Feeling like both the rose and the rain

What surprised me after a day of reflection on our school year.

This week a friend of mine offered a homeschool retreat at her home. Her husband and sons left for the day, and seven women arrived around 8:30am carrying their contributions for a potluck salad bar (a protein, a topping, a dressing), a few notebooks, and books they meant to look over during their time alone. The retreat was intended to be offline, so I packed a couple of pens and my notebook of notes on the last year, which consisted of one page of things that did not go well and one page things that were super.

the flowers I sat next to

We talked for a bit over coffee and cardamom buns (I really need to learn to make this incredible baked good!), and then went around and shared some useful ideas that had been great about our last year, including books like How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (and the wonderfully illustrated plays by Marcia Williams). I was quick to volunteer my friend Ashleigh’s hack of keeping a milk crate of books in her minivan packed with books that only live in the minivan. When I’ve driven with her children, they are constantly cycling through these weary volumes, reading at a steady clip throughout the drive. I also shared my spiral notebook hack, which I’ve written about here.

We talked for far longer than the schedule had planned and then split up for ninety minutes of sitting by ourselves and thinking through what needed revising for the next year. Some of the questions she gave us to consider were…

• What are your “end goals” for your student at the close of high school?

• What will be your focus on the early years, the middle, the later? Certain subjects, habits, etc?

• What excites you about homeschooling? What is concerning?

• What strengths do your children have? What do the enjoy about homeschooling?

• What weakness do you bring to homeschooling? What might you add or take away from your schedule or materials to address this? What resources, people, or materials can you draw on to help? How can you improve?

Throughout the retreat I vacillated between feeling a deep swell of how incredible it was that I get to consider what learning opportunities my children might thrive on next year and the constant sense that what we could do was so much smaller than what we hoped to do. I vacillated between a deep and abiding sense of beauty: the flowers I was sitting next to, the rich taste of fresh coffee, a pastry baked by a friend, how it feels when you read something beautiful and true, how it feels when you take a deep breath while going for a walk. And the profound sense of the reality human behavior: the light tap of tension and stress when you’ve set out to get laundry done when it’s breakfast you should be fixing, when you stayed up late reading and now you feel grouchy instead of enthused, a frisson of worry when one child is occupying far more of your attention than the other.

While I wanted to simply delight in the quiet and contemplation of the morning to myself, I kept pushing against this tension of feeling because it’s the one I really want to break through. I am proud of all we did this year. And I am disappointed by the things that didn’t go well/right/as I expected. The times I didn’t “fail fast” and pivot to a different approach, like when I realized we weren’t going to be able to do our morning reading for most mornings because I had signed Joan up for a morning Latin class. Things could have been thought through more pragmatically, but we also dreamed big.

It is this tension, in a way, that I feel summer is for wrestling with.

it’s me

When we gathered together at lunch to reflect on some of our goals, most of us shared that they start each day hoping one thing would happen and soon settling in to realize they would be doing far less. One woman with four children under seven noted that the ninety minutes of the baby’s morning nap was her kindergartener’s entire school day. One noted that the biggest change to her school year was having the two children that couldn’t help but pester each other, work in separate rooms every morning. Because I know all of these women and see their children at the co-op throughout the year, even as I listened to their concerns and worries, I know the reality is that everything is as wonderful as it could be. The children are curious and learning. They are proud of their work. They are eager for more. They believe in the value of their interests and hobbies. But in front of me I saw people who longed for even greater accomplishment, and perhaps a bit less friction.

While I wanted to say encouraging things to them because: of course, that’s life!, I also felt like sitting in the fact that the same was true for me. Was it the case that every single day I planned for more than we could possibly accomplish? If true, then how to shift that?

Ironically for the three questions that centered on the eventual goals of what we are doing:

• What are your “end goals” for your student at the close of high school?

• What will success look like for your homeschool?

• What characteristics, dispositions or habits do you hope your graduating student has?

My answers were: for them to be curious, self motivated, able to finish tasks, able to assess challenges and plan for them, aware of how to strategize, connected with community, and disciplined. These answers flowed from my pen as soon as the nib hit the paper. I was surprised to realize all my hopes were all about life skills, not academic abilities.

What I loved about the retreat was that it gave me the chance to write down my long term hopes for our children. I loved that it honored the effort of homeschooling with the time to reflect. A bit of time on a beautiful summer Saturday couldn’t solve the reality of the human pursuit of perfection, just like my garden currently looks nothing like what I thought it might at the end of June. But are we enjoying the process and is it a beautiful thing? Yes.