In Praise of Lying Fallow

A surprising number of my anxieties and guilts seem to trace back to an intense dislike of waste in any form. Probably the harshest form of waste though, is sand’s one way trek through the hourglass, and I wonder if the concept of lying fallow doesn’t offer some reprieve.

So one of the things about having three kids doing Suzuki music lessons at the same time is that in a given week only one of them ever seems to be “making progress,” that is stretching their abilities, doing new things, acquiring new skills. I had been feeling guilty about this, that perhaps it was my own limitation that I could focus on the progress of one child, consigning his brothers to “maintenance practicing.”

I tried to explain my idea of “maintenance practicing” to my mother last night on the phone; it comes from the observation over eleven years of marriage that our marriage seems to alternate between periods of maintenance and periods of growth — the growth periods often arising from a crisis brought on by too long in mere maintenance. During these maintenance periods, it’s not that we aren’t connected or that the rules of marriage don’t apply, it’s just that the work of marriage really isn’t the focus of either of our lives — we get distracted by things like kids, jobs, the house, friendships, writing and, while we try not to take each other for granted, well…

The thing is, my mother with her brilliant elementary school teacher’s insight was right back with the educational importance of the maintenance period, this is when a new skill becomes solid, ingrained, mastered so you can take it for granted. And I realize I’ve had other conversations with her about how, in her experience of teaching every grade of elementary school over the span of her career, some years involve a curriculum with the introduction of lots of new concepts, and some years are about practicing and applying concepts introduced the year before. And both are important. I think that, being part of a peer group of — what’s the gentle way of saying parents on the pushy end of the spectrum — it’s easy to see kids as these little bundles of potential on legs, just waiting for some brilliant teacher to activate this potential — so time spent on a review feels like time WASTED. And if you want to turn on the real guilt, start reading studies about “windows of opportunity” for certain kinds of learning, like acquiring a second language or musical ability.

I will say, in the defense of pushy parents, that it’s not necessarily competitiveness or wanting to be sure your child gets a place at an elite college that drives such pushiness. In my own case, it comes at least as much from this idealistic conviction that the universe is a feast to be devoured, full of ideas and sciences, facts and stories, that a lifetime’s nibbling can hardly ease the groaning board. There is no time to waste when it comes to learning the names of stars and trees, the songs of birds, reading Russian writers and learning French cooking techniques, becoming familiar with famous paintings and Beehtoven’s symphonies, the rules of baseball, the names of dinosaurs, the functions of the vital organs, poetic forms and the overwhelming variety of cultures and beliefs in the world. I remember loving the Galbraith’s _Cheaper by the Dozen_ for the efficiency expert’s approach to painting constellations on the ceiling and the morse code alphabet on the walls to facilitate quicker learning. And still I have this nagging feeling that anxiety doesn’t enable us to pack a lifetime more fully, that as valuable as all of these pursuits may seem in and of themselves, perhaps their importance is as part of the “great conversation” — that they create bridges between us and help us understand ourselves. But surely this is a process that must involve daydreaming of playing solitaire, or just goofing off and being silly with people we love for hours and hours, riding in circles on bicycles, and in minor doses, even vegging in front of the television sometimes, like Wittgenstein with his detective novels.

For myself and for my kids, for the sake of happiness, I am going to have to learn to look at how we choose to spend our time as this zero sum thing, time spent doing x is time one cannot spend doing y, that the time spent on math worksheets is time not contemplating the persistence of Greek gods and heroes, but rather to understand some sort of synergy. That recess and reading work together. That if biology is our guide, there must be value in sleep and in winter, in periods of dormancy… And as I willfully skip over another article on “mothers who opt out” and the latest version of the mommy wars, maybe I’ll be able to convince myself that this last decade when my classmates were getting MD’s and law degrees, I’ve been, um, creatively lying fallow.

Now I’m going to go re-read bits of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for exultation in nature’s wastefulness in an attempt to make myself more comfortable with my own.