Desperately Not Seeking . . .

Youtube adoramus te christe palestrina.

I have a name-twin who plays the violin-a.

Unless they google Castle in the Sea,

Most people neither find nor search for me.

I dunno, Simcha. My search terms were a lot less interesting than yours.

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On reading Danielle’s thoughts today on homeschooling,  I think it’s safe to say that there’s no decision about children’s education, never mind any other aspect of parenting, that’s not fraught with ambivalence and a lot of head-swiveling to see what might have been down that road you didn’t take.

When our oldest children were younger and did go to school — and we sent them without question, because we had been to school, and I had been a public-school teacher, and going to school was what you did when you turned five, period — we found ourselves asking, “When is it ever going to be better than okay?” The answer, ultimately, was that in that situation at any rate, for a particular child,  it was never going to be better than okay, and the possibility of its being a lot worse than okay began to loom larger the longer we put off making some drastic intervention.

Now, in Year Eight of the drastic intervention we did finally make, I still have to sit myself down and ask myself firmly, with meaningful eye contact, “Is this the better than okay that you were envisioning?”

Mostly the answer is yes. Well, honestly, the answer is that it’s better than okay in ways we didn’t anticipate in the beginning, because then we weren’t Catholic, and we made the decision to homeschool without considering how nice it might be to go to daily Mass and to Adoration with our children, and to pray the Angelus at noon. Meanwhile we’re reading some good books. The older kids are doing independent research projects, and the project-doing momentum hasn’t had time to tank. The little kids have been making a stone-age archaeological site in the unfinished  basement;  this is code for Mom told us we could draw on the walls as long as what we draw looks prehistoric. Some of us are surviving math, and others of us like it.

Is everything perfect? Not really, but then neither was any class I ever taught for money. Am I organized? More, to be honest, than I have been in other years, though that’s not saying much. Are the children thriving? Well, that’s the real question, isn’t it? That’s the question that ought to make any parent squirm in her seat.

Of course to answer that question  you have to ask, what are the indicators of thriving? Off the top of my head I’d list things like, naturally, academic progress:  being able this year to accomplish things that were out of reach a year or so ago. I’d also list, for lack of a better word, attitude. What I mean by this isn’t mouthiness or the lack thereof, so much as that indefinable sense of engagement which, in a classroom setting, can push a B+ student over the A line. The desire to talk about Shakespeare, the demonstration of interest in going on talking about Shakespeare, possibly even in one’s own free time, goes a long way towards redeeming an infelicitous pop-quiz average, I’ve always thought. Self-motivation, desire to learn, desire to talk about books and ideas:  all these seem like wellness factors to me.

And then there’s the business of what is called the whole person — as if you’d only be interested in the seven-forty-fifths of the person which does the dishes and sometimes puts candy wrappers in the trash where they belong. But you have to ask those questions, too. Do the kids have friends? Check. Do they have enough to keep them happily occupied, in the house and out of it? Check. Are they learning skills and pursuing interests beyond the purely academic? Check. Are they thoughtful, helpful, respectful, nice, caring? Not more than your average flesh-and-blood thoughtful helpful respectful nice caring children, but they’ll do.

Other people’s “thrive” checklists wouldn’t look exactly like mine, but you get the idea. Now, we’ve had seasons in which thriving was less than evident:  the first six months following a six-hundred-mile or a transatlantic move, for example, especially if one of the people you move is a teenager, and her eighty best friends, her violin teacher,  and the community theater don’t move with you. We’ve done this, both the six-hundred-mile way and the transatlantic way, and instantaneous thriving was not the result either time. You have to wait for the tide to change;  then the boats on their moorings swing around the other way.

And if they don’t, then something else has to swing. We haven’t run against this yet, and I don’t know what it would be. But I trust that in that day, it would be shown to me.

In the meantime, we’re doing Senior Year, Round One. And yes, I’m kind of freaking out.

(Cross-posted)