The Money I Spent Trying to Find the Answer
I'm not going to tell you the number.
Partly because I don't know the exact number. Partly because even the approximate number makes me wince. And partly because I suspect if you're listening to this you already have your own number and you don't need mine to feel the particular sting of it.
The boxes. The workbooks. The kits. The subscriptions I signed up for and forgot about until the charge showed up three months later. The laminated things. The curriculum that came highly recommended by three different homeschool moms in an online group and arrived looking so promising and lasted approximately eleven days before we both quietly stopped opening it.
There's a cabinet in my house. You know the one. Every homeschool mom has one.
Mine is impressive.
For a long time I felt ashamed of it. Like it was evidence of something — of being disorganized, impulsive, of not doing enough research. I would open that cabinet to get something and close it quickly.
Don't look. Don't count.
But every single thing in that cabinet was bought by a mother who was trying. She had read the reviews and weighed the options and decided this might be the thing that helped her son. When it didn't work she felt terrible and tried something else.
That's not impulsiveness. That's dedication wearing the costume of a poor purchasing decision.
The money I spent that first year wasn't wasted on nothing. It was spent on figuring out what my son needed. What clicked for him and what didn't. What kind of presentation engaged him and what made him shut down. Every box that didn't work was a data point. A real one.
Every box was data.
Not failure.
I couldn't have known that without the boxes. I needed to rule things out. I still spent too much money ruling them out. But shame is the wrong response — shame implies I was doing something reckless. I wasn't. I was doing something hard without a map.
The cabinet is still there. I've stopped treating it as evidence against myself.
It's evidence of a mother who was not willing to give up on finding what her son needed even when it cost her more than she expected.
Eventually I stopped looking in boxes entirely. But that came later — after I figured out what I was actually looking for. That's a different letter.
✦
A question I've been sitting with: What if I stopped counting the cost of what didn't work and started counting what I learned from it instead?
Love,
Claire