falling on up

I've got something to share but I've been having a hard time with it.  I've rewritten this post fourteen times.  Each time I've bored myself with maudlin musings and semi-hysterical pronouncements.  Here goes lucky fifteen.  Time to finally spit it out.

Okay, one tangent first.

Sorry.

Have you ever had the experience of walking up the stairs and you think you've made it all the way to the top, but there is one more step that you fail to raise your foot high enough to avoid tripping over and you fall splat onto your face, bruising your shins and busting your glasses?

I have too.

Those moments when reality isn't how it's supposed to be. 

Like knowing first hand that hyperemesis gravidarum is a bad thing to have.  With Smootch I lost twenty five pounds in my first four months of pregnancy.  That was a stumble up the stairs.

Or when Smootch was diagnosed with a hole in heart at two weeks old and stepped close to death several times before her VSD repair surgery at eleven weeks, that was a terrifying, pants-wetting trip and face plant.

I've got a few more personal nightmares, but it's suffice to say that due to unexpected realities I've fallen up a few times.  Mental adjustments have had to be made and expectations realigned to meet the corrected actualities. 

This is not like a trip up the stairs.

This is much easier.

And here we are:

Smootch is going to school.  Like real school.  With teachers in cardigans and line ups and bullies.  Public school.  Grade One.    

Gone.

All day.

I've done the whiny, self pitting stage on my way to accepting this.

But one last bittersweet pause before I move on.

We are unschoolers.  Because this is the succinct post, I'll just tell you that Smootch gets to choose what direction her education will go and I help facilitate it, within defined boundaries of reasonableness.  She wants to stay home?  Okay!  Go on trips and travel?  Sure!  Go to school?

Um.  OK.

Unschooling.  I am trusting this child.  I am trying not to let my ego get in the way.

Nor my private disgust with the school's blandly ironic claim to be 'a special place'.  And to put aside my abhorrence of the school run. 

Because I need to save my energy for all the words I have to eat on this blog.

This kid, she trips me up every time.

But hey.  We still are who we are.  Today we discussed friction and simple machines on the walk to school.  And Justin Bieber.  It's all the same and different and I'll adjust.  And next year she may want to stay home for a spell.

I'm not losing a daughter, I'm gaining a building.

First day of school, two thousand one hundred and eighty fifth day of homeschool:

I want to thank a homeschooler for helping me dig myself out mentally from my little homeschool or bust cul de sac.  It may appear that this ruminating vegan attachment parenting unschooler who posts about sending her child to school hadn't read a darn thing at Sniff & Snort, but she has and got the message to stop getting tangled up in her own brain and get a grip.

I got that this time there was no extra step, I just tripped over my own feet.

And now I'm going to stop brooding over this particular plot twist and move on.