An education

Pinkie Pie and I are beginning a new phase of life together.  She has been struggling with mental illness for all of 2018 so far, and school has become completely untenable.  She struggles with much of regular life too, but school is the thing that has fallen totally apart.  It is tough to hear from teachers that your kid is polite and gentle and kind and great in all the ways... but she doesn't do anything in school, and if this were the good ole days she would fail grade 6.  Not because she isn't clever enough, but simply because she doesn't do things.

This isn't laziness.  Hell, I don't even know if laziness really exists.  Read this article if you want to see where I am coming from.  This is a huge struggle Pinkie Pie has with herself and the world and grinding out assignments in school to get grades just isn't something she can do right now.

The best solution available to us now is homeschooling.  This certainly isn't a thing I thought I would do and quite frankly the prospect is intimidating and even terrifying.  Strangely being a teacher isn't scary in the same way because that at least is a structured environment where my duties are monitored by others.  I could be a teacher just fine.

But homeschooling is different.  It is like entrepreneurship for education and entrepreneurship has always terrified me.  I want a company to set my pay, give me a job, and expect a good 40 hours a week.  Same thing here.  The trouble is that there isn't any bar I can set where my teaching is enough.  I could always do more, always make it better, and I think this is going to leave me constantly anxious that I am not doing enough.  Elli's particular struggles exacerbate this because she isn't up to the kind or amount of teaching that a school would supply so I will never, ever measure up.  I can't just finish my official day and then clock out and walk away, and that separation is important for me.

As long as I am doing this I will be failing.

Rationally I know that when your kid has troubles you should judge their progress by their own standards, not ones imposed from outside.  You need to help them do their own best, not measure them against benchmarks created for 'the average child'.

But knowing that and managing to make myself believe it viscerally are two very different things.  I know I am going to constantly struggle with finding the right line to walk between letting her slack off too much and getting nowhere, and pushing too hard on her to do things she just can't do right now.  There simply won't be some easy way, some correct decision, that will lead me to the results I hope for.  I will always fall short in my own eyes.

This was a hard decision because it was so clear to me that homeschooling is the best thing for her, but by far the hardest for me.  It isn't something I ever thought I would do, or a thing I think I am suited to.  I can see myself doing that thing people do when their job is something they can't handle and they just long for the time when they can grab a drink and let alcohol take their angst and sadness away.  I had to balance that sense that this my future with the certainty that school is making Pinkie Pie miserable and offering her nothing in return.

It is easy, in my head, to come up with scenarios where I defend Pinkie Pie from some kind of danger.  If she were threatened by an attacker, a fire, or a storm, I would fling myself into mortal danger to protect her without hesitation.  But this thing is so much harder than any of that because it lasts, and it will grind me down.  It isn't temporary bravery that I need, because this might well last six years, and I don't know that I have the strength for that.

It isn't as though homeschooling is a horror for most people.  Lots of people would enjoy it, or at the very least wouldn't mind it.  It is a hard thing for me though, and it is a challenge I had never thought would be mine to face.

In writing this I am not looking for advice.  If you happen to desperately need to give that advice, fine, but respect that you have no idea about the details of my situation and as such your advice will almost certainly be ignored.  I am writing this to get my feelings out, not seeking opinions.