Bright New Chapter

First day of homeschool, August 2013

 

I've let this blog languish, in part because I started to feel conflicted about my family's privacy. Even though I've been careful not to publish names or identifying details and nothing embarrassing or private, as my daughter gets older I'm more aware that her pictures and the details of her life are not necessarily mine to share. I started the blog when R was five and we had just moved into this house. She's ten now, and it has been a wonderful record of these years. I miss it. I've decided to start posting again, to track the new adventure we've embarked on. We're homeschooling this year for the first time. The blog name, Bright Refuge, seems apt for this new part of our lives. We're opening the windows to new landscapes and prospects, with a solid home base underneath us. Most importantly, I have my husband and daughter's permission to share these photos and details. 

As we came to the end of fourth grade last year in the Catholic school where R has gone since kindergarten, I couldn't shake a discouraged, dissatisfied feeling. It seemed like we were always settling. It wasn't good enough, and she wasn't happy, but the alternatives seemed out of the question. This is our parish, and our faith is at the center of our lives. We bought our house because it was easy driving distance to school and church. We had put in a lot of years (and volunteer hours!) in this school, and we loved our school friends.

But the messages kept coming to me at odd moments. Aren't you ashamed to be only half-invested in life like this? Why are you trying to convince yourself that this is as good as it's going to get? Why are you calmly accepting that your sunny, curious little child spends most of her day bored and sullen and resentful? And worse. Miserable and resigned to being bullied. Feeling invisible; given only cursory attention from teachers who were grateful that she made their lives easier by being a quiet, well-behaved good student. 

She worked for weeks on a book report and took great care with her character descriptions, and when she read it aloud to the class they mocked her for doing more work than she needed to. The teacher said sarcastically, "Wow R, you really outdid yourself," and she came home crying and ashamed. None of it was outrageously evil or damaging. I liked the teacher personally, and the kids were good kids for the most part. But that incident stuck with me as a dull heartache. A growing conviction that she deserved better than she was getting, and it was my fault.

I'm in my third of four years at the Denver Catholic Biblical School. This year, we're studying the Old Testament Prophets. Our summer reading assignment was Eugene Peterson's brilliant book about the prophet Jeremiah: Run With the Horses: The Quest for Life At Its Best. It made me ashamed of my passivity. What happened to my courage? In Jeremiah 12:5, God says to the prophet, "If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country, how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?"

What kind of a life was this school preparing R for, in these critical years?

The messages kept coming. That July on World Youth Day, our new Pope Francis challenged his young listeners: "I ask you, instead, to be revolutionaries, to swim against the tide; yes, I am asking you to rebel against this culture that sees everything as temporary and that ultimately believes that you are incapable of responsibility, that you are incapable of true love." I almost always choose what's easy. I will go very far out of my way to avoid confronting people, or changing something that's comfortable. I'm good at coming up with reasons why the prevailing tides are just fine, and thank you but I'll just continue to float here in the warm salt water. And even if I know in my heart that the tide is moving in the wrong direction, what do you expect me to do about it?

One night I woke up thinking about homeschooling. How did that work, anyway? I knew I could never do it, but curiosity kept me from falling back asleep. I went downstairs to the computer, and the first thing that came up on a Google search was this quote from my Confirmation saint, St. Catherine of Siena: "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” That described nothing about R's education. Or me, as her mother whose job it is to make sure she gets what she needs to accomplish that.

We had registered for the next school year and paid our hefty non-refundable tuition deposit. R had an inspirational science teacher in fourth grade who was slated to teach science and social studies in fifth, and we had resigned ourselves to letting her at least finish out fifth grade at this school before transferring. She loved that teacher, and at least those two subjects would be rigorous and enjoyable for her. Then at the last day of school Mass, the principal announced that that excellent teacher was leaving. I sat in the car after Mass and cried. Should we start in June, looking around for other schools for August enrollment? How could we make a responsible decision in that amount of time, without seeing other schools in session? How could we introduce that kind of upheaval in R's life, unless we were certain that the new school was going to be better than the old one?

I blame the Peterson book and Pope Francis and St. Catherine. We jumped off the bridge without knowing where we were going to land. We met with the principal and withdrew from school. And I spent my summer trying to get up to speed on homeschooling and quietly panicking.

Now, at the end of January, I have a lot to say about homeschooling, and some words of comfort and encouragement I would like to go back and give my worried summer self. There are challenges, some foreseen and some un-. For the most part, these have been some of the best months of our lives. We have our happy, confident, curious little girl back. Much of the tween moodiness and defiance that had started to creep into her relationship with her Dad and me is just gone, like a fire that died down without school stressors to fuel it. I'm aware that that might be temporary, but I'm enjoying it for as long as it lasts. I feel like I am watching her brain wake up, and shake off the cobwebs of worksheet and test-prep education. My brain is waking up too--I'm learning about Greek history and life sciences and Latin vocabulary and all kinds of things I would never have pursued on my own. 

Maybe I get lonely for adult conversation, and miss some of the freelance and volunteer activities with which I used to fill my days. That's probably why this catch-up blog post turned into a much-too-long essay. But I'm looking forward to having a place again for errant thoughts and photos of homemade bread and snowscapes and Charlie and his chickens. I've always felt like E.M. Forster, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" And I know these days are fleeting. That one day, the light will shift and the seasons change. And this beautiful little daughter, who brings us so much joy, will be gone into her own life. I hope we can both look St. Catherine in the eye by then, and be proud of the work we did.