My imaginary homeschool life

and why hobbles save us

Is there anyone more starry eyed than the mother of a newly minted five year old, researching homeschool curriculum?

I suppose my idealism was tempered somewhat by the presence of a baby who, at that exact moment in time, didn’t believe in sleeping and frequently required me to wear all 20 lbs of his darling, chunky self in order to nap. But still, I was ready. We were going to start “real” school. I went to the practicum, I filled my head with classical education ideals, I became slightly overwhelmed by how exactly I was supposed to implement memory work, but it was going to be great.

And then that fall we decided to sell our house, we moved in with family, my husband quit his job, we moved to Wyoming, Covid hit, and while the school year wasn’t a wash — we did math and phonics and I had a fluent reader¹ by the end of the year — it didn’t look how I thought it should. I was failing.

Little did I know that in our next four years of homeschooling, we would move several more times, live with family again, have two more babies, weather some odd medical crises and finish it off with a cross country move.

If I’m honest, it’s very easy for me to spiral down a self pitying hole about how much I’ve failed my children, and how pathetic our homeschooling is compared to (Instagram, my friend with two kids, the mom in the co-op, the other random person who wrote about her lesson plan, literally anyone I meet on the street). Whether it’s our extenuating circumstances or just normal limitations it seems I can’t even live up to my own standards. Last summer I spent the whole summer working on curriculum development for our co-op²and by November I was barely keeping up with the minimum of the structure I’d designed.

Now here I am, mid-July, in a new place, but in my usual funk, dreading all the back to school and curriculum talk, and feeling inadequate when a fellow mom shows me laminated, color-coded grammar flashcards and I wonder if I even know where our spelling curriculum is. I can’t even manage our daily life right now, so how am I possibly going to add schoolwork into this mix?

But, as I keep thinking through these “failures” of mine, I’ve been mulling over a question. Are my children actually struggling or behind because of my “failures”, or do I just feel insecure because our homeschool isn’t very aesthetic? When I’m trying to judge how badly I’m failing, what’s my measuring stick³?