordered my son's homeschool curriculum with the click of a mouse and entered in my credit card info no problem, no problem at all. It's a luxury this homeschooling, because my hard-working husband earns enough and we are careful enough with money that I don't have to work. I'm fully conscious this week of the single mom working two jobs, dropping her kiddos at daycare before school even starts, missing her babies first day of kindergarten, coming home just to tuck them into bed. I'm crying for her or for myself or both as I write this.

Careful enough with money, what does that mean anyway? It means we own one old(er) vehicle, but my husband get's a company one so really it is no sacrifice. And just this morning I was thinking about wanting a bigger one because it is hard to fit all three kids car seats across the back seat. It means almost all the kids clothes come from the second hand store, but they are so nice you couldn't tell anyway and it means that we grow a garden and belong to a food coop to save on groceries. But we do it so we can eat healthy, our alternative is not noodles and hotdogs and food bank offerings. I don't shop for myself unless desperate because once I learned about slavery and infertile women left rejected by their families and spouses, as a result of dyeing fabric it took the fun out of it anyway. And we rarely eat out, and I don't shop, and wow, am I ever ill at my own ideas of sacrifice.

If I dropped my kids at school, I could take a yoga class (and I fantasize some days about doing just this) and get a latte from my favourite cafe. If I went to work, it would be for extras, like new vehicles and vacations and paying off our mortgage sooner. Or I could come home and write this uninterrupted and read a whole book and have a really clean house. But I don't and instead I am talking with friends who I love about what classes to send our kids too, for them to learn to swim, or play soccer or guitar or whatever. I'm planning what retreats I myself am going to this fall. On a day like today I don't know what is good and fine and beautiful and enough and what is luxury, luxury, luxury.

And here I am writing about it on the internet and yes, another rich white woman writing on the internet about her discomfort. Time and education and money to sit here in this space. Time to create.

Irony.

Luxury?

Because I know that right here in my own city today there are people without enough food and clothes (I mean I really know a few of them by name) and today children are dying around the world from lack of basics and does their mother love them less than I love my own. Is her grief different. I know it isn't.

I don't know what to do with this and our sponsor children and giving money and our careful spending and our volunteer work here just feel like less than nothing today. It's like sand between my teeth and I feel so uncomfortable in my own skin I want to run away from myself.

Because North America and Christ's bride the church, we believe that things like date nights and vacations and retreats and a beautiful home and ample food and lessons for our kids are well deserved and good and basic, if we are 'responsible' with our money. And I love all these things. Feel refreshed by them, inspired by them, grown by them.

What is a luxury now?

I ask for the mother who never has the free time to create, I ask for the kids who will never leave the city they were born in, I ask for the kid who spends all their after school hours watching TV, home alone. I ask for the women who are burying their starved children today and for the children who are 'orphaned' because their parents can't afford to keep them.

I ask for myself.

Lord have mercy.

Edited to add on February 1, 2014: Sharing over at Esther Emery's  site today for her syncroblog on spirit of the poor.

If my kiddos went to school

If my kiddos went to school, tomorrow I would be sending my son off before eight, to catch the yellow school bus. He would come home about four and hopefully we would chat about his day over milk and cookies or something just as yummy. The girls, they are still too little, Raine won't be old enough for kindergarten until next fall. But they would miss him while he was gone. But we homeschool (or we are some type of not go to schoolers-eclectic? unschoolers? for now, year by year, one never knows what the future holds) so tomorrow we will wake up when rested, eat some oatmeal and have our day all together.

Plans for the week include dealing with the 80 pounds of peaches we picked at an organic orchard and the rest of our garden bounty we need to harvest. There will be more jars of pickles and grated zucchini for the freezer. Since the sun disappears before ten again, we will finish up the astronomy book we started in the spring. Liam wants to make his own geocache, a Lego one and a trackable of him posing as 'Flat Liam' with a memory stick attached that people can take and upload pictures of his 'Flat Liam' image where ever they place him next (inspired by Flat Stanley.) We will play with friends we haven't seen near enough of over the summer and write stories about our summer adventures. Books will be read.

Although there are many reasons we choose to homeschool, at the top of the list, for now, I am grateful we get to really do this life together. I see each extra year of really knowing Liam (and eventually the girls) well, having him be around people who love and cherish him the most in the world for most of his day, as gifts. I love how he knows his sisters so well and how despite their age differences are such good friends. When asked if he would like to go to public school by a truly curious relative, he answered all on his own 'No because he would miss his family too much.' We've never really talked about public school and what it would mean much (we know lots of homeschoolers) but this was really from his heart. (Mine too.) I know this always won't be the way it is, but for now I am happy.