Author: Jason Zerbey

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Zerbey Three Adventure Day X-1

Fear and trepidation. I’ve become too familiar with these feelings in the last few weeks. It’s time for some exposure therapy. I’m throwing my sons in a Roadtrek 190 and we’re going to tackle the unknown.

Mary and I each went camping our whole lives and our first born spent a weekend in an old tent before he was seven months old. Just before she passed, we were debating the first new purchase of a tent in decades. A big, lovely suite of outdoor living with hinged door and screened-in mud room (my dirt-in-bed-phobic favorite). It was still there in her digital shopping cart as I started to pick up the pieces from her death. In those first days of the Zerbey Three I knew we needed something more than just right now. We needed a goal and an adventure, something with just the three of us.

Now we’re here. New tent purchased and tested and recreational vehicle borrowed. The RV only has three seats and it’s hard to conceive of this journey happening had Mary not left us. Last night, my elder son asked, “Why did Mom die?” I know he was thinking of those three seats. I told him that we need to pray and ask God for guidance, for patience, and for a way to see the purpose in our lives. That I’m not smart enough to solve this puzzle without help. That we’ve got to work to give it meaning.

I feel closer to God outside. All the green of spring is life anew. Regenerating is more painful than I had hoped, but I see a lot of growth to be had in the weeks ahead.

God bless,
Jason

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The “In-Laws” Problem

I’ve got the best problems. My favorite ones are all mine, I don’t have to share them with my boys and they involve an adoptive family that has embraced me for as long as I can recall.

Sure I remember some hesitance from Mary’s more protective family members when we first started dating; but I’m protective of those I care for too, so any perceived distance formed into bonds of trust. It wasn’t long before I had a great big pile of “in-laws.”

A horrid term. Beyond the socially negative connotations, I was already leaning libertarian and these folks meant a whole lot more to me than our legal connection. They accepted me as family, I accepted them, and blood ties were born with our boys. The legal binds are cut with Mary’s passing, but that has no relevance to our lives.

It does have relevance to terminology. Language is important to me as I try to navigate and define life. It has always been a central focus when I’m facilitating education or explaining a concept to my children. English language is inadequate in many ways (“home school” topping my list), but it doesn’t appear to have anything better than, “my late wife’s parents” or “Mary’s brother-in-law.” How about, “my late wife’s brother-in-law,” yeah, that just dances off the tongue.

I’ve found some articles on the subject (here and here), but it doesn’t seem to be a hot topic. Nor one with a resolution.

I’ve been too traditional to invent a lexicon to describe our world, but our existence has become exceedingly non-traditional and I may have to revisit that position.

God bless,
Jason

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A Precipice

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
John 1:14-18

Truth. God is the Word and the Word is truth and grace. The act of creating, of bringing something good into the world requires us to speak with truth. Speaking truth isn’t going to build heaven on Earth, but it can build the tools we need to survive the hellishness we will face.

I have truths I’m terrified to share. I’m lonely in the most juvenile of ways. I want to hold a pretty girl’s hand, but I don’t feel whole enough to make that a fair deal for anyone. I don’t want my loneliness to hurt anyone else, so I’ve kept it to myself. I’ve hidden the truth and it fed my pain for not being spoken. It became a physical pain and it came close to breaking me until I decided to reveal it.

I was playing terrible soccer in a terrible game and feeling terrible about myself when a lightning storm cut the game short and sent me off towards a terrible fork in the road. Seriously, a lightning storm. Sometimes God really gets how thick-headed we can be.

But I still didn’t get it. I was aimed at a bar and the first drink I’d had in two months and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to close that place down and cry all over the bartender and anyone else I could find. I had that vision and knew I had to literally drive past Mary’s resting place to get to that first drink. There it was. I looked at the clock and a grief support group that meets at our church might still be there. Looking, and smelling, pathetic in my soccer kit I crashed the meeting and tried not to fall apart.  The leader stayed after the meeting and we talked about the nuts and bolts of going from “dad and husband,” to “dad and ______” I didn’t go home with many answers, but I was reminded of the value of truth.

I’m not as ready to rebuild my mind as I thought I was, there is a lot to clean up first.

Mary and I worked hard at being truthful with each other. We knew that a marriage could fall right through your fingers if both parties didn’t focus on maintaining that foundation of truth. Mary knew my weaknesses and that made them lighter (even when I wasn’t in the mood to hear about them).

I don’t expect this to be the last precipice I toe up to; but like any other anticipation anxiety, I’m healthier for choosing to look into the chasm rather than blind myself to it.

God bless,
Jason 

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The Learning is Out There

When we started on this educational journey, we only knew the words “home school.” We got desks set up and slowly began to transform part of our house into a school room. We didn’t recognize it right away, but major problems were there from the start. We weren’t being rigid, but we were looking at education as a mere “part” of our lives. Even worse, narrowing it to a physical area of our home. “School” was the other problem. We were trying to replicate an environment of learning that hadn’t been satisfactory for ourselves. Every time we left the house to go to a museum, park, arboretum, music venue, or even the store, our children’s curiosity led us down unexpected paths of enrichment. We were slow to learn from these experiences that the excitement of life and knowledge was out in the community. Engaging with new ideas and experts in their own environments.

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Photo credit unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

These engagements often produce much more than expected. They cascade into different disciplines and new places of wonder. From the first time I spotted our older boy’s “birthday painting” (Howard Pyle’s The Fight on Lexington Common taught us when the American War for Independence began), Delaware Art Museum has been a frequent source of these moments. After having the pleasure of meeting Brian Selznick at the opening of the From Houdini to Hugo exhibit, we had a chance conversation with a security guard who had become familiar with the boys. He introduced us to the work of filmmaker Georges Méliès, the inspiration behind Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret. As we sought out his films at the library, we learned about early film, World War I, and how onscreen special effects were born from Méliès’s live stage act. I also learned about who was behind some of the fantastical science fiction film clips that had charged my imagination as a child. Our boys grew a love for silent films and we returned many times to that gallery to explore early paleontology, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the art of historical storytelling.

A few years later we would read Selznick’s Wonderstruck, about a boy who just lost his mother, and that same security guard would attend Mary’s memorial service. Delaware Art Museum has been central to our educational life, a life that doesn’t keep attendance Monday through Friday, but a life that is with us always and everywhere. It’s a life where learning and community are interlocked and essential to one another.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/G1fb75f2WN8?rel=0″ title=”Mister Rogers – Human beings learn best and most from other human beings” description=”Mister Rogers – Human beings learn best and most from other human beings” /]

God bless,
Jason

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Stand On It

Whether it was monster trucks, dragsters, stock cars, motocross, four wheeling, or getting to work on time, Mary liked it fast and loud. Little did I know when I started dating this pretty hippy gal that she would take me to my first NASCAR race and accompany me to countless drag races and motor sports events.

Mary was a sensitive, conscientious, and graceful woman who could get down there on the fence with her boys and feel the rubber flying off funny car tires, dotting our skin and clothes with black. She could stand at the edge of a gravel parking lot and watch Bigfoot launch into the air and smash cars twenty feet away. She could sit under the summer sun at Dover International Speedway for hours on end rooting for, and against, the drivers. She was meant to be the mom to two gasoline fume loving boys.

Those boys still tease me about not driving as fast as Mom. My younger says, “Yeah, she had a metal foot.”
“That’s lead foot, Son.”
“Nah, I like ‘metal.'”
Metal foot it is.

Mary enjoyed so many things in life. From the quietest of museum galleries to the loudest of cars. She showed our boys that life was to be lived. Experiences became the core of our home education philosophy. Expose a child to all the wonderful creations of God and man and let that child find his own loves and passions. The boys are a lot like Mary, up for anything and ready to take the lead on an adventure.

I fear they’ll also drive like her.

God bless,
Jason

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A Dad of Letters

I embraced a psychological death this week. More than two months after the physical death of my wife I am coming to the realization that I have to rebuild part of my mind.

I listen to Jordan Peterson a lot (and you should too) and grew into maturity listening to and reading Joseph Campbell. I never thought the Hero’s Journey would apply to me, but to quote Peterson, “Wrong!” Here I am, in the dark wood, dragons all about, and a village to save. It’s scary and I tried to deny the task that God has set before me. A sulfurous beast gave me no choice in the form of a combined birthday party for my boys. It almost took me out to do this without Mary. It killed part of me and I feel a little more peace for it being gone. The emptiness isn’t so much an impassable black hole any longer, but a blank page I have to fill.

Blank pages to fill can be scary too. But more dragons must be slayed and I have been inspired to spill a lot of ink in the process. I have a thousand wells of inspiration, but one very important source came in the form of a TEDxWilmington talk that happened as I girded myself to receive guests and facilitate the celebration. After surviving the party I was able to catch a replay of Alessandra Nicole‘s presentation. I knew it was about letter writing and included an image of the boys, so we sat down to watch together. I had no idea that it would feature our story, that I was watching it at the most perfect time, nor that it would light my way farther into that dark wood.

I wrote two quick letters the next morning, one with the help and guidance of my younger son. These are small markers of my rebuilding; clearing of rubble, choosing of materials, drafting of plans, inspecting of still-standing structures and foundations, slaying of dragons. I can’t put it back together, I’m going to build something new page by page and brick by brick.

God bless,
Jason

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The Lacking a Nearly Perfect Teammate Problem

Mary and I centered our lives around team work. We both came from team sport backgrounds and discovered nearly perfect teammates in each other. We identified problems in written and verbal exchanges and devised how each of us could apply our skill set to best solving each one together. We believed that if a problem is not addressed, it will get worse. Identifying and prioritizing problems is the first step.

The Lacking a Nearly Perfect Teammate Problem is underneath all the other quandaries now. Solutions have been ad hoc and temporary so far. I can’t recall chipping away at a puzzle for this long and not, at least, feeling like I was closer to a resolution.

Language is a not-nearly-perfect teammate. But it’s the tool God has given me to make the uncertainty into something real. Once I can grasp these dilemmas, I’ll write through them and hope that I can help someone else along the way.

God bless,
Jason

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Home?

Green heron, blue heron, swifts, geese and goslings, robins, flies, dogs big and small, friends, mallards, sparrows, and innumerable creatures we couldn’t name. The only thing that was odd not to see was a green-winged macaw named Rudy. We didn’t plan an adventure at Brandywine Park in Wilmington, but we got it.

This is why “home” education is an inadequate term. I couldn’t have identified half of those birds five years ago. I probably wouldn’t have even spotted some of them if I hadn’t shifted my perception of what education meant. It’s holistic for us. We sit down by a river for lunch and three mallards put on a courtship battle at our feet. We’ve got a day’s worth of lessons right there. Art in the surprisingly blue feathers of the female, Drama in the males’ struggle, Biology, Ecology…the boys’ questions turn to Sociology and Psychology. Forget lessons, a curriculum has waddled upon us!

Much of the base knowledge has come from books and learning in the home, but the excitement and application is there in the unexpectedness. And most of our birding knowledge has come from time in the field with experts of varying degrees. The green heron is a great example. We were at Ashland Nature Center and asked a naturalist about the interesting bird that was fishing along the Red Clay Creek. She told us it was a green heron, but there was disagreement among the Zerbeys so we did our follow-up research. Sure enough, this bird we hadn’t heard of, and is hardly green, was introduced to our world.

The journey for the right words continues…

God bless,
Jason

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Zerbey World

Mary and I didn’t discuss our children’s education until we had two of them. It seems absurd now that we spent so little time thinking about how we were guiding their development from the earliest stages to what was next.

I left my job as a proofreader/editor to care for our boys when the second was born and childcare expenses (+ gas + tolls + time away from family) became more than we would tolerate.

Over the next few months I made a Halloween costume, saw live music during lunch time, visited museums, and got to tell Mary a thousand stories about our days.

I didn’t regret it for one second. It was the first time that I felt like I was doing what I was born to do. Mary saw it too. We stopped talking about finding freelance work or what am I going to do “next”? We had to invent “next,” or so we thought.

We narrowed our focus to kindergarten and started with our own experiences, except for my first crush (I’ll never forget our student teacher, Ms. Austin), I had no idea what happened in that year.

Hold on. I remember the following summer. I did the math on my age difference with Ms. Austin and resolved I had the patience if she could find it. I also convinced my mom to help me write a letter to her. The first math and writing lessons I ever cared about were created by my own initiative. Ms. Austin wrote back, let me down easy, and showed me the power of knowledge. It wasn’t success that got me excited, but it was a taste of the adult world. I engaged with an adult outside the school system and took my chance like an equal.

That’s what I want for my boys. Not to subvert and battle the system like I had to, but to live outside of it. Not just taste the adult world, but live in it.

God bless,
Jason

 

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The Beautiful Gratitude

I married the greatest soccer manager, supporter, and cheerleader one could imagine. It started when I moved to Delaware and she helped me find a home with  Concord Soccer Association. I joined their adult co-rec team, Classics II, and got back to playing the same month our first son was born. Soccer was never too much, even when I took over managing as we had our second son. Mary more-than-ensured that soccer was a part of our lives. She brought our boys to games, did almost all of the managing paperwork, and listened to my endless recaps of games or plays she missed.

Mary didn’t have a whole lot of incentive to cultivate my love of the game. She came from a football coach dad and soccer got me into trouble while we were dating. We played and celebrated hard in those days and after being banned from a bar or two, a possible assault, and having a teammate throw up on her I don’t know how Mary thought soccer should stay in our lives. Again, her wisdom and patience saved me. Leading Classics II has been the greatest experience outside blood family I’ve had over the last ten years. They’ve become family. And not only these great folks, but the other teams I’ve been blessed to play with, the charity tournaments, the pickups, the opponents, and the other leaders I’ve gotten to watch and learn from, our soccer family is enormous and generous. From delivered meals, donations to the boys’ education fund, invitations to pro games, Bible studies, parties, and dinners to well wishes and prayers, our soccer family has embraced us and protected us.

Soccer has never been an “escape” for me, but more of a meditation. My mind is in a different mode on the field, but Mary and the boys are always there with me. As I glance over to see the boys playing while I play, I feel blessed that this isn’t some part of Daddy’s life that they didn’t know. I’m blessed that Mary inspired me to be a better player, leader, dad, and human. Her memory still inspires me and guides me in how to go about that.

After 30 years of playing I’ve got too many people to thank. Maybe you’re one of those people.

Thank you and God bless,
Jason