Today a Facebook page that I follow asked, “One thing you could never homeschool without is ________?” and since I was sitting there doing my Saturday planning, my response was “Planning”. Oh, you want to know the rest of what I said? “Six more weeks to go, and I’m done forever, but I still take time to plan each week. Don’t think I’ve just winged it any week in these 15 years, unless I just threw in the towel and gave us a week off.”
Then my friend Cindy posts her “annual catalog post” in the form of a rhetorical question that addressed the fact that moms are lured by curriculum that promises to form virtue in their child(ren), as if it was our job or even in our power (or that magic curriculum’s power) to do so.
So I’m washing dishes (and poke myself in my already hurting thumb joint with the tomato knife), and I’m thinking about my Planning to the bitter end, and all the good books that we’ve read through the years in hopes of molding my son’s heart, mind, and soul, and I’m thinking about my mother. My mother didn’t homeschool me, but what she was was There. And of all the planning and reading I’ve done through these 18 years of his life, I’m betting if there’s anything that I have done for my son’s heart and soul, it was just being there. I can remember the comfort and security I felt as a child and teen finding my mother at home when I arrived from school. Maybe we chatted about my day, but mostly it was about just being. I don’t know if my son feels the same about me, or if he ever will recognize what it has done for him, but I know it has made a difference. And it has been worth it all.
