The Homeschool Mom in My Head
It was eleven o'clock at night and I was looking at someone's homeschool room.
I don't know how I got there. I was doing something else entirely and then I wasn't, and suddenly I was looking at this room — the shelves, the labeled baskets, the little chalkboard with the week's schedule written in perfect handwriting, the natural light somehow streaming through windows at eleven o'clock at night in a photo that was definitely taken at two in the afternoon — and I was doing the thing. The comparison thing. The quiet inventory of everything my homeschool room is not.
My homeschool room, for reference, is also our dining room and occasionally our art studio and sometimes a Lego construction site and right now there is a pile of books on the table that has been there long enough I've stopped seeing it. There are no labeled baskets. There is a basket. One basket. It does not have a label because I lost the label maker and also I'm not entirely sure what I would label it. Stuff, probably.
And I'm sitting there at eleven o'clock looking at this woman's room — this serene, sunlit, somehow-perfectly-organized room — and I am building a version of her in my head. The homeschool mom in my head. She wakes up early. She has a morning routine that doesn't involve looking for her phone for ten minutes. Her children sit at their desks. Her days go according to plan.
I have never met this woman. I'm not sure she exists. But I have a very detailed mental picture of her and she has been making me feel inadequate for years.
I have no idea what that woman's actual homeschool looks like. I saw a room. A single, curated, photographed room. I don't know if her kids are happy. I don't know if she cried last Tuesday. I don't know anything about her except that she owns a label maker and knows how to use natural light.
And I built an entire alternate version of my life out of that.
Mostly I just notice it now — oh, there she is again, the homeschool mom in my head — and then I remember that she's not actually in the room with me. My son is in the room with me. The unlabeled basket is in the room with me. The pile of books that means we've been reading is in the room with me.
That's the actual room. That's the actual homeschool.
It doesn't photograph as well. But it's ours.
✦
A question I've been sitting with: What would I do differently tomorrow if I had never seen anyone else's homeschool?
Love,
Claire