What Should I Expect?

Last updated on: September 2, 2015 at 6:35 am by Anne Kennedy

What Should I Expect? 2015-09-02T06:35:13-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Well, we survived our first day of school. I always like to torture myself before a school year by reading lots of stuff on the Internet that will always and forever make me hate myself. That great sustaining pool that lets you find actual stuff that will actually help you is fed by a deep and powerful stream of other people’s lives that will never help you at all and will only make you know, truly and completely, that you…what’s a better word than the one I’m thinking of?

So one thing that I really really hate, and refuse to be helped by, in the arena of homeschooling, is Schmaltz. Emotionalism. Nostalgia. Gooey Tender Feelings about How Beautiful It All Is. I don’t see a similar kind of gushing from teachers in the moments before their students all come back for the year. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough. But on homeschool blogs, gah, there can be, not always, but there often can be a rolling tide of oohs and ahs about all the joy and delight.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a bad person. Maybe everyone loves their kids more than me. I don’t know. I just never feel that awesome about the whole enterprise. And I am never flooded with love for the children in the middle of school time. When they do something not stupid, I am not overcome by the wonder of it all. I usually sit in my school chair, admonishing, rebuking and instructing, thinking, to myself, not usually aloud, ‘how long until this wretched day is over?’ Although, to be fair, I think that even in the summer when the children are climbing trees and dismantling all that I hold dear.

The main thing, for me, is to keep my expectations in Sheol. I know it’s going to be awful. I know we’re going to hate it and that everyone is going to cry and be angry. I know that they aren’t going to want to learn, anything, and that I will be trying to shove a lot of information and knowledge into them that interests them not at all. I know that I won’t feel like doing it. I know that I will be angry about the school room being trashed. I know I will be fighting my own laziness and sin, plus all of theirs. I know that I will be piling up guilt on all sides. And all of this knowledge is So Important, because if I don’t keep a firm grip on all that, all that I know, and instead think idiotic thoughts like, maybe it won’t be so bad, maybe we’ll have a good time, maybe the children will be nice to each other, well, then I will always and forever be disappointed. It’s not that brief moments of it not being awful don’t occasionally shine through, it’s that if you go looking for them they will never be there, ever. I mean me, not you. Sorry for the confusion. Probably everything is a dream and a wonder for you and so why on earth are you reading this blog?

Of course, being a failure in all things (it’s my own personal meme, failure) I fail even to keep my expectations low and I frequently flip the whole enterprise on its head. And I don’t think I’m alone in this. Instead of keeping my emotional and self-fulfillment expectations low, I lower my objective standards so that both I and the children can meet them. This isn’t a habit or anything, but I have caught myself, here and there, calling it Good Enough when I should demand more. Having disappointed myself for happiness, I figure, oh whatever, go play, you can come finish this paragraph later. I ‘cut myself a break’. I ‘let myself off the hook’. Sometimes I even reward myself for a job well done, even if the job was done shoddily and incompletely.

Don’t sniff down your nose at me. It’s what America is doing. It is the soft tyranny of low expectations. It is providing a trophy and a sticker for participation and effort. I am tempted by it all the time. Maybe just showing up is enough, I tell myself, because, I swear, I read it on the Internet like 30 seconds ago.

When really, it should be the other way around. I should demand a high level of work. I should expect that we will work hard and achieve something. But I should have no expectations about how much we will enjoy ourselves. If we do along the way, great, but if not, fine, that wasn’t the point. Except it feels constantly like the point. It is the whining, sniveling, post modern I Don’t Know If I’m Having a Good Time and it effects me, yea, even me.

Anyway, now that I’ve said all that, I will contradict it all by saying we had a pretty good first day. Truth be told, I like being with my own children, for the most part, and we had a pretty good time together, for a first day. Of course, of course, as soon as the work was all done I had to rearrange the school room because the clever arrangement I had thought would be so clever, turned out to violate the closely held beliefs and feelings of two whole children, girls, in this case, and we almost couldn’t continue in the moment, because of my total failure to arrange the furniture in a way that would be ok. Anyway, arrangement two is in place and maybe everyone will see their way to coping today. And also, I’m going to treat myself by ditching them all and going to get a hair cut, because surely I deserve it, don’t I?

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