Mary and I didn’t discuss our children’s education until we had two of them. It seems absurd now that we spent so little time thinking about how we were guiding their development from the earliest stages to what was next.
I left my job as a proofreader/editor to care for our boys when the second was born and childcare expenses (+ gas + tolls + time away from family) became more than we would tolerate.
Over the next few months I made a Halloween costume, saw live music during lunch time, visited museums, and got to tell Mary a thousand stories about our days.
I didn’t regret it for one second. It was the first time that I felt like I was doing what I was born to do. Mary saw it too. We stopped talking about finding freelance work or what am I going to do “next”? We had to invent “next,” or so we thought.
We narrowed our focus to kindergarten and started with our own experiences, except for my first crush (I’ll never forget our student teacher, Ms. Austin), I had no idea what happened in that year.
Hold on. I remember the following summer. I did the math on my age difference with Ms. Austin and resolved I had the patience if she could find it. I also convinced my mom to help me write a letter to her. The first math and writing lessons I ever cared about were created by my own initiative. Ms. Austin wrote back, let me down easy, and showed me the power of knowledge. It wasn’t success that got me excited, but it was a taste of the adult world. I engaged with an adult outside the school system and took my chance like an equal.
That’s what I want for my boys. Not to subvert and battle the system like I had to, but to live outside of it. Not just taste the adult world, but live in it.
God bless,
Jason
