Don=?ISO-8859-1?B?uQ==?=t you love a happy ending?

So I called my son in to where I was reading all the comments posted to the last rant.

"Come here," I said. "I want you to see what your siblings are up to."

Since he's biologically an only child, he approached warily. And since for the past few hours I've been wondering out loud whether it's not too late for me to be childless by choice and give the lizard the newly spare bedroom, he approached really warily.

But then he started reading over my shoulder, and soon we were both giggling like loons at what his brothers and sisters under the skin are up to, all over the homeschooling world.

PERSPECTIVE, it's called.

Why do I flip out so much about what even I know are small things when I can tell myself -- and know that it's absolutely true -- that what I'm really upset about is:

my own health stuff;

the fact that I feel like a failure for living in this apartment, though recent real estate events in California should be making me feel better about that -- but I still get to have the daily self-inflicted guilt that I can't give my kid a yard or a garden;
the fact that I'm juggling a lot of stuff, and it's weird to love my work and my family so much and yet wish at times that they'd all go away and leave me alone (preferably trapped in the bathtub with a box of See's buttercreams, a stack of good novels, an unlimited supply of hot water, and no personal ambition whatsoever);

and most of all, the fact that I've been jittery about our homeschooling for some time, wondering if I'm going to kill the love of learning if I don't unschool, terrified that I'll have him growing up and blaming me for what I didn't teach him if I do, and wishing someone would just come along and give me the answers with all the brilliance of impossible hindsight.

So of course something had to blow.

I wake up to too many things to do that still feel terrifyingly new. Everything does.

Cooking, for example. My son went veggie years ago; my husband was assaulted by a slew of adult onset food allergies at about the same time, and all of a sudden I had to cook without meat, fish, chicken, tomatoes, avocados, fruit of any kind, chocolate, vinegar, buttermilk, alcohol of any kind -- and for a while there, he would suffer a breath-threatening allergy attack if he had food that I'd cooked yesterday, instead of fresh today. Something about the tiniest touch of fermentation just set him off -- and he's not the diva type, he really isn't. No dramatics at the dinner table. Just glancing over and seeing his lips quietly starting to swell, and here we go: what killer ingredient managed to slip in, in spite of all my best efforts? So every week, when I sit down and think about what to buy and prepare, the stress level is never any lower for me. I don't get to cook whatever sounds good, or what's on sale, or what I feel like; I get to try to cook something that won't kill or offend anyone. No wonder I feel hungry all the time.

And then there's the laundry. Stupid, I know; but really kind of stressful. All of a sudden, just for the past month or two, every week my neighbors have started to change their "routines" in our communal laundry room. I used to have a handle on who did how much when. Now I never know if I can get a quick load in before we run out for French class or park day, or if I'm out of luck and maybe I can try again later. I can't just run down in the middle of the night; the laundry room shares a wall with an apartment, and after ten or before six it's emergencies only, please.

And then the homeschooling. One day it feels as if we need to have a schedule and stick to it. Like my friend, who just wrote up such a document for her family that my son, who's always been a little in awe of her and her brilliant children, is now positively intimidated. Why am I so scared of that kind of organizational skill? My mother-in-law has it, and I love her and am so grateful for everything she does for us and yet every time I see her I have to come home and mess things up a bit, just to get the scent of that killing efficiency off me. She comes over and sees my calendars still sitting on February four days into March, and I can see her trying not to wince too visibly. I find myself clinging harder than ever to "we do what we feel like around here, not what we're supposed to do because it's Tuesday." And then panicking because it's Tuesday and I really don't know what we should be doing.

Some days I feel like a character in a novel I never read -- I only saw the review. It was a strange book about, among other things, a baby girl who died because her parents decided to experiment on her by calling her a new, different name every day.

What's wrong with me? Why can't I just get it all together and figure it out?

You know, like everybody else has?

(pause for sound of uproarious laughter from the entire homeschooling community and/or world)

So this morning, after I was done flipping out, my son came in with the document he'd quietly drawn up. It reads as follows:
 
Partly-unschooling Schedule
When I get up (not later than 7:30), you assign all the work I need to do. I take it to my room, and figure out when I will do it.
I eat breakfast.
I start doing work. When finished, I ask any questions I have.
When I finish everything, including instruments and languages, I have the rest of the day free to do whatever.
 
"Whatever." I like that.

We talked about that a little. Would it be better to do Latin for half an hour a few days a week, or fifteen minutes every day? (Fifteen minutes, we decided for various reasons. Ditto French.)

We talked about sitting down on Sundays and discussing what the week ahead will hold. I'd like to be able to go to museums at least a couple of times a month. I'd like to keep teaching science to him with his friends, the way we've been doing a couple of times a month, but he has to help me out because it's a lot of work, especially when I'm not feeling well.

Let's get the Life of Fred math books and see if he likes them. Let's keep getting lots of books about animals and American history from the library, because he does like them. Let's finish reading Johnny Tremain and start either Oliver Twist or The Prince and the Pauper.

And the exercise question? I need to be able to exercise inside sometimes. But it would be nice if we went out together for morning walks -- we do have an ocean close enough to walk to -- and, if we save up a bit, I can get some running shoes and he can get an inexpensive bike we saw at Costco. That would be fun for both of us.

Which, as Idzie pointed out very kindly and correctly in reply to my blundering unschooling statements, is supposed to be what this is about.

Wish me luck.