by Laura Brodie
Part of my problem was the annual despair of February. In Virginia, February is the cruelest month. Winter stands entrenched in a brittle gray landscape, draining the human spirit of all color. In our drafty old house, even when I wear my coat indoors, I can never quite get the chill out of my bones. Julia and I sometimes spent February mornings soaked in a scalding Jacuzzi beneath inches of bubbles, trying to stay warm while we watched snow flurries outside the bay window and talked about the early colonists in New England.
February is a miserable month for teaching—the interval when students have lost their fall enthusiasm and spring remains too distant for hope. Valentine’s Day provides only a weak counterbalance to all the darkness and depression that can freeze the human heart in February.
My heart felt especially cold that winter, hardened by months of mother-daughter power struggles, and suffering the cabin fever that comes with winter homeschooling. To escape our homebound malaise, Julia and I tried a mid-winter field trip to Washington. One of my college roommates was a curator at the National Gallery, and she had assembled an impressive exhibit on Dada, gathering works by artists from all over Europe. College friends from London and Cincinnati were coming to celebrate the exhibit’s D.C. premiere, and Julia and I joined them for three days of ice skating, concert-going, and, of course, art.
Dada, however, is not the sort of art to cheer a wintry soul. The exhibit opened with films clips from World War I: horses wearing gas masks, soldiers dying by the thousands in muddy trenches, others coming home sans legs, arms, and faces. The parallel with the Iraq war was all too clear.
Dada is heavy for most adults, let alone a ten-year-old. Julia didn’t care for paintings of discombobulated human forms, scraps of newsprint scattered helter-skelter on canvases, and piped-in recordings of Dada “poetry”—clipped fragments of verbal nonsense. “These guys must have had serious nightmares,” she murmured. “I wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley.”
She was equally unmoved by Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (an upside down urinal); nor did she appreciate the moustache and goatee he had scribbled on a copy of the Mona Lisa: “You know, I can say the five blades on my ceiling fan represent a star. Does that make it art?” Still, she enjoyed Sophie Taeuber’s marionettes, which looked like whimsical predecessors to Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and she discovered a dark beauty in the collages of Kurt Schwitters—bits of multicolor paper, metal, fabric, cork, and leather arranged in a controlled chaos.
That three-day weekend provided a brief respite from our February blues. Back home in Lexington, Julia took out her gift shop Dada kit and randomly dropped strips of paper, gold wire, and clipped newsprint on a piece of yellow paper. Behold! Art. But soon enough our usual tensions resumed: the whining, the teeth gritting, the boredom and blowups. More and more my frustrations emerged in brief fits of anger, which produced especially ugly results. Just as there is no place like home, there is no anger like homeschooling anger.
My friends invariably act surprised when I raise the touchy subject of maternal rage. “But you’re so calm,” they say, “so patient,” and I used to agree. Decades ago, in a college interview, when an Amherst admissions officer asked me for one adjective to describe myself, I shrugged and replied, “Mellow.”
Parenthood changed that. After ten years of child rearing, I discovered that deep down inside, I am as much of a control freak as anyone else. For what is homeschooling but an act of control? An attempt to make the amorphous world of education conform to an individual’s or family’s concrete vision. Ultimately, children cannot be controlled, real learning cannot be forced, and the effort to do so yields minor explosions.
Hence the nickname that Julia assigned me halfway into our dreary winter.
She dubbed me “the Volcano,” because of my tendency to swing from a state of calm green dormancy to a heap of spitting lava. In my defense, I reminded her that volcanoes give plenty of warning signs before they erupt. I would usually ask Julia to do something three times before my tone changed into what John calls my “monster voice”: a low-pitched, sharp-edged bark he swears he never heard during our first nine child-free years of marriage.
“It’s so out of character for who you really are,” he told me one day. “I’d never even seen you raise your voice before we had kids. I guess the girls know how to pull your chain.”
I prefer to think of my “monster voice” as the dulcet tones of a drill sergeant instructing some poor private to “Do it NOW!” Unfortunately, drill sergeants don’t fit the sentimentalized American vision of motherhood. Once, when I mentioned my occasionally volcanic state in a homeschooling article for Brain, Child magazine, a man responded by saying that I should get some anger management therapy. (To which the only appropriate response is, “Give me a ————ing break.”) There’s plenty of anger in American society, and some of it might require therapy, but if all moms had to consult a psychologist every time they blew their tops, most U.S. households would be bankrupt.
Years ago I never would have confessed to getting storming mad at my kids. I thought it was shameful—an unacceptable loss of control. Mothers were supposed to be endlessly loving and encouraging. We were supposed to resemble Carol Brady or Shirley Partridge or June Cleaver, unfailingly good humored in the face of enormous exasperation. Now, in the new millennium, I find those saccharine maternal stereotypes to be as unhealthy as Barbie’s grotesquely arched and tiptoed body.
Nevertheless, I tend to feel very guilty whenever I lose my temper. Once, when I asked John if he thought my monster voice was a problem, he laughed: “Are you kidding me? I come from an Irish-Catholic family with screaming and throwing shit and hitting and physical violence. Your angry voice is nothing. You are the UN, and my family was like Kosovo and Serbia.”
But angry words can be as hurtful as blows, and in the throes of homeschooling, I did utter some harsh, embarrassing words. The worst emerged in February—the dark night of the homeschooling soul—during a math lesson.
All year Julia had been following a two-track math schedule, with her time divided between concepts and computation. Week by week she learned new material—from Roman numerals, to place value, to dividing decimals and fractions—and although these gave her little trouble, basic computation was another story. Multiplication tables slipped from her memory with the same speed as the rules of spelling. I wondered if the two were handled by the same portion of the brain.
One morning, while reviewing another of Julia’s especially careless tests, I asked her,
“Julia, what is six times four?”
She shrugged. “Eighteen.”
“Six times four,” I repeated.
She gazed up at the ceiling, more interested in swirls of plaster than arithmetic. “Twenty-six?”
“Julia!” I snapped. “Don’t be a dumbass!”
That got her attention. Her eyes widened. Her jaw dropped. “You called me a dumbass!”
At which point I launched into rhetorical maneuvers worthy of Bill Clinton.
“I didn’t say you were a dumbass. I told you not to be one. There’s a difference.”
Julia shook her head. “You called me a dumbass.”
“You’re obviously not a dumbass,” I continued. “You’re a very smart girl. But if you don’t use your brain and pay attention to what you’re doing, you’re going to appear to be a dumbass.” I sighed. “Let’s just finish correcting this test,” I added. “How would you fix the next problem?”
“How should I know?” Julia said. “Since I’m such a dumbass.”
Clearly she was a very sharp girl and Mom was the dumbass, because for the rest of the day, and occasionally in days to come, she wielded my insult like a get-out-of-jail-free card that exempted her from any need for thought.
“What was the Magna Carta, Julia?”
“Gee, I guess I’m too much of a dumbass to remember.”
“When was Jamestown founded?”
She shrugged and pointed to he
r head. “Dumbass, remember?”
Bad as things were at that point, they got worse. We hit bottom one morning in late February, when Julia was practicing her violin.
There’s something about the sound of a novice violinist that churns up all of my internal lava. Maybe it’s the high-pitched rasping or the notes that remain forever flat or sharp. Math errors, misspelled words, mangled subject-verb agreement, are nothing compared with the torture of an out-of-tune violin. While grammatical mistakes lie silent on a page—turn your eyes away and you can pretend they don’t exist—the screech of a flat fiddle is inescapable.
“How can you tell when a violin is out of tune?” Julia joked just the other day.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How?”
She smiled. “If the bow is moving.”
I wish I’d had a sense of humor about it during our homeschooling. Instead, I began each practice session inwardly telling myself to remain calm, not to get annoyed, which was difficult, since Julia usually began with five minutes of complaint about having to practice at all. Each time, I explained how her new teacher had high expectations. Esther Vine, Julia’s Mormon violin teacher, had moved back to Utah, taking with her our days of Rainbow violin books, with their multicolor pages and cartoon drawings. Now Julia had advanced to serious music—the first movement of a Seitz concerto—and her teacher took new students only if the child agreed to practice at least five times a week. “We’ll make sure that happens,” I had promised Ms. Porter back in August, so now I felt a contractual obligation to hold up our end of the bargain.
Julia didn’t mind playing through a piece; she just hated the idea of going back and correcting her mistakes. No matter how bad a cadence sounded, she plowed ahead. Practicing her concerto was like running the mile at school; it didn’t matter if she wound up limping across the finish line; so long as she completed it, she figured she had done her job.
“Stop,” I would say after an especially mangled measure, and Julia would keep playing. “Stop,” I’d repeat, while the music continued. “Stop!” I’d catch her bow in my hand and lift it from the strings.
“When I say ‘stop,’ that means stop…. If you mess up a phrase, you need to go back and work on it. Practice it ten times, or thirty times; whatever it takes.”
If Julia learned a note wrong, she tended to stick with it, as if she had established a tradition that should not be broken—which might give the impression that she was a poor violinist. On the contrary, Julia was very good, for a ten-year-old. It was her talent, I explained, that made me insist.
“If you were lousy, I would let you quit. In fact, I’d want you to quit, to spend your time on something where you had more potential. But people are born with certain gifts, and one of yours is music. You should take the time to develop your gift.”
I nurtured no secret dreams of Julia performing professionally; I just wanted her to reach the stage where she could enjoy music as a social event. Two more years of practice and she could play in our community orchestra, sight-read string quartets with friends, or join a bluegrass group. But all my visions came crashing down during our homeschooling.
One afternoon, Julia was playing a passage in her concerto, which she had memorized with a wrong note, an F natural instead of an F sharp. The melody didn’t sound bad with an F natural; it just wasn’t right. Performers, I told her, can’t change the composer’s notes. They can’t pick and choose which sharps to play.
She played the passage again, with an F natural.
“Wait,” I said, and she kept on playing. “Stop!”
She continued on.
I walked over and lifted her bow from the strings. “See this note here,” I pointed at the top of the page on her stand. “It’s an F sharp. Try it again.”
Once again she played an F natural, racing forward like a runaway train.
This time I lifted the violin from her hands without asking (a very rude action; good violin teachers always ask permission first). “Here’s what the passage is supposed to sound like.” I played it with the proper notes.
Julia took back her violin and played an F natural.
By now I had gritted another millimeter off my left incisor. Reaching forward, I pulled her third finger a half inch up the fingerboard, to the F-sharp position. “That’s the note you need to play. What’s the problem?”
She played the passage again with the same, ingrained F natural.
“Sharp, sharp, sharp!” I said.
Natural, natural, natural, she played.
Was she doing this deliberately, to torment me? Or did this child of nature instinctively cling to all things natural? Or—most likely of all—was she never listening to what I said, tuning me out as she had tuned out so many teachers before, playing the notes that had settled into her brain, right or wrong, oblivious to all instruction?
By now my voice had crescendoed from mezzo piano to forte. “It’s an F sharp! Why won’t you play the *#&%$ F sharp?”
One more time she tried it. She started at the beginning of the passage, winding her way through a series of correct notes, correct rhythms, correct dynamics, and then, at the moment of truth: F natural. At which point I leaned over and swatted her across the top of her head. It wasn’t a hard swat, not the sort of thing that would hurt, knock a girl backward, or leave even the faintest tinge of pink. An inch of tousled hair, poking out from behind her ear, was the extent of the physical damage. The emotional damage, however, will probably ripple back to me for years to come.
On television, a swat across the head is the stuff of comedy—a hallmark of The Three Stooges (but who wants to be a stooge, especially mean-spirited Moe?) and the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island (but he always used his hat against his little buddy, never his hand). In reality, there is nothing funny about a mother swatting her daughter on the head, particularly in our household, where corporal punishment is supposed to be off limits. (In fact, when Julia was six years old and especially disobedient, I once spanked her on the side of her thigh. After eyeing me with surprise, and noting my flustered, guilty face, she laughed and taunted me, “Mommy’s a spanker! Mommy’s a spanker!”)
Now I wished that she would mock me, laugh at me, make light of the situation. Call me a swatter or a smacker or a walking Mount St. Helens. Instead, two things happened. She played the F sharp, but she did it with tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “That was way out of line.”
I tried to assuage my guilt with lame excuses. “It’s just that you were driving me crazy, the way you wouldn’t play such a simple note.”
Julia wouldn’t even look me in the eye.
“You can put your violin away,” I said. “We’re done for the day.”
Done for the day, done for the week, done with all of it. Julia took refuge in a book while I retreated to my bed, where I stared at the ceiling and wallowed in a sea of self-recrimination. I was a lousy homeschooler and, what’s more, a lousy mom. I should probably not have had children in the first place. I had never been one of those women whose body aches with maternal instincts, someone who feels her life will be incomplete without a child, eager to hold other women’s babies, to read board books and buy onesies and push a stroller through a park. I should have settled for Wordsworth and Bishop and Eliot, and never trusted myself with these precious little lives.
Because what had come of it? I had struck my daughter for something so trivial as an F natural. Homeschooling had brought out the worst in me. It had turned me into a sputtering, head-swatting monster. And the more I brooded over my failures, the more I was certain: this homeschooling had been a mistake. It was time to quit.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Turning Point
The importance of writing is the one thing Mom and I agree on.
JULIA
THE NEXT MORNING IT WAS HARD TO GET OUT OF BED—hard to face my daughters and look at myself in the mirror. I didn’t want to contemplate the ugly features I’d developed as a homeschooler: my own
little Picture of Dorian Gray. Better to stay under the covers and sleep it off for a few hundred hours.
Not that I had the option. Most days I can barely grant myself a few hundred seconds. As I huddled under our blankets that morning, trying to stay warm in the winter’s pre-dawn hours, those extra ten minutes meant that our family’s schedule would be rushed. Rachel and Kathryn might be a minute late to school, and at Waddell Elementary, if a child is one second late, the parent is supposed to park her car, get out, and walk inside, then stand as a silent, contrite witness while the school secretary fills out a tardy slip for the child to deliver to her teacher.
I rarely bother with that. If my girls are substantially late, I’m willing to sign them in, but if the bell rings as we pull up, or if we are within the two-minute limit, I drop them off and skulk away. I figure children can retrieve their own tardy slips without the school’s attempts at disciplining already rushed and harassed parents. Even the word tardy annoys me. Nevertheless, the thought of those little white slips and their pink carbon copies, and the stern letters of admonition sent home after three late arrivals, was enough to launch me out of bed. I got up, grabbed my robe, roused Rachel and Kathryn, made their lunches, fixed their breakfast, poured John a cup of tea (one teaspoon of sugar, one dribble of cream), looked in the girls’ shared room (“Why aren’t you dressed yet? Hurry!”), searched for shoes and socks (“It’s okay if they don’t match! You’re wearing long pants!”), signed homework sheets and field trip forms, brushed and braided Kathryn’s hair, cursed inwardly as Kathryn pulled out her imperfect left braid, braided that side again with added care, lamented the half-eaten bowls of cereal on the kitchen table, and handed my girls buttered bagels through the window of the car while John yelled, “We don’t have time for that!” Then I stepped back and sighed while the three of them pulled out of the driveway with forty seconds to spare.