11 May 2013

Tomorrow, apparently, is Mother’s Day. I’m not sure how, but it snuck up on me this year. Yesterday we received the results from Homeschool Week at Rift Valley Academy (RVA). The kids love Homeschool Week. RVA has endless grass to play in, in an expansive space that gives them freedom to roam. They make new pals, following them to different classes. As Grace said, “It’s just like everything’s normal!” After four mornings of testing for the two middle kids, it boiled dramatically down to two packets of paper, one for each child. How simple is that? We looked forward to getting the results. For the previous three weeks, Breanna and I drilled and reviewed with both of the kids who were taking the tests.

However, these results instead plunged into us like a sharp jab. We didn’t realize the depth of it until we had to come back for our appointment with one of the missions advisors, who had proctored the tests. The concern, of course, was that there may be additional needs for the kids’ education.

The day slowly became heavy. I kept looking for a bright side, a chance to try something else, while I know Breanna kept looking deep inside, circling and highlighting every failure, wondering what choices she could have changed. The kids love homeschool week, but for parents who teach, it’s a sudden reveal of how things are going. Don’t get me wrong, the painful truth is better than going another year without realizing there is a problem. But it’s still painful.

I tried to distract Breanna with some of my brilliant ideas. She entertained them, because she’s sweet and always nice to me, but I know she wasn’t listening.

“This is probably something going on inside the child’s brain. It’s not about your teaching or parenting,” the advisor told us. We left the appointment with some good ideas to try, and tried to take our minds off of homeschool for a just a little while.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. And for my lady, nothing hurts quite as much finding out your kids are not performing well. Breanna makes fairness, honesty, and humor come alive. She embodies it. She hates competing, and saves her passion for other things than trying to be the best at something she considers trivial. With one exception… teaching and mothering. She won’t ever say it, well not out loud, but she wants to be the best teacher she can, and the best mother for our kids. Yesterday hit her hard. The thought we held them back because of something we did or didn’t do kept percolating in our minds.

Today is also a special day. It would have been Jack’s real first birthday (if he had stayed on schedule in utero 🙂 .

And what Breanna’s balanced last year probably felt like running class 5 rapids while juggling homeschooling, all the emotions of family changes and uncertainty, and keeping a family running in a town that has zero western children besides ours.

We spent a lot of time with Olivia during this week at RVA. She’s grown so much, loved deeply, and admired by some of her teachers. Always the first to help a student who’s struggling, she told me about a friend who is “learning English as a second language, and now she has to learn Shakespeare, which is, basically, a third language.” I asked if she wanted to come hang out with us in the homeschool workshops during her study hall. “No, Dad, I really need to get my homework done.” Breanna and I look wide eyed, and whisper to each other “She’s got so much more discipline than I had!”

Want to know the kind of Mother’s Day we’ll spend? It will be with the smiley, wild haired econo sized fighter baby; the puzzle solving, energetic charmer; the witty, creative, book worm; the selfless and brilliant artist; and then there’s the balding, out-of-touch, stressed, forgetful pilot guy, and the mother who keeps us together. A tough year for her just got tougher, but that doesn’t matter. If there ever was proof for what makes a mother great, it has to be watching as her heart, her children who she cherishes more than her own life, tackle the big, real, world. Judging from the smiles on our teenager  (who is equally at home holding her baby brother, or trying out for field hockey at boarding school) she’s done an amazing job as a teacher, and even better job as mom.