The Thrill is Gone

Okay, the homeschool convention is coming up in a couple of weeks, and it’s causing me to confront a hard truth about myself and our little off-the-beaten-path educational tour: The thrill is gone.

When DH and I first started discussing homeschooling, our oldest child was in 1st grade and his brother was only four, and they attended a private Christian school near our home. We had a brand-new baby girl and were finding that the whole “school” thing wasn’t what we’d hoped it would be. For one thing, the boys were at two different campuses, in opposite directions. Neither was that far away, yet the hassle factor was high: Fight early-morning traffic to get one kid dropped off by 8:00 a.m., then turn around and fly to the other campus to get brother dropped off by 8:25. Come home, feed sister, clean up the breakfast dishes, put baby down for nap, then whoops! Nap time is over, baby, whether you’re ready or not – it’s time to get in line for the kindergarten carpool. Come back home, fight with four-year-old to take a nap, then wake HIM up to go get his brother at 2:45. This is only 1st grade and kindergarten, folks, and only two kids. What will life be like when you’re juggling three school schedules?

Then there are the field trips. The fund raisers. The class parties. The brownies you need to bake and the costumes you need to sew and the phone calls you need to make. The homework. (For first-graders. Who’ve already been in school six hours.)

Then there was just the missing them. I had left my budding new counseling career to stay home and raise these kids, and had been with them pretty much 24-7 since their births, and now suddenly I was without them for the best parts of their days. I got them for a few hours at the end of the day, when I also had dinner to prepare and laundry to launder. Not the best formula for parent-child bonding. I really missed my boys.

But the final straw was the emotional baggage that just seems unavoidable no matter where you send your kid when you choose to send him off to school. At our local public school, it would have been one kind of baggage; at this school, it came in a different color, but it was baggage all the same. My first grader came home singing a song with a line that went, “Red is for the blood of Christ that saves us from hell; yellow is for the Christian who’s afraid to tell.” AAACCCK! Yeah, and green is for the big bucks he’s going to have to pay some therapist someday to work through his false guilt issues while he decides if he’s ready to come back to organized religion.

So when I started to investigate homeschooling… well, it seemed like the answer to all our troubles. No more having to wake up a kid who clearly isn’t done sleeping. No more rushing through the morning to finish breakfast and find the lost permission slips and missing sneaker and get in the car before 7:45. No more FUND RAISERS. Just educational exploring and delightful, hands-on learning that would guarantee my children’s fully-funded admission into the Ivy League Educational Establishment of his choice. After all, everything you read about homeschooling assures you that it is the path to higher test scores and greater success in college. All that AND you can take a family vacation whenever you want, right?

Well. There is all that. And more. But once again, the whole "homeschool" thing isn't always all I had hoped it would be. Hence my current dilemma... The thrill is gone. Which, since this post is getting sorta long, I'm going to explain tomorrow.

(I.e, To be continued…)