The Enemy Is Arithmetic

I spent five years planning to homeschool him. We couldn't make the numbers work.

I walk past the door multiple times a day that has the backpack hanging on it. It’s empty and two sizes too big for my five-year-old. He wears it around the house “practicing” for his big day, the straps swallowing his little shoulders. He looks up at me for approval every time, and I smile and tell him he looks so big. Because as much as I don’t want him to go, the only thing worse would be if he hates it. That would be unbearable. So I smile. I have gotten good at smiling at the very thing that is breaking my heart.

He is still so small. That is what nobody tells you about this part. When people say “he’s starting kindergarten,” they picture a big kid. But I still see the hands dimpled at the knuckles, the way he says “puh-sgetti”, the way he has to climb into the bed on his belly. He still reaches up for my hand without looking, so certain it will be there that he doesn’t even check. And I am supposed to walk this small person up to a big brick building and leave him there.

Five years is a long time to furnish an imaginary future, and I can’t help but think of the plans I had so carefully made. I had read Charlotte Mason and imagined myself in my own little classroom here at home. I had subscribed to homeschool moms here on Substack and soaked in all of their advice.

I had imagined Monday mornings with the table still sticky from breakfast, the two of us leaning over a library book about whatever he’d decided he loved that week. Nowhere to be. No bell telling us we were out of time. He was going to learn to read on the living room floor. He was going to discover that a caterpillar becomes a butterfly while crouched over it in our own backyard, not from a laminated poster on a wall I will never see.

I had already lived a thousand of these mornings in my head. I loved them there. That was the cruelest part. They were so real to me that losing them feels like losing something that actually happened.

About six months ago, the cracks in my plans started to show. I wasn’t ready to admit it, but somewhere deep inside I knew my twenty-four hours a day had begun to shrink. The financial strain my family has been under reached a breaking point, and no longer could I afford to work the bare minimum.

Eight hours a day turned into ten. And before I knew it, ten hours was twelve or more. And still, these hours didn’t allow for ends to meet. They just brought them a little closer than before. I ran the numbers again and again, the way you keep checking a door you already know is locked. The answer never changed.

The enemy is arithmetic.

There is so much grief. The first is stolen time. I thought we still had years left together, years I had already spent in my head, and now I have to give them back unlived. Every hour I work is an hour I had already promised to someone. I made those promises to a version of us that isn’t going to happen, and no one is going to give those hours back to me.

Then there is the guilt of feeling as if I’m shipping him off, making him someone else’s responsibility when he was given to me to raise. I keep imagining his first day. How he will look so tiny walking through those big doors, his backpack still too big, turning around once to find my face in the crowd.

And it is a stranger’s hands that will tie his shoe, a stranger deciding when he can go to the bathroom, seeing his face the moment something finally clicks. Good hands, probably. Kind hands, I pray. But not mine.

Someone else will get the ordinary hours of his days, the boring beautiful middle of them, and I will get the leftovers. The tired evenings. The rushed mornings. I will be asking “how was your day?” like a visitor and hoping that he remembers enough to share with me.

My mom was able to stay home when we were little, and even though she didn’t homeschool us, she was there in a way I have never stopped being grateful for. I can still feel it, that particular safety of walking in the door and knowing she would be standing in the kitchen. I thought that maybe by now I would have that same thing to hand down to my own kids.

This isn’t about what other moms can or can’t give their children. Plenty of working moms give more than I do and are somehow able to make it all work out perfectly. It’s just that I watched my mother give a specific thing, and I wanted so badly to give it too, and I can’t. No matter how educated and qualified a teacher is, I know she will never love my child the way I do. She will see a student. I see the whole of him, the boy who still crawls into my bed at night and fits himself into the curve of me like he did before he was born.

I have to admit that I’ve been filled with jealousy. I watch friends of mine homeschool their children now, and I am so envious that I can’t do the same. I had imagined joining up with them on Fridays for our field trip days, our little bubble safely enveloped around our own children.

Their photos of nature walks and kitchen table lessons feel like postcards from a country I was supposed to move to and never did. And if I’m being honest, I feel like I’m back in high school, watching friends with more means than I’ll ever have live out the dream I thought was mine, too. Only this time it isn’t me being left out. It’s my children.

I want to be careful here, because this was never about public school being a danger. My siblings and I went through public school, and so did my husband and his, and we are all no worse for the wear. There are teachers walking into those buildings right now who will love their students fiercely and teach them things I never could. This isn’t fear. It’s grief. There is a door I wanted to walk my children through, and I stood in front of it for five years believing it was ours, and this year I found it locked. You can be genuinely glad for the other doors and still grieve the one that wouldn’t open.

Maybe you know this feeling, even if your door was a different one. Maybe it was a job you laid down, or a house you had to sell, or a baby that never came. Maybe it was a whole life you had sketched out in pencil, so sure you could ink it in someday, and then someday came and the pencil lines were all you got to keep. We don’t just grieve the people we love. We grieve the lives we thought we’d get to live with them.

“Many are the plans in the mind of a man,
but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.”

- Proverbs 19:21 (ESV)

Many are the plans in a person’s heart, the proverb says, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails. I have read that verse a hundred times and always heard it as comfort. Lately I hear it differently. Lately it sounds less like a promise and more like a hand gently prying my fingers off of something I was never meant to grip this tightly. I am trying to remind myself that His purpose is better than my plan. Most days I do. Today I am mostly just aware that the plan was mine and the purpose is His, and that those were never the same thing, no matter how long I let myself believe otherwise.

So this is what letting go actually looks like. Not some graceful open hand lifted to heaven. It looks like kneeling on the kitchen floor in front of a backpack. It is still hanging on the door, two sizes too big.

He is still wearing it around the house, still practicing, still certain his big day is going to be wonderful. So I kneel down to his level and tighten the straps until it fits him a little better. My hands are shaking a little and he doesn’t notice. He’ll grow into it.

That’s the whole problem. He’ll grow into all of it, with or without me, and the growing has already begun.

Three weeks until kindergarten.

I'll be here every Thursday until then, writing it down as it happens.

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If you’re new here, this is the third piece in a series I’m writing through the last weeks of summer before my oldest starts kindergarten.

The first, A Handful of Summers, is where the counting started, thirteen summers left, and I couldn’t stop doing the math.

The second, Nobody Told Me, is about the last times no one warns you about. The last time you carry them, the last time they say a word wrong, gone before you noticed it happening.

I’m glad you’re here for this one. There are two more coming.

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