Winter Wonder
Dr. Dixie Dillon Lane
It’s 5:45 when I tiptoe into my son’s room. “Okay,” he mumbles and rolls out of bed. Fifteen minutes later, we are walking through a dark wood near our house.
He shines his flashlight on the frosty, leaf-covered grass, and I show him the “Tiger Trap” between two trees — a deep, unexplained hole camouflaged by the bracken. Don’t fall in — not like your mother, yesterday! We pass through a hidden gate and cross a lawn to a deserted road. Orion’s belt twinkles above us. Muffled by our scarves, we can’t hear each other talk, so we walk silently. It is below freezing.
We turn around once or twice to check the light in the east. First it is mostly black, the moon waning. Then the watercolor slowly spreads, all shades of blue, bleeding up from the horizon.
In an hour we reach the church and slide into a pew for the first service of the day. My son shivers. He lays his head on my shoulder.
After the dismissal, we set our sights on the diner down the road. Pancakes and cocoa for him, eggs and coffee for me. “Why did the blue jay cross the road at a red light?” my son quips. “Because he was jay-walking!”
On the way home, we meet a cistern topped with a half-inch of ice. My son finds a heavy stick and clubs the ice once, twice, again, and yet again. What glee! What release! It takes several smashes to make even one hole in the ice. We laugh until we can’t breathe. Each blow satisfies all the senses. Every time he makes a hole, new bubbles form under the ice surrounding it. Why, we ask?
This is the best kind of education.
As we wander home, I reflect on the challenges of my current life: a tight budget, an often aching heart and body, and all the harder parts of raising and educating four wonderful, exuberant children.
Like many mothers, I live on the narrow and winding boundary between what I once was and what I am becoming. I rarely just “am.”
Like many mothers, I live on the narrow and winding boundary between what I once was and what I am becoming. I rarely just “am.” I spent my young adulthood forming my heart for marriage and motherhood, but my mind for teaching and research. I have a doctoral degree and many years’ experience teaching, but it hardly matters to me when it comes to smashing ice with my son or showing him the stars. Oh, I don’t mean it hasn’t prepared me for my motherly, homeschooling life; in fact, it was an excellent preparation. It helps me to see, for example, what this current ice-moment means and how to use it to help my child grow, and I don’t regret graduate school or years of teaching in the slightest. But the unexpected way everything has worked out does strike me daily as, well, unexpected.
For many years, my heart was all a-twist inside me over finding a balance between mothering and teaching. I’ve tried many different professional versions of teaching while also being a full-time mother: adjuncting in the evenings at the college where my husband teaches full-time; teaching high school history and math twice a week; even teaching elementary students history and literature for one long day per week, with my toddlers in tow. Sometimes it has worked, and sometimes it decidedly has not.
So this semester, as my oldest child moves further into her second decade and everything seems to be changing, I have decided to choose walks in the woods over extra teaching commitments. No new college thesis students; no homeschool co-ops. Just the four kids and me and whatever we come up with together. 
Yesterday it was Charlemagne. Today it was bubbles and ice. I do not have to force teaching into my life in order for it to happen – just being together with my children, in the world, is proving to be enough. After all, as the children of two passionate historians, our kids already ask questions at the dinner table about culpability in the American Civil War and about nuance in understanding Martin Luther’s motivations. I certainly can’t claim to be missing out on an intellectual life, even though my version is perhaps unusual. There is a new peace for me here, but there is also now space for me to really feel my fears and frustrations.
There is a new peace for me here, but there is also now space for me to really feel my fears and frustrations.
What surprises and regrets will this current decade bring, as I prepare my heart, mind, and body for the new task of being the mother and friend of older children? I know I need more rest and more time alone and with friends. I know I need creative pursuits, increased prayer, and more frequent reception of the sacraments. I need to read things that don’t begin with “Once upon a time.” All this being so, I suppose it ought to be a terrible idea to get up in the dark and walk five miles to and from church with a child in the freezing cold.
But it isn’t. It is the life-breath of the brisk air, the loveliness of the watercolor sunrise, and the tightening of ties between my child’s heart and my own. I am walking back home with my son amidst the winter wonder.
Nothing could be better.
