As I listened from a vaguely discreet distance, there was a tone in his voice and a certain lean to his body that I recognized. This particular combo is what he uses when he’s trying to convince someone that he’s doing what they want him to do. But it’s a little tricky because it’s also the tone and posture he uses when he’s trying something on for size—sort of sussing out if he really believes what he’s saying, seeing if what he’s thinking of is really a good fit for him. I like it when he does this. I think it’s really wise. It makes me proud.

Later he and I were able to talk this college thing out a bit over breakfast. (These things always go better over a breakfast burrito.) It became clear that while he’s aware that most of the parental-types in his life would like to see him in college at some point, he wasn’t just blowing smoke at us when he mentioned the college catalogs. He really is interested in the possibility of taking some course — he’s just not sure how to do college his own unconventional way. He doesn’t want to get trapped on some horrid jump-through-the-hoops, school-debt, hamster wheel from hell. In short, he’s trying to figure out how to make college work for him, instead of the other way around.

See, I told you he was smart.

This got me to thinking about all the courses I slogged through and hated, and all the books I bought and never used. It was a lot of waste. So here, in retrospect are my Magpie Girl’s Tips for College Courses.

 1. Take Eclectic Classes. At most schools you can attend “non-matriculated”-meaning you don’t have to be accepted into a specific program to take a course in the program. Use this to your advantage. Skip the pre-requisites as much as possible, and try out a handful of varied topics that intrigue you. (The 19yo’s short list? Math, Logic, Epistemology.)

2. Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bath Water. The problem with first year classes, is that they are first-year classes. The prof is underpaid, half of his/her students don’t want to be there, and quite frankly, neither do they. NOT ALL CLASSES ARE LIKE THAT. Don’t give up. Try the one down the hall.

3. Don’t Buy the Books. If possible (and it will depend on the class) sit in on at least the first class session (or 2, or 3) before you buy the books. You want to be able to walk away with your bank account unscathed. If you can tell the class is the wrong fit for you early on, then you’ve saved yourself some money. Also, save your receipts. Selling books back at the end of the term will get you far less than half the price of what you paid for them in September. And try BigWords.com or Half.com for discounted textbooks.

4. Transfer. If you don’t like a class, change it. Understand your school’s rules about the deadlines for changing courses. You usually have a week or so to swap courses if you change your mind. Some schools let you change one or two courses for free, but even a small fee is better than a semester in a course that’s not right for you. At big schools pre-requisite freshmen courses are sometimes taught in multiple sessions with different lecturers or TA’s. Don’t like yours? Sit in on a different session and see if someone else is a little less sleep inducing.

5. Be Independent. If you parent’s can’t help you pay for college, consider filing for taxes as an independent. This will mean your parent’s can’t “claim” you on their taxes and won’t get to have you as a deduction, so talk it out with them. But if it’s just you and your McJob salary on the FASA application, you’ll probably get a better financial aid package.

6. Think about Community Colleges. If you travel off the beaten path, a straight-up four year school might not be for you. Back in the day, community colleges were called “Junior College” and had a “lesser than” stigma attached to them. Now, many Community Colleges are functioning like charter school, specializing in niche programs like graphic design, or early childhood education. Some are hidden gems, offering fine-tune training at lower prices and with less competition than the universities. They’re also a less expensive place to explore. Also, new professors often get their first gigs at community colleges and can shine with newbie enthusiasm.

7. Consider Non-Traditional Schools. Grade-free schools and/or those with self-designed programs like Reed College (Oregon) or Evergreen College (Washington) or UC Santa Cruz (California) are also great starting out, or transfer schools. Just because you don’t like structure doesn’t mean you won’t like college.

8. Do it Slow. There’s no need to go into debt and finish in four years. Part-time is fine—even preferable—as it gives you more time to build a resume, experiment with subjects you like, and earn-along. (So much more preferable than big loans! Remember, you may be a social worker and not a MBA when you’re done!)

In short, explore. You’re already on your path. Enjoy it!

What tips to do you have for college-aged kids young adults who don’t follow the beaten path? What do you wish you had a “do over” on from your college days? Tell us in the comments below, and add to the Giant Pool of Wisdom,  forming now.

I struggle to live in the moment. So often I am casting my gaze back in regret and longing, or throwing myself forward in to future worries. I know it’s healthiest for me to live mostly in the Now. But to the Now I feel foreign born, and like an adopted child returning to the place of her birth, I must work a little harder to feel at home on what is truly my native land.

I notice this most when Summer fades to Fall, and the days begin to shorten. I start missing the Light even before she is gone. Start longing for her while she is yet by my side. And in doing so I waste the last long rays of her presence.

This then is my attempt to stay with her, to stay present as long as she is still here.  To remain alert to her companionship. To “…follow the day and reach for the sun.”Later when she is gone, these images may hold her near to me a little longer yet, until she gently moves my hand from her hers, pats my shoulder, and tells me to lean into the next season until she returns.  

 How do you stay present to the edge of this season? What will you need to transition into the next?

He comes to me in my dreams, this child of my heart, separated now seas and ages.

Sometimes the dreams are all absurdity. Last night in my somnolence he came to me with a new love. I asked after her:  what captivated? what called? His serious reply: “She taught me the word “Huntington’s.” Ah, what meaning in that then? Pizza for dinner, perhaps.

Othertimes they are wrought with meaning — Jungian symbols all in a row.  He is lost in the woods. And what are these clamps there on his shoulders, at his gut? What is written on this new scroll?  Are we falling or flying?

When he feels far from me, this child of choice, I wear this ’round my neck. A charm passed to me from my soulsister, long ago when I was the age he is now. Touch it with one finger there at the hollow of my throat. For safety. For comfort. For joy. Hoping to only connect.

A talisman then, swinging there over my heart.

In this photo post: Favorite things, culled from a vagabond’s backpack while on furlough from Denmark in the States, and posed on a swing which has held three generations. 

Would you like to Unravel? Sign up for Susannah Conway’sphotography and journaling ecourse.

Tuesday night the 19yo haunted my dreams, flitting in and out of whatever story was going on. We call this my “Spidey-sense” and when it happens, no matter how long he’s been incommunicado, I have to track him down and find out what’s what. 

Wednesday night the full moon glowed yellow and welcoming in my Copenhagen sky. I’m not usually very connected to the moon, but last night its glow, it felt important…powerful. So I sat down and made a quick-and-dirty dreamboard with the few supplies I had on hand,  uttering once again what my dear friend Dwight practically has tattooed on his forehead:

ONLY CONNECT.

By Friday we were back in touch and the emails went back and forth with tidbits and updates.

Oh, that Sister Moon, I love her so……

P.s. If Souren actually read my blog, I’m sure he’d be THRILLED with this photo. Sorry bruddah, if you sent me more pics, you’d get better airtime. :-)

For more about Dreamboard visit Jamie at Starshyne Productions, or read my interview with her sister Suzie of Chez Suzie here. What will you dream of this month?

i promised to stop adopting teenagers, but they keep slipping into my heart…

I love these young ones so much it’s ridiculous. Each one has crawled into my soul in a different way, and while at times this process splits me open, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s a scene in the Princess Bride where a funny old crone makes a pill for new life, and she paints something on it croaking: “The coating makes it go down easier.” I want to wrap my arms around each of these precious ones and let my heart for them coat them like chocolate –one long-lasting dose of mama-love to help the new life of adulthood go down a little more smoothly.

I want wrap them up with affection. With warmth. With stability. With all the elements of unconditional love you can think to put on a menu. And then, when they are all warm and cozy, I want to drop integrity into the center of their chests, like a silver quarter slipping into a coin slot.

If they have integrity then all thier live-long days they will be the stellar creatures they are already becoming. Not integrity to the rules, but the kind of integrity that allows you to acknowledge who you truly are, and stand in that truth. The kind of integrity that is not beholden to outside rules, or your peer’s opinons, or because of ‘the way it’s done’– but because of a solid internal compass that will not steer you wrong if you listen. The kind of integrity that lets you live a life on the outside that is true to the life you hold in your heart. If they have that, well, they will have everything they need.

So that is what I bless them with, in my dreaming, in my words, in my living. And the old Christian mystic who married that witchy little crone in my soul says, “Amen, may it be so.”

“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid”
-Basil King

…….

Leaving Souren has been a little bit like a death. I hate to be so melodramatic, given that there are so many things going on in the world that are ever-so-much harder and more devastating. Leaving your semi-adopted teenager in the States in order to go gallivanting around Europe with your two adorable blood children and a handsome husband—this barely makes a mark on the ‘hardships’ meter. Still, it’s hard, to take a child into your heart and then to say goodbye.

I know, of course, that there is the telephone and internet, and even old fashioned snail mail. But if you’ve ever known, or met, or even grazed shoulders with a teenage boy, you should realize that communication is not, generally speaking, their strong suite.

I knew, when we left, that most communication with Souren would be over. And I’m trying to not put my happiness under his text messaging thumbs. You simply cannot let a teenager take the wheel of your happiness. That’s even more daft than letting them drive your car on prom night.

But at night, when those nasty little buggers come to get me, I am mournful, and I re-think the wisdom of being so nonchalant about grafting a child who is not my own, so firmly onto my family tree. In those dark moments, I write maudlin poetry on the pages of my notebook. (The emotions of my days and nights are so different, sometimes I am left wondering, which is more me?) Though the pain in these overwrought words are real, I have to ask myself, would I hesitate to love this way again…to love this way still? When we are paying attention to the true and the questions, these are the things that come up. These are the ponderings that make up the reality of whom we are and who we are to be. So of course, the answer must always be, ‘amen.’

——

loss is a wolf at the throat,
there, at the front of the neck
where all you cannot swallow
lies exposed and unprotected

the ache and the tear of it,
the way you bleed unchecked

this is what it is
to take another’s child,
graft him deep into your veins.

i cannot recommend it,
this unchecked rushing of the blood
when the graft does not take,
when the bloodline is severed.

even birthing blood ceases with the hours,
after the placenta tears.

but what of that wound
of which nature has no counterpart?
does this blood then run without clot,
without ebbing,
leaving in its wake
more than the womb as hollow?

There is fierceness to your love as a parent, a primordial viciousness that cannot quite be captured by pen or by page. The heat of it feeds you, moves you to the force of living that must be done to rear a child, to create a life.

But it tears at you too, this animal of passion, and the thing that tears deepest is that the one you love so fiercely–this child of womb or of heart–cannot understand this beast, cannot capture it in their reality, or even in their imagination. And you know, in spite of this longing to make sure they know, that they aren’t meant to, aren’t intended to. This kind of knowing is not expected of them.

So this tears then too, this absolute inability to communicate the sheer volume of heartache held for them, the rawness of the love which bears them into existence.

And when the child is not your own and you must live into a place that is not-parent, but rather mentor, or friend, or some indefinable something else–where then does this animal go to dwell? And where does the fierce protectionism burn when the child grows older, finds wings on which to lift away? Where does that energy live, when the cage you’ve built in your heart is no longer large enough to contain its nervous pacing, when there is not enough flesh to keep it fed?

Should there not be a guide book for this wild adventure? A star chart or a river guide? Should there not be an ancient map, a gilt compass, moss on the north of the tree? How do you find your footing when you dwell on the edge of love’s fierce map?

This is my neighbor, Souren, who accidentally became a part of our family nearly three years ago. We met when I was sitting on the little strip of lawn that seeps out from under the chain link fence surrounding their house. The big yellow school bus stopped there each day at 3, and we would chat over the fence while I waited for my children to get home from school. I think it took me three days to learn how to pronounce his name – forever marking me as a lazy tongued American, compared to his tri-lingual boy genius. After a week I stopped bringing my waiting-for-the-bus book, since I knew he would come out, sandwich in hand, for our afternoon chat. By the time I met his mother Helene, he and I were already fast friends. When Helene left the country on a six week business trip a month later, Souren started his life in our home.

Souren is entrenched in our world now, coming with us to extend family barbeques, writing me mother’s day cards, and having a room of his own in our home as well as in his mother’s duplex four houses up. Lately, I’ve been trying to write about our strange relationship – this family of two and my family of four, now an odd assorted family of six. I want to write about parenthood and ownership; gratitude and jealousy; satisfaction and yearning; pride and disappointment; joy and heartache. But it’s hard, to be honest in a relationship this complex – when my nurturing instincts sometimes conflict with his mom’s; when my kids don’t share his mother the way he shares theirs; when I am so grateful to have this young blood in our lives, and simultaneously terrified that he will soon disappear into adulthood.

Can you ever write with complete honesty about your children – those of your genetic descant and those you chose of your heart? Once they’ve learned their alphabet and how to use a mouse, how can you lay bare the stories you carry about them and for them and of them? Where do you put the wonder and the terror, the laughter and the follies? How can you capture the complexity and wonder without, basically, EMBARRASSING THEM TO DEATH?

Alas, I have no answer.

This summer Souren has gone to lay his foot once again on German soil, his birthplace and homeland until he was nearly a teen. After being virtually attached by an IV to our wireless for the past two years, he has suddenly forgotten how to log onto a computer and has to be cajoled into writing even the briefest of five-line emails with nary a compound thought enclosed. Still, reading carefully between the lines, and remembering what it was once to be young, what little I’ve heard of his time there indicates it has been rife with rites of passage – what with being legally of age in Europe for booze and clubs, and with a girl at his side – not to mention the father he hadn’t seen since before puberty and the attic full of childhood memories waiting for him to sort out.

It’s just….I remember the summer of my 17 year – all the heat and pheromones, all the freedom and romance– and I know that what comes speeding after it is so much more growing up, so much differentiating from home and hearth and parenting. Those ties between him and me, between him and us, are already much thinner than a lifetime of family-ness could have brought. What will happen to them as they are stretched by the final years of high school, by this incredibly heady summer?

Who can say and who can tell and who can know? It is utterly unknown territory and I, in some part of my soul, am both terrified and—truthfully—a little in awe. We do this, we humans? This growing up thing? What a wonder.

“Wait!” my heart moans, “I didn’t get enough time. You can’t be moving through these rites yet! You only just came to me! I didn’t get the early years!” Yet at the same time I know that this one’s long history of growing up is not within my rights to hold. What I get access to is this little part- time window between the first day of high school and the last–that’s all. I want to guard that time, press out the minutes like the edges of a toothpaste tube, make sure I don’t miss any thing I’m entitled to.

But the reality is I’m entitled to nothing. Every bit of this childhood is a bonus gift. And with this thought I realize in spite of my disquietness, there’s really no other option, is there? I wouldn’t want to miss this stretching, tearing thing – watching the wolfpup in growup, thrashing out his way in a world that will, all to soon, be his for the taking.