Dear Old Golden Rule Days

Here’s an interesting fact: when you home-school your kid, they’re always around.

This is my way of apologizing for my relative quiet and also bringing you up to speed. Yeah, we’re home-schooling again, have been since this start of the school year. But two years ago I loudly announced our general home-schooliness only to put Daughter back in school after a semester. This time, I wasn’t going to announce until it looked as if the Quinn Cummings Home School would last longer than a vase of cut flowers. Halfway through January, I’m feeling as if I can safely talk about this without lapsing into silence and staring moodily off into space.

Finding a math tutor helped. No, let me rephrase that; finding a math tutor meant my daughter and I now have a chance to make happy memories this year, not just memories aerated by sighing and seasoned with tears. A few parents who home-school suggested I let the math go and take it on faith that when it mattered to her she’d learn it; but she is half me. I am a person who decided to become an actor and eventually a writer because they seemed like two careers where no one would ever make me do long division. And it would have worked out perfectly were it not for the fact that I fell in love and had a terrific child and now am staring down mean, median and mode, which I’m convinced didn’t exist when I was in elementary school. And after two months of sighing and muttering and doodling and tears, I found a math tutor who is very good, very reasonable and has the happy luck to be very pretty. Being pretty shouldn’t matter in a tutor but studies have shown even newborns look longer at attractive people. Also, Daughter might be getting a subliminal message that being good at math gives you ringlets, which will encourage better work habits than pleasing her mother ever could.

Educationally, there’s a lot of writing and there’s American history and there’s science and there are Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes and I think the kid is learning a few things. I can tell you that I’m getting smarter, because it seems as if I forgot nearly everything I learned before twelve. Unfortunately, my new knowledge is in things which don’t actually matter once you’ve gone through puberty. Consort and I went to a cocktail party of work friends of his and I quickly realized that unless the conversation swung around to George Washington Carver, the Gold Rush or the prefix hydra, I wasn’t going to be contributing much.

Which brings us back to my first thought: when they home-school, your kids are always around. And this is lovely in its own way and I admit freely to enjoying seeing what kind of person Daughter is becoming when allowed to follow her own interests. But I’m never not Mom. I settle the kid down with a chapter to read, go to pick up an actual adult book and become distracted in ten minutes because even though I can still hear silence from her I instinctively know it’s the nonproductive daydreaming kind. A friend calls to discuss some deep, meaningful philosophic concept (or George Clooney) and I beg off because I’m supervising Daughter labeling the parts of a cell and if I stop supervising she’ll sketch dresses on the Golgi apparatus. And some dress-sketching and some wool-gathering is totally fine and even to be encouraged but some isn’t and if we don’t at least glance at the American Revolution she’s going to think the Battle of Bunker Hill took place in 1939 and what fiendish troll thought up factoring?

And then, if you’re me, you worry about your child having real time with peers, learning how to bump up against other kids socially without getting bruised psychically. This means I spend five afternoons a week standing on one sporting field or another, watching kids get commended on their hustle [As with mean, median and mode, I don’t think hustle existed when I was a child.] It’s nice to be outdoors once I’ve taken a Claritin and I’ve become quite the dab hand at handing out orange slices, but I’m hesitant to call it Quinn Time.

Consort is a brick, taking on far more of this educating than most fathers, but he’s working, and I want him focusing on his job. I’m focusing on my job, which is to make sure my daughter is happy, curious, brave and not one of those high-school kids who think Vietnam is in South America.

I’m exaggerating. My life isn’t that hard. Certainly there’s less shouting than when she was in school, doing homework every night. Then she was doodling jewelry on cross-sections of the planet Earth and we had to be out the door at 7:45am, a time neither Daughter nor Consort really believe exists. But the fact remains that the hardest lesson I learn this year might be how to give myself fully to the people I love without giving myself entirely away.