Homeschool Angst

I wrote this after I attended my first ever homeschool support group meeting. Perhaps it was odd since I haven't started homeschooling quite yet—our first day will be next week. But I know I'll want a group of like-minded moms once I'm in the trenches. So tonight was the night.
make-shift puppet theatre in the living room

I think I need a Support Group support group.

I took notes during the meeting, not many, but here they are:

my anxious scrawled notes

And since it's hard to read my handwriting, this is what I wrote.

CM group
I am stupid.
panic attack feeling – sick in stomach
someone with 11 kids – oh god help
pink sun agnst. bldg outside – run
can I make it?
flashback of factory wk
pull-out chart – 6 pgs together
colored sticky notes
agonizing pain in seat
write in pencil so you can erase it
and it was never there

Those who were there (like the friend I had ice cream with later – our post-group support session) will know what that means. Anyone else will think I’ve lost my mind. But last night I wondered if I had.

I took a semester off from college to figure out what I wanted to do before I got more deeply in debt than I already was, and during that winter and spring I worked odd jobs. I worked in a coffee shop, I worked retail in the mall, I signed up through a temp agency and spent a few weeks in a floral-arrangement sweat shop (except it was very, very chilly). And once summer came I worked in a factory for one eternal day. My job was to load cardboard onto one end of a machine and watch it get sucked down to the other end where two girls (I assume – I never saw them) took the now-folded and -glued cardboard and packed it into boxes.

On the far side of the factory floor was a window, small and high in the metal-sheeted wall. A blue patch of sky, waving branches of an oak. I was supposed to hit a button if the machine jammed, but instead I stared out the window. A thousand times in each of those torturous hours I imagined crossing the factory floor, sprouting wings, escaping. The next day I got a job at McDonald’s and worked there until returning to school in the fall.

I think hell will have a window like that, into heaven.

And so last night, the back door to the classroom (where our meeting was held) stood open, and across the parking lot the setting sun glowed off a metal-sheeted building. I half-listened to homeschool veterans describe their typical days, show their hand-illustrated spiral-bound planning and record-keeping journals, discuss field trips to nature centers in other parts of the state. And I looked out the door in my panic-induced haze thinking if I bolted fast enough no one would even see me leave.

How can I teach even one child to read, let alone all three? How can I keep a (somewhat sanitary) house? How can I do any of that and write?

I didn’t run screaming out the door, because of one wise woman. In the discussion of planning, of to-do lists and assignments she said,
“Just write it in pencil, and if you don’t get it done you can erase it. Then it’s like it was never there.”
Words to live by.

What Month Comes After August?

That would be September. Which is why I have been sitting at my dining room table, books piled to the cobwebbed hanging lamp, for the past few weeks. Not heady reading (that’s my husband’s department), but picture books, curricula, catalogs, and my trusty IBM Thinkpad.
child's drawing of a guy riding a mythical creature
Inspired!
I’m coming up on my first year homeschooling, and had to hammer out a plan for September for St. Nick. I need to stimulate his interests (boogers, vomit, amputations, monsters) while teaching a few basic things he might need to know later in life (reading, and which insects are poisonous to baby sister and which are not, and why he ought not feed any insects to sister regardless of toxicity).

And since it’s Friday, and for lack of anything intelligent to say, beyond the names of all major Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, I will share my favorite online homeschool resources.

Starfall. A website dedicated to helping children learn to read. It utilizes phonics, stories, games, and all things interactive. And it’s free.

Better Chinese. This is a free demo of their online program (lessons 1-3). If the rest of the program is like this, my whole family will be speaking Mandarin by the end of the year. Fish is already singing songs in Chinese. *sadly, this site is no longer available*

Singapore Math. The math curriculum for Moms who detest all things rote and boring.

Sonlight. A literature-based whole-book curriculum. My fallback option if I can’t figure out how to use the curriculum below. Fantastic packages for individual subjects like math and science.

Tapestry of Grace. A literature-based curriculum that combines historically organized unit studies with classical methodology (i.e., the trivium). And it’s Reformed. Do you know how hard it is to find homeschool curricula that is Reformed?

Last, and I wish least, the website that will give St. Nick the motivation to read: Captain Underpants. Who knew sounding out the words: Booger, Vomit, Underpants and so on could be so engrossing?

Nine Years Ago, Today

I stand beneath blistering lights at VanDyke Photography studio.

My dress brushes the floor when I turn, sweeps behind me when I take a step. Vintage 1960 ivory lace and satin, which I’d found at a Lansing antique store for $99. A dress that is perfectly me, entirely unique. The secret blessing of a tight budget. And I bought it (rather, my parents did) two months before engagement.

I knew. I had only known this man, the one I am waiting for at the photography studio, six months when I bought the dress, had only been dating him four. But I knew.

I like to say we met Goofing Off.

We were at work, in the upstairs hallway of Sunshine Community Church, sitting on the floor outside empty classrooms. The walls glowed with fresh paint and our job that day was to take a chemical solvent to the baseboards, to remove the slopped smears and drips of paint. The name of the product was Goof Off.

Maybe the fumes went to our heads, but our conversation turned to the future. What were our hopes? What did we want most out of life?

“We’re done with the girls, with the bride’s parents,” the photographer says. “Shall we bring in the groom?”

I was too young for him. Only nineteen, nine years his junior. He had fears, he will tell me later, that I was too young to know my own mind, too young to be trusted.

That day after Goofing Off, I knew. I wrote in my journal, “I think I met someone. I won’t say more because I always do that. I always say, ‘I know! This is the one! This is IT!’ and I have always been wrong. This time, hear me, journal. I will say nothing.” Several months later I sat beside my friend Lucy, visiting from the then Czech Republic, in the church narthex, and I pointed to the man in the maintenance uniform. “That’s him, that’s the man I’m going to marry.”

The photographers send everyone off the studio floor and out the doors. I look at them, confused. The assistant smiles at me. “He hasn’t seen you in your dress, has he?” I shake my head. She nods and follows the photographer out of the room.

One of my work responsibilities was to make up the schedule. Who would work concerts? Who would open Saturday morning, or close after services Sunday night? Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings were our days. No one else worked with us, and only rarely did a call on the radio interrupt our conversations. Soon those conversations continued over late night cups of coffee and slices of pie, and soon those late nights became bleary drives back to my apartment in the predawn hours, exhausted, exhilarated, certain.

I will tell him later of the hours spent manipulating the schedule, accommodating fifteen or more employees’ preferences, their requested days off, and still holding on to Tuesdays and Saturdays. He will laugh. “I wondered why we were always working together.”

I wait in the empty studio. Of all the moments of that day, this I will remember. Black cloth drapes the walls, wires snake across the floor, the lights obscure my view of the door. I pace as time stretches on. I am not sure why I am alone, and I am beginning to worry—is there a problem? Was I supposed to have left with the rest?


I do not see him until he is standing at the edge of the circle of light. His eyes glisten. And again, I know.
antique-styled wedding photo in a gold frame


Nine years later, three children, and conflicts and struggles that were not in our plan, I still know. I have changed and so has he, but my promise that day has not.

August 9, 1997
August 9, 2006
August 9 for the rest of my life.
Our Hearts, Our Souls, Our Love Forever.

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