Each morning I get up to say goodbye to two of my boys as they go to school. I don’t love that part of my day. I clean the kitchen and wake up Mark, and home school begins.
I have no amazing educational activities to post, but I teach him every day. He reads a lot; I read to him. There are library trips where we fill the book bag until it is so heavy that I can hardly carry it. We talk as he does math problems and I let him doodle on his assignments. I ask him to write essays and book reports, label maps, and write history summaries. There are drawings, diagrams, and charts for science. Some grammar exercises are really difficult for me, and I don’t have a teacher’s edition. In fact, I erase Paige’s old 5th grade workbook so Mark can reuse it, one or two pages each day. There are spelling words to learn and cursive handwriting to practice. Sometimes he has a terrible attitude about writing. Some days it takes hours to do what should take 20 minutes. Sometimes I fall asleep when I am reading aloud to him or I get a phone call from someone who is upset and I ignore him for 20 minutes. We take a break from each other at lunch time.
We have this whole school life that no one really acknowledges. Even I don’t talk or write about it most of the time. But it’s my life’s work, however unseen and unrecognized. We simply sit in the basement, surrounded by books and colored pencils, studying and writing.
Today I remind myself that the small, consistent efforts in life are the the most real, because they make us who we are.