Back to it

Today Pinkie Pie went back to school.  For the past year she has been home with me, attempting to do the homeschooling thing.  It hasn't gone great, largely because her struggles at school were not fixed by being at home.  But now we are testing out the being at school thing once again to find out if we can make it work.

I can't figure out how I feel.  I am oscillating rapidly back and forth between worry that this year will fall apart and we will end up right back where we were, and relief that she is out the door, doing the thing, and it might all work.  I can feel the tension in my shoulders tighten and loosen, wax and wane, and I don't know where it is all going to end up.

It isn't particularly important that she gets high grades in school.  Ideally, of course, she would find school easy and smash all expectations, but realistically I am just pinning my hopes on her staying there, passing her courses, and being mostly content.

Kind of funny how the things we hope for shift so radically from what we had thought they would be in times past.  My parents expected straight As from me, because they knew I could manage that if I bothered to try.  When Pinkie Pie was young I had figured I would end up in the same parenting situation; turns out that life doesn't much give a crap about where you expect to end up.

I so desperately want this to work.  Homeschooling has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, and it has worn me down in so many ways.  I am not suited to it in the best of cases, and this isn't the best of cases.  I want these hours where it is just me here without the constant sense that I should be forever pushing Pinkie Pie onward and nearly always failing.  I want the time to myself to play, to work, to think.

But there isn't a lot I can do to make it happen.

So I will wait and see.  Sit and hope.