I am poking my head out of the ground less and less, scampering from hole to hole as one does when they homeschool. My phone is on silent. I clock six miles through my house on the average. Mac and cheese is the only viable hot lunch option. I pray that a math worksheet will take more than five minutes, enough time to maybe visit the bathroom. I need more treats in my cabinets, more friends to call when I get lonely and defeated.
I feel like I live in a factory. A lab. A cafeteria. An art studio. A theater. A hippy commune. A war reenactment.
Yes, we fold a hundred airplanes a day, and then we fly them. We stir up sweet tea and add kombucha, then swat fruit flies for three weeks while it turns into a bubbly elixir with a nasty film on top. Is it a scoby (good)? Is it mold (bad)? Let’s put it under the microscope and see if it wiggles.
We swab things around the house–the fish tank, dog’s mouth, knee scrape (Luke’s fitness wound, the label reads) and incubate the germs in petri dishes in the living room window seat, a tea towel covering the evidence.
One child rips brown paper bags into long strips and hot glues them to a cottage cheese container. It is Bunker Hill, he announces, then asks me if I have any popsicle sticks so he can fortify the post.
Cardboard boxes in the recycling bin are met with tears.
“Did you throw away my project?” they demand to know.
“No…” I lie, and tell them Daddy probably didn’t know it was special.
They have figured out how to play harpsichord and human voices simultaneously on the digital piano. Along with the preprogrammed player feature and metronome. The Entertainer blasts out, full volume, as a child ad libs, an eerie, annoying, medieval pounding vibrates the house.
Am I in a bad movie?
I look through the freezer and see a tea cup, full of water–ice now–and what is it? A cookie, solid in the middle of the mass.
“Who froze a cookie in a cup of water?” I holler through the house. Luke meekly claims the experiment.
“Well…I had a couple plans. Soak it all the way and then freeze it or just leave it and see what happens,” he shrugs. (At least they no longer pee in the basketball goal base in the driveway.)
My little girl is in the garden, picking ripe tomatoes and squash. She brings them in the house, the tomatoes to the counter for me to taste. The squash are soon wrapped in blankets. Her squash babies.
My writing languishes in bits and pieces, some pages in a folder, some chapters on google docs. It makes me terribly sad to watch it slip away, but I cannot sustain the focus when someone is describing, in great detail, how to fold a Jar Jar Binks origami puppet. Plus, bibliographies and editing–two huge mountains I can’t get over.
Tempus fugit, I texted a friend. Time is in no way flying, but it is what I tell myself. It’s what old ladies always tell young ladies like me with young kids (usually at the grocery store, when the blood pressure is high). You’ll miss this.
Maybe. I love my kids, but I unashamedly love silence. (Aaand, I’m already feeling guilty for saying it.) You are their best teacher, the homeschooling ghost of the school year present wags her finger. I’m pretty sure I am not. I was hoping this year or next might be the one where I’d get a job–but life is too absurd to counter.
Homeschool is here. I’ve never posted front porch, first day pictures of any kind of school. It’s a bit of the pride of life–that fleeting pleasure in what my kids are doing, what I am doing–and I’m ever aware of the hurt it unintentionally causes. I don’t love this world. If I need any more reason to not flaunt it, I need not look far: the struggle is all around. Our neighbor down the street will be remote learning in their rental with his fourteen year old sister while their single mom is at work. They’ll eat cold cereal again for lunch because they cannot get to the food distribution center for another meal.
Three hundred thousand people in Beirut lost their homes and schools three weeks ago in an explosion. They have been largely forgotten.
Friends of friends lost their kids–all of them–in a car crash caused by a drunk driver. They would give their soul for it not to be so quiet in their house. When do they get a fresh start, cute pictures on the front porch?
Nothing is fair. I’m grateful for my not-just-a-home, as crazy as it feels, as buggy as it makes me. Why me, God? Why are you so good to me? Can you teach me to look forward and not back, can you help me fix my eyes on the horizon and not on myself? Can you keep reminding me that the next hard thing doesn’t depend on my ability to do it but my willingness to trust you?
I’ve been intending to add some little interesting homeschool resources, but I kind of blanch at the idea of offering something that seems so subjective to the masses. Your kids are not my kids. I know that–you know that. Do what you think is best, right? Seize the day, because you aren’t guaranteed another one.
In the feeble hopes of inspiring my own learners (and perhaps pretending I’m confident when I’m not), I’ve been reading Susan Wise Bauer. She’s the writer with whom I have a love-hate relationship. She is so wise when she isn’t condescending. I love her philosophy as a post-homeschooler better than when she wrote The Well-Trained Mind.
Her more recent book, Rethinking School: How to take charge of your child’s education, had some excellent points. (She’s a grandma now, and can look back a little more objectively at her child-rearing and schooling years.)
The theme I picked up on was this: kids are different, so schooling should be, too. Wise Bauer’s new and improved view boils down to a more flexible approach to education at home. It includes how to avoid the “going global” terror I frequently sink into with homeschool–where one small, miniscule action by a child ends up with my hysterical, panic-ridden reaction.
You told me you finished your math problems, but I just found the crumpled paper shoved down next to the sofa cushion and it’s not even half done.
And then it escalates.
You didn’t do the work. I know it’s hard. But you just quit. You don’t know how to word hard.
And you lied to me! You didn’t tell me the truth. If you can’t tell the truth and work hard, you won’t be able to graduate from high school. And then what will you do? You’ll never be able to go to college and get a job.
And you’ll end up in a cardboard box.
Under a bridge.
With no health insurance.
Keep in mind that when you’re homeschooling, the opportunities for going global multiply. It’s related to fear. Fear that you’re not doing a good enough job to prepare them for life…
It’s just a math worksheet, not a referendum on the rest of his life. He’s not revealing a deep character flaw. He just doesn’t want to do his math.
Rethinking School, Susan Wise Bauer
This is the kind of encouragement I need to hear. We’re doing our best here. We’re not proud. Some days we won’t do math because I’d rather be just a mom.
My kids have turned our home into a grand experiment–one where I usually hypothesize the worst-case scenario…and they show me what gratitude and wonder looks like. They fold another plane. They marvel at the tiny hairs on the leg of a fly, magnified by their dinky microscope. They wrap up squash babies and sing them to sleep.
They are miracles, moment by moment by moment miracles.
It upends me.
They are my best teachers, under every circumstance. Thank you, Jesus, for letting them teach me.
