When I was growing up the two things I loved playing the most were school and midwife. I would line my dolls up to sit through daily lessons, where I would write in pastel colored chalk while balancing on a pair of my mom’s red pumps, pretending my name was Michelle. If it was midwife time, I would carefully place balled up paper towels into a Barbie dress so she looked pregnant and could have a baby. Barbie has come a long way- because when I was a child, there were not Barbie babies- so I improvised and used my brother’s GI Joe action figures instead. People said to me, “You should be a teacher.” Secretly I wanted to be a midwife more than a teacher, but perhaps they saw something in me that I didn’t, so perhaps they were right. So I decided that steering myself towards Liberal Arts was a good idea- but inside, I had a burning desire to be around all things pregnant. I went to my first birth workshop when I was nineteen and I was alive.
And people kept saying, “But you’d make a good teacher”.
As my oldest was approaching five, I felt a pang of anxiety when the sign in our small town began to advertise “Kindergarten Roundup”. It wasn’t like I was nervous to be away from him (although that is a valid feeling for sure) or that he wouldn’t be okay without his dad or I with him. It was this other overwhelming feeling- sometimes waking me from the most sound sleep, whispering it’s way into my thoughts. I tried to shove it down. It’s what happens. You have a baby, they grow, they turn five and they get on the bus. You pack lunches and walk to the bus stop and wave goodbye. We visited the school. The whisper got louder. We got a registration packet. The whisper got louder. We spoke to the teacher. The whisper was not a whisper anymore- it was a voice. We started the process of signing up and the voice was now a yell. So we looked at a private school. Maybe this particular public school wasn’t for us. The yell didn’t care- apparently, it didn’t like private school either. My husband said it first, “Why don’t we just homeschool?” I wish there were the words to describe my scoffs and sighs and gasps at this notion. I went to bed that night and fell asleep thinking about his seemingly absurd solution. Weird thing was- the voice was quiet.
I was standing in my mom’s backyard when I told her we were going to try homeschooling her grandson. My forehead scrunched up, my volume barely audible- I think on the outside she tried to look confident. Inside though, she was probably making some sounds herself! I was unsure of how we were going to do this- but I wasn’t unsure that we would. Besides, hadn’t people been telling me that I would be a good teacher? I have a strong feeling now that this wasn’t what they meant.
They Homeschool 