Love in a Time of Homeschooling Read online

  Love in a Time of Homeschooling

  A Mother and Daughter’s Uncommon Year

  Laura Brodie

  To all the parents who, when looking at their children’s

  schooling, have sometimes thought that they could do it better

  themselves, if only for a little while

  And as always, to Julia, with love

  Contents

  Prologue

  ON A COLD OCTOBER MORNING MY TEN-YEAR-OLD daughter, Julia, sat…

  Chapter One

  Losing Julia

  Chapter Two

  Julia and the Schools

  Chapter Three

  Making a Plan

  Chapter Four

  Day One

  Chapter Five

  Autumn Field Trips

  Chapter Six

  The Winter of Our Discontent

  Chapter Seven

  Turning Point

  Chapter Eight

  The Rites of Spring

  Epilogue: Back to School

  Thinking About Homeschooling

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Laura Brodie

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  ON A COLD OCTOBER MORNING MY TEN-YEAR-OLD daughter, Julia, sat at our kitchen table and contemplated the Earth’s layers. She had been tasked with making a cross section of the planet’s interior—core, mantle, and crust—part of the fifth-grade curriculum in Virginia. Now she needed to decide what materials to use for a three-dimensional model.

  From my angle at the stove, I saw Julia’s eyes wander out the window, across our country road, where the neighbors’ horses grazed on a hillside beyond a wooden fence. Another minute and her mind would disappear over that hill, heading north through the Shenandoah Valley. Before that could happen I sat down beside her and called her thoughts back to the project at hand.

  “Julia, what do you want to use? Play-Doh?” I imagined concentric rings of clay, balls within balls, cut in half to reveal the Earth’s multicolored strata. “Or would you like to cut a Styrofoam ball in half? You could paint the Earth’s layers onto the flat center.”

  Julia shook her head.

  “Well, what do you want to use?”

  “Fruit,” she said.

  “Fruit?”

  Yes, fruit.

  From the basket in the center of our kitchen table Julia lifted a kiwi, then took a steak knife and cut it in half. She held the green fruit up to my eyes, and there was a model of the Earth: the white core surrounded by the squishy green mantle, with black seeds like the rocks that float in the Earth’s magma, and on the outside, the thin, dry crust, its fuzz like brittle, drought-ridden grass. I felt completely humbled, reminded that all life is connected in repeated patterns, as when one learns that the ratio of water to land on our planet is the same as the ratio of liquid to solid in the human body.

  For five minutes Julia and I took turns cutting tectonic plates into the kiwi’s surface, carving a drippy Ring of Fire. “Look,” she said, “when the plates shift, the mountain ranges form.” She squeezed the kiwi, and a ridge of lumpy green flesh emerged on the surface. I couldn’t have been more proud if she had painted the Mona Lisa. My daughter could see the world within a slice of fruit.

  If this had been a typical school project, Julia would have found a way to glue rings of kiwi onto poster board, adding labels and writing a brief report. The poster might have been soggy and smeared by the end, but she probably would have gotten an A. As it was, we peeled the mutilated fruit and ate it. Julia didn’t need to carry her work into school; she didn’t need to receive a grade, because for that day, that month, that entire year, I was her teacher and our home was her school.

  Julia and I had decided that for her fifth-grade year she would take a break from her usual public school routine. We had chosen to stay at home and craft a curriculum that included not only Virginia’s standardized essentials, but plenty of subjects her school never covered—like knitting, and speaking a foreign language, and playing the violin. I called this Julia’s homeschooling sabbatical, because, as an English professor, I understand the need for intellectual rejuvenation. With five years of public education under her belt, and seven more looming in the future, Julia needed time to do her own research and writing, time to explore the world beyond an elementary school classroom, time to wander and travel and think in ways her school couldn’t accommodate.

  My friends found our version of homeschooling a strange curiosity. “Why are you doing it?” they asked, knowing that my motivations wouldn’t fit the usual home-ed norms. I’m not an overtly religious person appalled by the lack of moral values in the public schools’ secular swamp. Nor am I a radical bohemian opposed to the state’s authoritarian, assembly-line approach to education. Those are the chief homeschooling stereotypes—caricatures of the two camps that spearheaded home education as a populist movement in the 1970s. These days, homeschooling has expanded beyond its traditional base, reaching into the lives of millions of American families, and appealing even to moderate Moms like me, who don’t have the religious or philosophical compulsion to become full-time homeschoolers, but who want to give a special child one good year.

  And so, when friends and family asked, “Why are you homeschooling?” my answers varied according to my mood.

  “Julia was getting really burnt out in her school routine.”

  “We wanted to try something different for a year.”

  “Julia needs a boost before middle school, to renew her interest in learning, and to fill the gaps in her math and English skills.”

  “I’ve always thought the public schools are weak on writing, so Julia’s going to do a year of writing across the curriculum.”

  All of these answers, however, were incomplete. To understand how Julia and I came to be home on a Tuesday morning carving tectonic plates into the skin of a kiwi, we must go back five months—back to a spring afternoon in southwest Virginia, when, for one nerve-wracking hour, Julia disappeared.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Losing Julia

  Happiness and homework don’t mix.

  JULIA

  IN APRIL OF 2005, I LOST MY DAUGHTER.

  Not for long. Not the permanent loss of death or the nightmare disappearances that leave parents consigned to the third circle of hell. Mine was only one of those hour-long dislocations when a child is not where she is expected to be. Such moments happen every so often in a parent’s life, but that does not soften the twist in one’s stomach, the surge of unreasoning dread. In those minor disorientations, each parent previews the greater fear, a world in which the child is gone forever. For me, my human brain devolves into a dog mind that can’t comprehend a different future, knowing only the present absence.

  Children come into our lives so abruptly; nine months of pregnancy cannot prepare us for the startling reality of their presence. And so I sometimes fear that mine will disappear with the same abruptness, God’s temporary gift taken back. But on that April afternoon, I should not have worried. Julia was nine years old and we were dawdling at home, and our home is not a threatening place. We live at the edge of a meadow in a rural corner of Virginia, five miles beyond the main street of a small college town. Our backyard rolls downhill to a wide, stony creek that flows past cows, and fields of Queen Anne’s Lace, and a lightning-warped tree that leans at a forty-five-degree angle over the water. A hundred yards beyond that hunchbacked maple, an old barn stands among cedar trees, a gray sentinel that precedes the first layer of foothills at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  One mile west of those mountains stands our two-stor
y farmhouse, originally built in 1911 and revisited half a dozen times by half a dozen owners. One owner covered most of the rooms with Laura Ashley wallpaper, miniature flowers and mauve paisley and thin blue stripes, presumably to hide the cracks in the plaster. Another painted all the doors and chair rails and eight-inch floorboards with a white semi-gloss, to brighten a house filled with wood: oak floors, a walnut banister, knotty pine kitchen walls. Our family’s contribution to this collaborative enterprise has been to demolish the one bathroom and expand it into two, and to sandwich the whole house between a pair of tiled porches, screened and unscreened, with white wicker furniture and carved white railings that brush against dwarf lilacs.

  It’s all very pretty, very safe. Not a place to worry about a child roaming free. And yet I have been trained to worry—first by the road that stands less than fifteen feet from the side of our house, where walkers glance into my kitchen window and wave at me in my bathrobe. On that country road, pickups race by at fifty miles an hour, accelerating down a straightaway before braking at the sharp left curve beyond our third acre. Four times in the past eighteen years that curve has triumphed over a driver, usually young people who miss the sharp turn and go airborne through our neighbor’s wooden fence, sending the horses galloping. I once watched from my porch swing as a group of highschoolers spun out at the curve and carved a half donut into the top of our yard, narrowly missing my husband, John, on his lawn tractor. Deep in headphoned oblivion, John didn’t hear the Pontiac lurch to a halt behind him, the unlocked door flung open as a boy tumbled out. The kid jumped to his feet and scrambled back into the car, and John turned in time to see the vehicle screech down the street, and to contemplate the tire tracks clawed into the grass.

  No humans have died at that curve in our twenty-year residence, but we have lost a cat and a dog, and when Julia was born, my mother-in-law insisted that we should build a fence, hundreds of white pickets to hold the world’s dangers at bay. Or perhaps we should fence in a small area behind the house, furnish it with a swing set, a plastic slide, and a small round sandbox with a turtleback lid? That way Julia would be kept away from the road and the creek’s deepest pools. But I liked the open yard and the accessibility of water, and I had no intention of leaving my child in an overgrown playpen that any intelligent four-year-old could easily escape. I intended to watch my daughter every minute of every hour, to keep her safe from the road, the creek, the precipice at the top of the stairs. From kitchen knives and bathroom cleansers and medicine cabinets and electric sockets. What is a mother’s purpose except to serve as a pair of eyes, to observe and guide and occasionally swoop down and whisk a child away from a rocky ledge or a growling dog?

  My mother-in-law, who raised six children, was right about one thing. A mother cannot always watch. Sometimes a woman has to pee. Sometimes she must help one child while another wanders out of reach. By 2001, I had three daughters—Julia, six; Rachel, four; and Kathryn, two—and my world was no longer within my control.

  Going inside one afternoon to answer the telephone, I was confident that I could see my girls from the kitchen window. There they were, catching caterpillars. There they were, plucking grass. There they were, digging in the dirt with large kitchen spoons. And then, in less time than it takes to write a note on a calendar, they were gone. All that remained were the dirty spoons lying in the grass. I dropped the phone and ran outside, instinctively bolting for the road, and there they were, crouched in the ditch on the other side. Kathryn and Rachel, seeing my alarmed expression, stood up, extended their pudgy arms, and prepared to run back to me, oblivious to the car approaching from the right, coming fast, the driver blind to the little children in their lowered hiding place.

  “Don’t move!” I yelled to my girls. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”

  Thank God for Rachel, my pragmatic middle child, who held her little sister back from the asphalt. They waited while the car sliced through the air between us, and when the danger had passed, I crossed the road and looked down at them. I wondered if they were crouched in this ditch to hide from me, or if they had paused there in awe at their accomplishment, fearful that they could never cross back.

  “Why did you cross the road?” I asked, half expecting the old punch line: “To get to the other side.”

  Rachel pointed her finger. “Julia brought us.”

  I looked at my eldest daughter, with her wolfish blue eyes, her wavy brown hair in perpetual tangles, and I knew that I should expect no explanations, no logic or contrition. Here was a child who, sensing the one moment when she was not under observation, had instinctively done the thing that was most forbidden. She sought out the place of greatest danger and did not go alone, but took her little sisters with her.

  “We crossed the road,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if there was triumph in her voice or bare matter-of-factness. Perhaps she meant to show me that it was all right. She could cross the road safely, and safely lead others. But I thought only of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the inscrutable Father Time, a tragic, deadly child, Done because we are too menny.

  “You must never come to the road without an adult,” I said. “Not until you are much older. You all could have died.” And then, trying to penetrate those six blue eyes—“Remember the cat.”

  With that image of bloody warning impressed on their minds, I solemnly led my little brood across the street, into the house, up the stairs, and into the bedroom that all three of them shared. “You will stay here until dinner because I cannot trust you outside. I need to know that I can trust you.” And I closed their door.

  Some parents will find this punishment absurdly mild. Some parents would spank, smack, hit, whip, paddle, or swat—whatever the family euphemism for corporal punishment. My husband grew up in fear of his father’s belt, and dreading wooden rulers in the clenched hands of aging nuns. But I was raised by a liberal mother who did not believe in spanking, who preferred the power of words, and who was blessed with mild-mannered, obedient children.

  Julia has never been mild-mannered or obedient. Kind, yes, and sensitive and lovely and bright, but from her toddler years forward she was always the sort of child to run twenty yards ahead, toward intersections and escalators and cliff edges. I am the harried mother you’ve seen on the sidewalk, with a newborn in one arm and a toddler at her side, yelling, “No!” or “Stop!” or “Come back here right now!” to the gleeful third child who has wandered out of orbit, escaping the parent’s gravitational pull. I am the mother with the edge of madness in her voice, and I have come to view the entire world as an elaborate deathtrap. Which explains why, on that April afternoon in 2005, when Julia went missing for one hour, I worried.

  She had been sitting on the living room floor pressing tiny Legos into dragon bodies with colorful wings and tails. And so it was a surprise to call her name from the kitchen and get no reply. Inside the living room I found the four-inch dragons scattered across the carpet. I walked upstairs and called again, moving from room to room, checking beds and bathrooms. Rachel and Kathryn, immersed in a world of Polly Pockets, had not seen her. Outside, on our screened porch, I shouted Julia’s name to the east and west. Sometimes when our neighbor’s cows graze in a distant field, leaving the front meadow empty and inviting, Julia climbs between the barbed wire and follows the creek a hundred yards downstream, where a waterfall drops six feet into a wide, shallow pool. I stared into the field and tried to see a girl’s head poking above the water-carved gulley, but nothing moved that afternoon except a pair of mallards and a great blue heron, tiptoeing in the grass.

  Up at the road, I saw a car disappear behind the curve and I remembered Samantha Runnion, that beautiful five-year-old in California, who, with her long curly brown hair, looked a lot like Julia. One moment she was playing safely in her yard, and the next she had disappeared into a murderer’s car. There could be murderers, I thought, driving on our road. They might be the ones responsible for the trash that I often find on the fringes of our property. People who throw beer can
s from the windows of their cars might also be the type to open their doors and coax a child inside. But Julia had been trained to be suspicious of strangers, to avoid stopped cars, and to scream and bite and kick and claw if any unknown person were to take her arm.

  I doubted that Julia had disappeared at the road. It was more likely that she was hidden somewhere along the creek, scooping crayfish and minnows with my kitchen strainers. Julia has always been a child of nature, the sort who prefers animals to human beings. As a preschooler, she liked to stand under pine trees and serenade the mockingbirds, or sing lullabies to the house wrens that built their summer nests in the nooks of our carport. She also liked to run among flocks of starlings in our grass, as if they were a dark puddle to be stomped, raising a cloud of splashing wings.

  During those preschool years, I called Julia my feral child because of her resistance to clothing and hairbrushes. Once, when I arrived at her Montessori classroom and told her that she must put away her beadwork, finished or not, she growled at me—a low, menacing animal growl. I responded as any mother would: by growling back.

  In the third grade a little friend suggested to Julia that she might have an easier time getting along with the other children if she did not so often crawl on the floor, pretending to be a cat. But even at age ten, hiking through the Rockies, she twice stopped to howl into the forest, and both times I hushed her, wondering what kindred beasts she might call down from the mountains.

  Back in our yard, on that April afternoon, I checked the rocky alcove where the spring that provides our drinking water drains into a little marsh full of watercress and mint. There, Julia liked to sit on the concrete slab and scoop up tiny salamanders that wiggled across her palm and plopped back into the water, external gills flared like a dinosaur’s frill. Finding that spot empty, I searched the deepest stretch of our creek, overgrown by a canopy of weed trees. Beneath those shadows, water slides down a mossy rock into a narrow miniature canyon before widening into a channel four feet deep, home to water snakes and the occasional muskrat.