School Daze.

So, I’m home-schooling now. Please read that with a tone of surprise because even though I’m the one doing it there’s still that quality of when you’re in a crowded room and someone you don’t know starts waving frantically at you and smiling, and you look at them and kind of point to yourself as if to say “I’m sorry, you mean me..?”

Part of my surprise comes from how we didn’t take her out of school for any of the normal reasons. I like her school very much; I would recommend it without hesitation. We might even put her back there next year. I didn’t pull her out because she was having academic or social problems. Daughter’s only complaint about her peer interaction was that some of her friends didn’t get her jokes which caused Consort and me to say in unison “Yeah, join the club.” In all ways that mattered, she was fine. So why take on the extra work just when I am supposed to be finishing the book?

First, there is Consort. For a general good time, Daughter prefers Consort to me, which bothers me not at all. I’ve spent time with me and I’ve spent time with Consort and he is measurably more fun than I am. But the companies renting his brain this fall and winter have all been start-ups and I don’t know why this is but all start-ups work really weird hours. More nights than not, he comes home long after she’s gone to bed; frequently after I’ve gone to bed. He’s asleep in the morning when we leave for school and gone when we return home. Weekends are meaningless. Most Saturdays, he’s gone all day. Occasionally, one of his client companies makes an offer to join the party full-time. Eventually he will accept one of these offers and his hours could get even weirder. For the foreseeable future, Consort’s home-time is going to have a certain improvisational quality. If I keep her in school, days will go by without my daughter and her father seeing each other awake. The voice in my head which points out when I’m driving on a mountain road without a guardrail reminded me that a girl who doesn’t see enough of an adored father sometimes goes out and finds a substitute. Having her see her father and really spend time with him is nearly reason enough in and of itself.

And then there’s the yelling. Over Christmas break, I noticed I felt better. Was I working out more? No. In fact, with Daughter home, I was getting to the gym less. Was it the overall relaxed spirit of the holidays? Not really, although I did sigh in relief after I found something for the cat’s stocking. So what was it that was making me feel so much more aligned with the universe? It was all the time I didn't spend communicating at the top of my lungs.

Here’s what I say during any given school day:

COME ON.

COME ON, WE’VE GOT TO GO.

WE’RE GOING TO BE LATE, COME ON.

GET IN THE CAR.

GET IN THE CAR, WE’RE GOING TO BE LATE.

COME ON, WE’RE GOING TO BE LATE, GET IN THE CAR.
EAT YOUR DINNER, IT’S LATE.

COME ON, GET IN BED, IT’S LATE. WE DON’T WANT TO BE LATE TOMORROW MORNING.

I don’t understand how I don’t have nodules on my vocal chords. Everything is about the rush to the next thing, and I’m sick of it. Take choir. She goes to choir one day a week. Afterwards, the kids play freeze-tag on the church lawn, shrieking and tumbling across the grass, squabbling and negotiating until it’s too dark to see one another. It’s the most timeless, perfectly childlike time of her week. It’s the kind of activity we look back on fondly as adults. And what would I be doing during these freeze-tag tournaments? I would be bouncing around like a caffeinated ferret measuring how long it would take us to get home, get her homework done, get her fed and cleaned up so I could get her to sleep enough so she’d be rested the next day. I’d spend the last ten minutes of tag saying in increasingly plangent tones “We have to go. Now. Go. Now.” Everything in her life had to be measured and dosed with not a minute to spare for the pure pleasure of running on grass after dark.

And that, ultimately, is why I am doing this now. I am giving my daughter time, the one thing which used to be the birthright of all children. I found an online-school which is fairly challenging, but even at its most laborious is still going to consume less time each day than conventional school. The second day she was in home-school, she finished her work and came across Consort’s book of nearly a century's worth of New Yorker cartoons. She read cartoons from the 30’s and the 40’s which led to us discussing the Depression, and Prohibition, and women working during the war. I don’t expect every activity in her newfound spare time to lead to dragging out the Encyclopedia Britannica. I do expect she’ll create, and read and dream. For those people who think “Yes, but what about socialization?”, the reality is that she has more chances to be with her friends because I’m more able to work according to their schedule; I don't have to squeeze a slot for "playing" into two enrichment-packed lives.

When Consort and I started to think about this over Christmas our greatest concern was how she would take it. Daughter was happy at school, dashing in to hug her friends in the morning and loudly complaining that I had interrupted a game when I'd pick her up after-school. I was pretty certain leaving was going to involve tears. Tentatively, I brought up the idea of home-school one night when she was eating. Her spoon stopped stirring the soup.

“Will I still play with my friends?” she asked quickly.

“Of course,” I said.

She went back to stirring. “Then, I’m fine with it. More chances to do my stuff.”

I had no idea what stuff she meant, and I didn’t care. I glanced at the clock; dinner was running late. I started to open my mouth and then realized it would only matter for another week or so, and shut my mouth and smiled.