Somewhere in the Middle

The uncertainty of school and such.

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“Tomorrow is our first official day of homeschool,” the post says.

I’ve learned to read the invisible parade of punctuation that follows a statement made like this online. I recognize the plea for someone, somewhere, anywhere to tell me I’m not alone here.

Something akin to the sting of an arrow shoots through my heart in translation. Is it regret? Is it doubt? Simply sadness? Is it fully understanding the weight, relief, and uncertainty of a declaration you swore you’d never utter and can’t fathom making good on. (Or, conversely, always dreamed of doing and can’t believe your fortune at getting to.)

Suddenly, I race backward through time, remembering, considering how we got here, as if here may ever be a fixed destination.

We’re still somewhere in the middle.

March 2020

Our youngest is in his first of the two years he’ll attend the peer model preschool program his older sister and brother both attended at our neighborhood elementary school. Three hours a day, four days a week, he’s settled in a classroom with ten other children he’s learning how to learn alongside. His teacher and aides are the same who’ve loved and cared for our family for five years, now. We are unsurprised that, of the three, he’s the least concerned with rule-following but loves making art.

Our middle is in kindergarten with the same teacher who taught our oldest to read and add to ten, two years ago. He’s made friends, gone on field trips, learned how to spend his days away from home and is thriving. He smiles wide at me through the window in his classroom door each week when I show up for my volunteer hour. I love our Friday lunches, sitting on round plastic stools linked to long gray tables in a noisy room of children.

Our oldest is in second grade and living the life. Book fairs and folk dances and writing journals filled with stories. Her teacher, in her first year of teaching second after a career in kindergarten, absolutely adores our daughter. The feeling is mutual. Once a week, I also spend an hour with her class running through lists of sight words and stepping into her beloved little world. She adores having both her brothers at school with her now.

July 2020

I am wrung out by the need to make a decision, by the days bleeding one into the other almost exactly the same for the last four months. I am sad and angry, but I’m also fresh off a life-giving escape to the Rocky Mountains to breathe open air and sleep in tents with my family away from people, the news, and questions stacking one upon the other every week. Driving home, I watch the world I know come back into view and remember nothing is the same.

No answer feels exactly right, but in my body it’s like life and death. Long gone is the given, idyllic choice it had been for years to walk our children a couple blocks to the haven they knew as school, changed in ways they now cannot contemplate and maybe don’t have to, at least for a little while.

We tour a local private school. We consider a hybrid school model being created by our daughter’s first grade teacher who has quit. We imagine a different way of returning to what we have known. A few days before we begin our first year of homeschool, we say “for now” to what was once “never.”

I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’ll do my best to learn.

And that’s what I’ve done, haven’t I?

I spontaneously waded into a icy-cold, rock-strewn pool under an 110-foot waterfall, fully-clothed, because when you’re that close to something so terrifying and breathtaking and potentially life-changing, how can you not?

And I didn’t do it alone.

Four years, it’s been, since we were cast off our tidy, prefunctory path for what feels, some days, like No Man’s Land. Like I am Wonder Woman in the scene where she shrugs off the mission’s expected course and lifts arms and shield against the enemy’s fire. Except a whole lot less Hollywood and with pencils, so many pencils.

Before 2020, I never understood the capacity within parents to choose alternate paths for their children in education. And not just their children as a unit but as individuals. I could see it, respect it, but nothing in me connected with the desire, compulsion, or conviction.

“Why make things harder?” I’d ask myself. Not realizing, then, how much of parenting was going to be less about keeping my children alive than finding ways for them to be fully realized humans whose potential growth would be optimized by intentional, thoughtful choices made by Cliff and I.

Sometimes, those choices are the harder way. The path of most resistance. The path that perplexes those around you, even those closest. Choices I never imagined myself making until we felt, for all intents and purposes, forced to.

I have learned, though, to recognize that for our family:

• Not everything is right for every child.

• Not everything is right for every child in every season.

And our season is shifting.

This school year, we’ve asked new questions, widened our vision a bit broader. We’ve wondered what happens when “for now” becomes “four years”?

Where would we go from here?

Though I am fully convinced of its immeasurable gifts to our family, I’ve never let myself cling entirely to the ideal of homeschooling, to the surety that it was somehow superior to any other way for us. That first year was meant to be our only. Both Cliff and I are proud of our public school educations, and I come from family littered with incredible public educators. We have nephews and nieces and friends’ kids who’ve loved their time in private school. And my friends and family who’ve homeschooled here and there over the years make complete sense to me, now.

I’ve also never let myself stop being surprised by what this journey has been and will continue to be. But it’s transitioning, some, and I’ll be learning anew, a new path.

This past fall, we challenged our oldest two to consider a shift, again, in what school might look like in the following year. Not because we were sure, but curious. Knowing you can’t walk through a door you don’t knock on first, it’s required a process, a challenge the kids have risen beautifully to. Even — and especially — the waiting. Perhaps, the most important step of all.

Today, the proverbial ink is still fresh on enrollment forms for a new school for one kid, for next year. Another is returning to the only way he really remembers school to be at all. The last one learns to live in the in-between, remaining open to either of the options possibly set before her. We simmer with anticipation and excitement, fear and hope, each in turn. Many days, I field questions I don’t yet know the answers to.

The only thing I know to be certain on this journey is uncertainty.

How could I ever again stand on the solid ground of what I believed school to be knowing that, when the rug was pulled out from under us four years ago, it felt as though there was nothing but air? The force of invisible molecules rushing past in my free fall while building not just one parachute but four.

But, even then, I was held.

Today, I homeschool three children.

In six months, that number becomes two, maybe even one.

The coming transition, though months away, is one we’re all five of us walking through now and have been for awhile now. In the growing light of these spring days still doing school at home, I remember that while here is not a final destination, it is presence.

It’s the gift I didn’t see coming. It’s the sometimes exorbitantly taxing moments married to an astonishment and wonder that, in the end, has kept me anchored to the very being it turns out I was meant to become in the final years, even weeks, of my fourth decade.

Right here in the middle of things, I plan to enjoy it. To let the next eight weeks stand as a celebration of the great things that have been done in and for us on this journey, knowing the same will be true, even when it changes.