Love in a Time of Homeschooling Read Online Free PDF Page A

tile—would cause Julia to weep for twenty minutes. Once, when I hired a contractor to demolish our thin, crooked front porch and build a wider screened space, Julia complained for months. She mourned the holly bush that was cut down in the process, and the original porch columns, which were octagonal cement lampposts.
    Many human beings, young and old, deplore change. What seemed unusual in a child less than ten years old was Julia’s capacity for profound nostalgia. From her preschool years forward, she vocalized the belief that all human life, and her life in particular, was better in the past. Her yearnings for her toddler classroom were mirrored at age five, when she entered a public kindergarten, full of lamentations for her lost Montessori world. From first grade forward, she longed to return to kindergarten, with its blocks and Legos and dolls. At every stage, she became more convinced that life got harder—not more interesting—asshe aged. Each new year brought new responsibilities, added homework, and the incremental loss of basic comforts. Soon, in her average school day, the toys would be gone, the carpet gone, the background music gone. By middle school, recess would be gone.
    And all of these losses began at age three, when she never quite adjusted to her new Montessori classroom. Over the next two years Julia would often cry when John or I brought her to school.
    â€œJust drop her off and drive away,” advised the teachers, who met the line of cars at the preschool gate. “It’s worse if you linger. You’d be surprised how quickly the kids dry their eyes and jump into their work as soon as the parents are gone.”
    One teacher added this bit of wisdom: “Don’t worry if Julia doesn’t want to go when you drop her off. The real question is whether she wants to stay when you come to pick her up.”
    Therein lay my comfort. Because, at twelve-thirty, whenever I came to retrieve my daughter, she was never eager to leave. At pickup time, when parents parked their cars and went inside the classroom, I would inevitably find Julia absorbed in a puzzle, a painting, a collection of tiny barnyard animals. I welcomed her absorption as a sign of contentment, but her concentration was often so complete it was hard to drag her away. Other children might complain when it was time to go; they might beg for a few more minutes, maybe whine and drag their heels, but eventually they would finish their work and follow along. Julia, however, often refused to budge. She remained oblivious to time and to the needs of her waiting sisters. Oblivious to me, with my string of errands to complete.
    If I could have given my daughter any gift in the world, I would have given her endless bundles of time, hours and years and centuries. Time to explore every caterpillar on the playground, to cover every inch of a canvas with intricate detail, to finish every game, every puzzle, every book. To me, Julia’s imagination was a constant source of wonder, but she was often painstakingly slow at her tasks, sometimes because of her wandering mind, sometimes because of her meticulous attention. She maintained a separate schedule that never fit the group, and at the end of the school day, I sometimes had to resort to lifting her up and carrying her out scratching and screaming, while the other mothers watched. “Yes,” I felt like saying, “my daughter is a wild animal.”
    â€œTransitions are hard,” the teachers would say. “Go to your car, and we will bring her to you.” (Like most children, Julia would obey a teacher more readily than a parent—one of the big challenges behind homeschooling.) Meanwhile, they recommended books to read, such as Raising Your Spirited Child . But I suspected that Julia’s behavior was something different from mere willfulness. Both her creativity and her resistance to transitions (from one grade to the next, one hour to the next)