I am used to the comments by now. When people hear that I homeschool, the response is either "I could never do that. I don't have the patience." Or "How do you find the time?
I reply humbly to the comments describing me as "amazing" or "awesome" and hide the truth as best I can. I hide it because I enjoy the momentary bliss of being thought "amazing" by someone, despite the hypocrisy of the compliment. I want to shout at the top of my lungs, "Stop! I'm a loser just like you!"
Sometimes I retort, "You should see my toilets." That gets a laugh, but they don't believe me. They go on complimenting, needing to believe that I am the Martha Stewart of prepositions, clean toilets and all. I remember my father introducing me one time to an associate. I was in college, and he introduced me as his "4-point-oh daughter." I gave him a strange look, and started to protest, but he cut me off and continued talking. He may have remembered that I only had a 4.0 my freshman year when I was barely taking a full load in anthropology, with no job and no boyfriend. As soon as I switched to engineering, and got a job and a boyfriend, my GPA went the direction of mercury on a cold winter's day. It did not seem to matter to his urban legend. He needed to believe I was amazing.
Maybe I deserved the title when I first started homeschooling. I was full of enthusiasm, idealistic dreams, and my own abilities. No one hated math, and I had only two small Kindergarten students, my daughter and her friend. I painted the classroom butter yellow, and collected books and games and memories. I changed the bulletin board every five weeks, painstakingly creating a vision of what we would learn the following weeks. I took pictures of our day, and pasted them into a log that I wrote each afternoon. I spent evenings planning the details of the next day, complete with full-color worksheets often created by me, and lots of hands-on manipulatives. I actually planned what we would have for snack, and stocked it beforehand. We had story time and calendar time and said the Pledge of Allegiance, God and all. We had one day each week that we called field-trip day, and we fully took advantage of them. There was a period of time when we had passes to every conceivable park within an hour's drive. Considering we live in Southern California, that is no easy feat.
I'm not sure when things changed. The friend went public, but my son graduated from his crib, so there was no net change in enrollment. My son had a good Kindergarten experience, but then something happened. Maybe it was coincident with bringing in DVD teachers. Maybe I burned myself out the first four years. Initially, the DVD teachers were there to allow me a break at times, but then my children were watching television more than I taught. The bulletin board stayed the same all year, just a U.S. map and a multiplication table. I stopped taking pictures. The park passes began to expire. Math was exposed as the enemy.
I kept having dreams that my purse was being stolen, after I had left it in a vulnerable place. The only thing I had inside was my wallet and my camera. I read somewhere that repeated dreams should be interpreted by determining what the objects mean to you. My wallet and my camera. My identity and my memories. I was giving my identity away to DVD teachers, and cheating myself of memories. The day I figured that out was the day that I stopped relying on women with large shoulder pads to teach my children.
With that phase over, I was renewed. I began taking advantage of parent classes at our charter school. I was always the one in the room with my arm up the longest as they asked, "Who's been homeschooling over three years? Four? Five? Six? Seven?" But as an old dog, I was surprised to be learning new tricks. The best one was the "lap book" which is like unit-study-meets-scrapbook. It was the adrenaline that I needed to revitalize our schooling. We made amazing lap books, and enjoyed ourselves immensely that year. The more classes I attended, the more I started sharing my own discoveries, and I found that pretty soon I earned a reputation of being amazing even among my peers who were teaching too. But I was behind the mask of longevity and beautiful lap books. You should see my toilets, I would say, to the utter relief of the other moms to whom I was speaking.
Every year has a theme. There is a flow not unlike the ups and downs of a child in public school. One thing has stayed the same however, and that is the reason that I am amazing and the reason that I have time to do it all.
My toilets are truly cleaned about once a school year, if my husband is up to it. (Hey, he's the one who does not want to pay a housecleaner. Whatever.) The upstairs is usually off-limits to all but the most indiscriminating friends. Beds are made on a whim. There are stacks of clutter, some of it waiting to be unpacked from trips that were taken two seasons before. We used to have an agreement that the kitchen would always be clean, but that has fallen by the wayside too. There is usually an archaeological dig by the phone, getting deeper by the month.
I rarely wear makeup, except to church. My hair has been wash and wear for years, despite my sister begging me to do something with it. I don't iron except on holidays. I do shower every day, however; even I have my limits.
I go through phases with making dinner. One night on, two months off. Dinner is usually Jimbo's hot deli and salad bar (hey, it's organic). My son is great at making pasta (and messes). My daughter is great at begging me to go to Jimbo's to get food. The other night we had sweet potato shepherd's pie from the deli. It was yummy. We're not suffering.
My car has been washed once in the last year, by my neighbor who claimed to be thanking me for some forgotten kindness. I still wonder if they were just getting embarrassed by the layer of filth on it. When we carpool, we have to throw everything into the trunk and cover it. I still have something back there that I hear rolling around when I turn corners. I've even been known to spread a towel on the seat for these poor unsuspecting carpool children. Oh, and gas only happens when the car beeps at me.
Clean underwear needs the same alarm. When more than one person is complaining about needing clean underpants, then something happens. Usually that something is that a third person starts complaining. After everyone has gone through their swimsuits and borrowed underwear (same gender, please), there's usually a trip to Target to buy more. And the dry cleaning bin is uni-directional. I'm not even sure where there is a dry cleaners nearby since we moved (eleven years ago). We keep getting new clothes, but no one is cleaning out the old clothes. Every once in awhile my son comes out wearing pants that are four inches too short. Everyone thinks he's "growing so fast," but it's just time to do laundry.
We recently added fish and rabbits to the equation. I don't know what we were thinking. The fish gave us false security that we could handle the bunnies. Let me tell you, fish poop stays in the tank. Sometimes if you don't clean out the tank often enough, the fish eat the poop and it kills them. But you don't step in fish urine in your own kitchen in stocking feet. Fish don't make little yellow circles on the same carpet that you once asked people to remove their shoes for. Now we warn people to keep their shoes on their feet when entering our home.
I think what is amazing about me is that I have not been committed or arrested yet. Committed because of the insanity within my home, just this side of chaos, moving from one urgency to the next--no time to do it all, or even half of it, or even a tenth. Arrested because of the yelling that has to be heard from our open windows on a breezy day--yelling from the frustration and impatience and insanity and chaos and urgency. Stubbed toes. Left open mayonnaise. Bunnies running amok. Chaos and impatience and not enough time. Just like any other suburban American home. Only we homeschool. But I wouldn't trade it for the world. I guess that truly is amazing.