Because You Just Know Deep Down That You’ve Ruined Her Life

11 years ago, I looked at my sweet 4 1/2 year old daughter and decided to homeschool her.  I’d never met any homeshoolers. No one I knew had ever met a homeschooler.  In fact, the only person I knew of who was actually crazy enough to do it was that girl who played Blair on Facts of Life.

The only homeschooler I knew 11 years ago.

She’d said something about it in a People magazine interview a few years earlier.  I had thought she was a nut back then and had loudly said so.  The irony of my deciding to do this was not lost on me.

I’m not a great teacher.  Is it okay to say that out loud? I’m not sure what the ratio is between my actually teaching them and their teaching themselves, but they end up reading it and figuring it out long before I get the chance to tell them anything.  Which of course means I’ve ruined them all.

It’s the secret fear of parents, no matter what decisions we make, that we’ve ruined our children. The fear of homeschooling is that we will ruin them and there will be no time left to fix it.  We will have literally ruined their lives.  There’s not a lot of time for do overs when you’ve raised dumb a…..not bright at all children, and of course I’ve been watching the eldest like a hawk for signs of my failure.  I’ve thought deep down that if I could see that I had messed her up that I’d still have time to save the rest of them. (Of course it’s irrational…if that surprises you, then you must be new around here.)

I also knew that if they were messed up, it was all my fault.  Literally.  I had talked my husband into this great experiment.  I had made the decision to do this.  He went along with it, but it was all on me.  (A fact of which I am very much aware.) It’s really not like me to volunteer for more responsibility, which is probably why I have secretly dreaded the SAT and ACT.  I’ve had nightmares about them.  They are impartial judges of 11 years of effort on my part, and increasingly on her own. Those scores would show how miserably I had failed.  I was so afraid of them that when I dropped her off the first weekend of June to take her first ever standardized test….I drove down the street, sat in the car, and cried a bit.

 Just pure fear. The fear of failing her and fear being a failure.  This is my life. I’ve devoted all of my adulthood to educating my children.  What if I can’t do it?  I wonder it all the time. Still.

Her scores arrived at the colleges of her choice this morning.  (University of Dallas, Texas A & M, and OU)  We still don’t know what they are, but the nice lady at UD told me they were high enough for her to be accepted.  She’s 15.  Somehow…..somehow…..she’s managed to learn enough to score high enough on the ACT to get into all three of these schools, and high enough to maybe get a scholarship at one of them.

I didn’t fail her.  She managed to learn it in spite of me.  It can only be through Grace.  Because there’s no way my daydreaming daughter and her slacker mom did this on our own.