Love in a Time of Homeschooling (21 page)

By now my voice had crescendoed from mezzo piano to forte. “It's an F
sharp
! Why won't you play the *#&%$
F sharp
?”

One more time she tried it. She started at the beginning of the passage, winding her way through a series of correct notes, correct rhythms, correct dynamics, and then, at the moment of truth: F natural. At which point I leaned over and swatted her across the top of her head. It wasn't a hard swat, not the sort of thing that would hurt, knock a girl backward, or leave even the faintest tinge of pink. An inch of tousled hair, poking out from behind her ear, was the extent of the physical damage. The emotional damage, however, will probably ripple back to me for years to come.

On television, a swat across the head is the stuff of comedy—
a hallmark of
The Three Stooges
(but who wants to be a stooge, especially mean-spirited Moe?) and the Skipper on
Gilligan's Island
(but he always used his hat against his little buddy, never his hand). In reality, there is nothing funny about a mother swatting her daughter on the head, particularly in our household, where corporal punishment is supposed to be off limits. (In fact, when Julia was six years old and especially disobedient, I once spanked her on the side of her thigh. After eyeing me with surprise, and noting my flustered, guilty face, she laughed and taunted me, “Mommy's a spanker! Mommy's a spanker!”)

Now I wished that she would mock me, laugh at me, make light of the situation. Call me a swatter or a smacker or a walking Mount St. Helens. Instead, two things happened. She played the F sharp, but she did it with tears in her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” I mumbled. “That was way out of line.”

I tried to assuage my guilt with lame excuses. “It's just that you were driving me crazy, the way you wouldn't play such a simple note.”

Julia wouldn't even look me in the eye.

“You can put your violin away,” I said. “We're done for the day.”

Done for the day, done for the week, done with all of it. Julia took refuge in a book while I retreated to my bed, where I stared at the ceiling and wallowed in a sea of self-recrimination. I was a lousy homeschooler and, what's more, a lousy mom. I should probably not have had children in the first place. I had never been one of those women whose body aches with maternal instincts, someone who feels her life will be incomplete without a child, eager to hold other women's babies, to read board books and buy onesies and push a stroller through a park. I should have settled for Wordsworth and Bishop and Eliot, and never trusted myself with these precious little lives.

Because what had come of it? I had struck my daughter for something so trivial as an F natural. Homeschooling had brought out the worst in me. It had turned me into a sputtering, head-swatting monster. And the more I brooded over my failures, the more I was certain: this homeschooling had been a mistake. It was time to quit.

T
HE NEXT MORNING IT WAS HARD TO GET OUT OF BED
—hard to face my daughters and look at myself in the mirror. I didn't want to contemplate the ugly features I'd developed as a homeschooler: my own little
Picture of Dorian Gray
. Better to stay under the covers and sleep it off for a few hundred hours.

Not that I had the option. Most days I can barely grant myself a few hundred seconds. As I huddled under our blankets that morning, trying to stay warm in the winter's pre-dawn hours, those extra ten minutes meant that our family's schedule would be rushed. Rachel and Kathryn might be a minute late to school, and at Waddell Elementary, if a child is one second late, the parent is supposed to park her car, get out, and walk inside, then stand as a silent, contrite witness while the school secretary fills out a tardy slip for the child to deliver to her teacher.

I rarely bother with that. If my girls are substantially late, I'm willing to sign them in, but if the bell rings as we pull up, or if we are within the two-minute limit, I drop them off and skulk away. I figure children can retrieve their own tardy slips without
the school's attempts at disciplining already rushed and harassed parents. Even the word
tardy
annoys me. Nevertheless, the thought of those little white slips and their pink carbon copies, and the stern letters of admonition sent home after three late arrivals, was enough to launch me out of bed. I got up, grabbed my robe, roused Rachel and Kathryn, made their lunches, fixed their breakfast, poured John a cup of tea (one teaspoon of sugar, one dribble of cream), looked in the girls' shared room (“Why aren't you dressed yet? Hurry!”), searched for shoes and socks (“It's okay if they don't match! You're wearing long pants!”), signed homework sheets and field trip forms, brushed and braided Kathryn's hair, cursed inwardly as Kathryn pulled out her imperfect left braid, braided that side again with added care, lamented the half-eaten bowls of cereal on the kitchen table, and handed my girls buttered bagels through the window of the car while John yelled, “We don't have time for that!” Then I stepped back and sighed while the three of them pulled out of the driveway with forty seconds to spare.

Mornings like that are reason enough for some families to homeschool. I know a local woman whose kids sleep until 9:30 while she enjoys her coffee and paper, a morning walk, and a leisurely shower. In her house, school begins at ten, and by two, the children have finished all of their lessons. I envision their home as an island of peace in the morning, while throughout their neighborhood, families scurry around grouchy and stressed. More arguments take place in our house between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m. than at any other time of day.

Yes, one might say, but those late-sleeping children will never be prepared for the early morning grind of the working world! And maybe that's true. But there are many working worlds in our country, with various working hours, and why must children be indoctrinated so early into the hassles of adult life?

I pondered that question as I closed my door against the February chill. Walking into the kitchen, I sat down and warmed my hands on a mug of tea, blowing ripples across its surface. That day Julia could sleep late. Left undisturbed, she would doze until ten, which suited me fine. I needed time to think.

Glancing at the counter to my left, I saw Julia's journal, which beckoned with its oh-so-pretty Thomas Kinkade cover. I picked it up and examined that cover carefully for the first time: a painting of a stone cottage trimmed by multiple shades of blue. In the middle, an azure door was matched by azure shutters and eaves, topped with silvery blue shingles and a background of trees and sky that faded into a gray and pink twilit haze. In the foreground, a willow tree leaned over the cottage's left corner, while dozens of plants bloomed simultaneously, perpetually. Snapdragons, red, pink, and purple, lined a hand-hewn wooden fence, and tall puffy shrubs buffered the entire scene, covered in miscellaneous blossoms that ranged from bluebonnets and scotch broom to daisies and lilac.

This, I told myself, was the American idealized vision of home. Home was a place where every window glowed with orange and golden light, while tiny threads of smoke rose from the tops of brick chimneys. Home was a warm and sheltering nook, so inviting that even animals seemed drawn to it. Five blackbirds congregated on this painted roof, while a cat watched from a fencepost. To the left, free-range hens pecked in a pebbled walkway leading through a gate that remained always open.

It struck me that Julia, for her daily journal, had chosen this paradisal image of home. Here, home was a haven of safety, beauty, and warmth, not a setting for anger and stress. Not a place where a frustrated mother called you a dumbass or popped you on the head for playing an F natural. What a betrayal of hopes my recent behavior had been. Obviously I was not living up to Thomas Kinkade's vision of the world.

I thought of the March family in
Little Women
. Even amid financial hardships and the troubles of war, their house was warmed by love, doled out under the guiding light of Marmee. And theirs, too, was a homeschooling house, where Jo was tasked with teaching little sister Amy, in protest against the tyranny of Amy's knuckle-rapping schoolteacher. Of course, Jo deplored the idea of homeschooling her sister; she probably popped Amy on the head many a time. And Marmee, whose sticky-sweet name sounded too much like marmalade, confessed to having a fiery temper and a bitter tongue: “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo.” Even in the most idyllic households, anger and frustration could simmer just beneath the surface.

Still, I hated to compare myself to Marmee. I never did like
Little Women
, and in fact, neither did Louisa May Alcott, when she was first writing the book. She found the task dreary and dull and would have stuck to writing potboilers, if it weren't for her somewhat despotic father, who pushed his daughter to complete the highly marketable project.

The question for me, on that cold winter morning, was how hard a parent should push a child toward success. Should a parent “push” at all, or merely nudge and coax and pray? In the lives of many successful women there has lurked some form of parental despot, prodding, insisting, and sometimes punishing. I wondered: Was a touch of tyranny essential in parenting? So many parents of my generation seemed to allow their children to tyrannize them.

I took another swallow of tea and opened Julia's journal. Julia always let me read the pages with impunity, since she rarely used them for personal feelings. In fact, her first entries were little more than silly scribblings:

In the first few weeks of homeschooling, Julia had viewed her journal as a boring chore. Compelled to write one page after school every Monday through Thursday, she had conformed to the letter, if not the spirit, of the assignment. She had filled her initial pages with short, terrible poems in large print, with double spacing between lines and quadruple spacing between stanzas. Her goal was haste, not quality; she sometimes completed her page in five minutes.

I had been tempted, in our first month of schooling, to insist that she fill each page with thoughtful, single-spaced writing. This silly verse, I had wanted to say, was beneath her intelligence. Luckily, I never intervened. For once, I displayed amazing self-restraint, remaining patient even through the lowest forms of doggerel: “Twinkle twinkle little mutt, / Do not think I am a nut.”

Now, as I flipped through the more recent pages of Julia's writing, I was reminded that a mother's silence is often more effective than her words. After weeks of jotting down hasty drivel, Julia had decided to put her journal to better use. She had begun to compile a dragon encyclopedia, filling her pages with descriptions of imaginary Fire Dragons, Cat Dragons, Were Dragons, and Water Wyverns. “Warrior Dragons,” she wrote, “are one of the most interesting dragons that have been”:

At last, Julia was actually writing. These pages were not composed to silence an insistent mother; they were meant to satisfy a ten-year-old's imaginative thirst. As a result, the sentences weren't scribbled quickly, with oversize type. Here was single-spaced cursive, with subsequent entries that built upon earlier ideas:

As I studied the progression in that little blue book, from hasty riffs on a single rhyme to intricate, creative sentences, I told myself that here, in my hands, lay tangible proof that something had been accomplished in our homeschooling. Julia had begun to write from her heart, and as a result, her ideas, her sentence structure, even her grammar, were improving.

That brief moment at my kitchen table served as a minor revelation. How wrong I had been, for the past several weeks, to have fretted over all the things that were going badly in our
schooling. What a fruitless waste of time, to have worried about incomplete tasks, abandoned goals, misspelled words, and miscalculated equations. Instead, why not celebrate everything that was going right?

I should have known that the real test of our academic success would lie in Julia's writing. After all, I am an English teacher—not a French linguist, not a scientist, certainly not a mathematician. For twelve years I had taught college students how to write papers and analyze literature, and my chief academic goal in homeschooling had been to encourage Julia to write across the curriculum, drafting essays on everything from fantasy novels to colonial life.

Closing Julia's journal, I walked into our dining room, where our family computer stands in a corner cabinet. There, from the shelf above the monitor, I took out Julia's portfolio, which held most of her formal writing from the year. Inside were pages and pages of essays, three times as much writing as her peers were doing—more writing, in fact, than Julia would ever complete in any of her middle-school years to come.

Thumbing through the early pages, I stopped at Julia's first book report, on a novel called
Crispin
, by the children's author known as Avi.

“What should you include in a book report?” I had asked Julia back in September.

“The title of the book,” she answered.

“That's a good start.”

“And the author?” she added.

“That's important, too. But what else?”

She shrugged. “Stuff that happened in the story?”

“Yes, that's called the plot. But what other information should you include?”

Julia was stumped, because what else did a book contain besides the stuff that happened?

“How about your own analysis of the book?” I suggested.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, did you like
Crispin
?”

“Yeah,” she nodded.

“Why?”

“Because it was good.”

“What made it good?”

“The writing.”

“What made the writing good?”

“I dunno.”

“Every good book is successful for different reasons,” I explained. “Some books are funny, some have beautiful descriptions, some have exciting adventures, some have great characters. If you know what makes a particular book good, then you'll know what makes each author unique. Is Avi talented at writing action scenes, or dialogue, or describing a place?”

Julia wound up writing two brief paragraphs:

It was rough, but it was a start. My college students still write about how things are “so different but also so alike.” That, I explained to Julia, doesn't say much.

My students also suffer from repetitive vocabulary. “See how you've used
like
in three sentences in a row?” I said to Julia.
“How can you change that? What's one synonym for
different
? And how else can you say ‘on-the-run life'?” That day marked Julia's first acquaintance with a thesaurus.

We also talked about larger questions of content. What made the story exciting and dramatic? Could she describe some of the settings? Why was Crispin's life “on the run,” and who was Bear? These sorts of questions occupied every week of our autumn homeschooling, and now when I turned to Julia's most recent book report, the benefits were clear: