Perfectionism

I am not a parenting perfectionist. Oh, OK, I am. I spend nine-tenths of my day worrying about my children and the fact that I am not doing enough for them. The last tenth I spend planning grand projects that we will never get around to. Then I berate myself for not having done them. I have a mind that works fast and the problem with this is that in the space of about twenty seconds I can move from "goodness it is nice to see my son reading" through "but is that the right kind of book? he has only read that book series for about six months" into "I am a total failure as a mother because I have not set him any more challenging literature" to "he will leave home and blame me PERSONALLY for the fact that he has not yet read The Secret Garden." This absurdity is followed by the thought "Just be grateful that he's reading AT ALL," and then in swift succession "But he never does any drawing, shouldn't I be encouraging him to stop reading that blasted series and do some drawing?" "If I make him draw he will just draw stuff from that blasted series." "What about introducing him to something wonderful like Chinese calligraphy, shouldn't I do that with him this afternoon?" "My goodness I know NOTHING about Chinese calligraphy what kind of mother am I?" I can find fifteen different ways to blame myself for being inadequate in the space it takes someone else to think "Good, children quiet, time for a quick cup of tea."

In short, I am really not the kind of person who should be doing home-schooling. I just don't have that inner serenity and belief that it will all be fine, you know, you just need to throw your children into the open air with some paints and get on with it and before you know it they will have produced a masterwork. No, I am wriggling at the moment like a worm on a fish-hook. My neurotic thought pattern runs like this

1) I have no idea what I'm doing. (Fortunately he doesn't know - yet. I have this mysterious air of calm certainty that I put on for his benefit when I say cheerfully "Now, turn off the telly, we're going to do a....an educational thing.") I am not even quite sure why I am doing it. He's a bright kid, he will survive educationally even if he skips a couple of years of school. But I have a strong aversion to the idea of leaving him to sit on the sofa for those couple of years. Trouble is, I don't have a clearer idea than that. I have no grand game-plan or theory about what Home Schooling should be. (I'm pretty sure most theories of homeschool don't include "send him to school whenever he can stagger down the stairs unaided") This obviously means I will be a failure because all the Home Schoolers I know are super-confident. And they know that school is bad, or unnecessary, or something. Whereas I rather like schools. They have cake sales and everything. I'm also rather in awe of teachers, and I certainly don't think I can do a better job. I wish I had a grand theory of why Home Is Better. I don't, I just don't have a ramp.

2) The fact that he's going to school when he can is obviously great, because a) it means that he gets to socialise with his peers and b) if I do anything disastrous by homeschooling him, such as I accidentally unplug the neurons in his brain that deal with reading and writing, well the school will notice that I've made him illiterate and pick up the pieces for me. But it also makes it dashed hard to design a curriculum. Do I try to teach him anything? What if I teach him the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong order? It's all very well if you are fulltime HE, but I might accidentally teach him fractions before multiplication, or verbs before nouns, when the teacher wants to do it the other way around. And then the world will end. Obviously.

3) My son will hate me for having made him weird and unsocialised by homeschooling him. He will not remember that the reason I am taking this route is that he lies on the carpet in tears, almost retching with the pain of trying to push himself down the stairs of a morning (thank you, Ministry of Health, for deciding that he doesn't need a ramp). He will only remember that he wanted to spend the whole day watching Teenage Mutant Ninja and I said No, we are doing to do a...a...weird THING that I have invented. Called sitting at the table, oh no you can't really sit at the moment, you are in too much pain, well lie there then, no you can't have more painkiller, I'm going to test you on your spellings instead. He will probably write a misery memoir called "I was in pain and she made me spell 'miscellaneous.'" And for the record, HE chose miscellaneous as a spelling he wanted to learn. But he won't remember that either.

4) I am overpreparing and overthinking this. This is a weird one. Because, on the one level, of course I am, because I've never had to teach a child before, and I have no idea how to design a lesson or a course, or even how to choose a useful curriculum. So it is hard work. The reason for this isn't academic prowess, it's that when I started out trying to teach him the lazy way ("oh, I was an academic, I taught at university level, how hard can this be?") I ran out of material and inspiration within about a day. He's a sponge, he just soaks stuff in, he understands it instantly and then what do you do? So I started looking up books to teach him from, and reading them in the evenings, and watching my small amount of free time disappear. Never mind, I think, I am enjoying it. But then I feel guilty that I am enjoying the studying too much, and that I am in some weird way meeting my own needs not his by doing this. (Rationally, I think this is unlikely: if I REALLY wanted to teach myself NZ geology there are easier ways. But neuroses are of course not rational, this is part of the point).

5) This is all a total waste of my time because in a month or so he'll be better, fixed, right as rain, he'll be back in school and I'll be irrelevant, feeling a bit silly for having thought so hard about all this. Well, actually, that's not so much a neurosis as a fantasy. Chance would be a fine thing.

Against all this neurosis and gloom, there have been some interesting moments. Like today, when my son put down the blasted series to which he has been superglued for six months, turned to me and said, "this book has a volcano in it, I think the way that rocks melt in volcanoes is like this." And because I had just spent an hour sorting out in my head the difference between metamorphic and igneous and sedimentary rock, we had an interesting conversation about it. Of course what I COULD have said is "please don't ask me about this now, if we talk about it today then that is a whole hour of one of your sick days I can't use up teaching you about rocks. Just go and read your book." But, even novice-and-sceptical homeschooler that I am, I had this sense that my child turning to talk to me of his own volition about a topic was a GOOD THING.

And I guess that's the first thing about homeschooling that I am learning, that you can have a plan and you can do some preparation but your child's mind and interests and all that will ultimately, you know, do their own thing and take their own direction. So be flexible and be prepared for the unexpected. And optimistic. And don't be a perfectionist. And don't listen to your negative neurosis. Better, don't have any.
Hmm. I might be able to manage flexible.