Illustration by Karly Andersen
Like many families this past fall, we set up a COVID home school in our dining room, naively moving the paint-stained storage shelves up from the basement and filling them with school supplies for our second, fourth, sixth and seventh graders.
We had home-schooled before when my oldest two were in kindergarten and first grade and my two youngest were still taking naps. And while I’d enjoyed it, when it came time for my youngest child to start kindergarten, all of the kids transitioned to public school. It was an exciting change for them and for me.
Deciding to home-school again was easy. Getting up every day to work math problems ahead of my middle school math lesson? That was hard. The kids were bigger, the subjects were harder and my youngest hated school. My sweet 7-year-old rejected everything I put in front of him, from Play-Doh to paint. If it could be used to make a letter or a number, he ran away, yelled or cried.
I was battling him daily over basic tasks while simultaneously trying to teach parts of speech and hold my fourth grader close after reading the story of Sadako, a young girl who died in the radioactive aftermath of Hiroshima. I was trying so hard to be both mom and teacher, but I was failing at both.
And the looks (those tiny needles to the heart) from my other children as they tried to complete their assignments amid the hurricane of my youngest’s fit-throwing, along with their soft-spoken suggestions of help for their brother, just made me feel worse.
By November, I was yelling and cut off from what I had set out to do — create an environment of connection, where a love of learning was the goal. I had to channel my inner Brené Brown (rewatching the bestselling author and researcher’s Ted Talks on vulnerability and shame helped).
I felt so much shame, not just around how poorly things were going and what that might mean for me as a mom, but also because my family’s stories from the pandemic so far will be about home-schooling projects and roller-skating indoors, whereas others are facing the deaths of loved ones from COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, many have struggled with bigger problems than mine. It was tempting to ignore my situation or try to belittle it.
Instead, I left my comfort zone and got vulnerable with my kids (and myself) about my role in what wasn’t working in our home school. When we talked, we were able to laugh at some of the more ridiculous moments, and the temperature in the room shifted, enabling us to take a collective breath, set some new boundaries and lean into love.
I found the older kids a new curriculum, one that let them follow their interests and was more self-led. This freed me to spend more time with my youngest, and the more time we spent together, the easier it was to see that he was his regular, reasonable self when we were not schooling. This led me to believe that perhaps something more was going on.
Right after Christmas, I scheduled him for tests for dyslexia and other learning disabilities. Due to a backlog, he won’t get tested until this month, but help — or at least some answers — is on the way.
In the meantime, our family has been figuring out our home school together. One easy choice was to make open-ended conversations about books and movies a priority. We were already reading a ton, so we added in a few movies, and mealtimes became opportunities to discuss in depth the qualities that make Marvel’s Avengers heroes, or to debate the identity of the strongest force user in the Star Wars universe, citing evidence from the films. (Palpatine for the win!)
Finding the fun became our goal. My seventh grader staged a play for her unit on ancient Greece that somehow told the story of Pandora as a modern high school comedy, and my sixth grader built a Civil War memorial using cardboard cutouts and stories from generals, soldiers and regular people to tell a more complete story of the war than the statues that once dotted Monument Avenue. My fourth grader’s study of the suffragette movement informed and deepened all of our discussions around the necessity of protests to create change.
And it turns out my youngest is a builder. We’ve built a Voltron lion and a model of the solar system with all 13 planets (we count the dwarf planets) and the Kuiper belt made out of so many teeny-tiny rocks.
I know I’m not alone in trying to juggle everything our kids throw at us — that’s the high-wire act of parenting, and I love those times I don’t drop a thing. Other times, I drop everything, fall and split open my pants. But this year I’ve learned that both are good.
For me, home-schooling during a pandemic is not about getting it right, it’s about making moments, the ones that create the inside jokes and references we’ll remember later, the moments that will remind us when we need it, that we can fail and still belong to each other.
Rosa Castellano is a writer and teacher. She was recently the emerging writer in residence at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming from The Southampton Review and The Coil.