I’m having an epiphany. It’s about homeschooling.

You know how everyone always responds with the same line when they hear that you homeschool your kids? Oh, you homeschool? Wow, I could never do that!

Maybe it gets said to you, or maybe you’ve said it to other people. (Or maybe you just think it.) It’s okay if you do. Really, it is. We all get twinges of I could never do that when other people do things differently from us. (Or maybe it’s just a polite way of saying, You’re crazy! That’s always a good possibility.)

In any case, it’s been dawning on me that maybe people say I could never do that because they think homeschooling parents talk to their kids like school teachers talk to their students—patiently, clearly, kindly, and in complete sentences. (If you’re a homeschooling parent and you talk to your child that way, good for you. And you may go now.)

This weekend, I had a conversation about homeschooling. These homeschooling conversations pop up occasionally, and they almost always catch me off-guard. I usually botch them something fierce, because in my efforts to downplay the uniqueness of the homeschooling situation, I end up making it sound like some half-assed affair. Which, if you came to my house, you might think it is, but I promise you, it’s a half-assed affair I’ve put a lot of thought into!

Best I can figure, I do this downplaying thing because I’m super-sensitive to the undercurrent of comparison feelings that lap at the edges of any conversation between mamas who have made different lifestyle choices. No matter how respectfully and carefully and graciously the speakers speak (and listen), it’s like there’s an evil undertow just waiting to suck both struggling mamas down into the cold wet and kill them. (Oh, the drama!) So when I feel that I might be threatening someone just because I homeschool my kids, I get tense, and my tongue tangles.

However, this time around the questioner was a grandmother so we were not in parallel situations, thus greatly reducing the threat element. Plus, she was sincerely interested. So when she asked me what our schedule was like, I told her straight up—no embellishing, and no sweeping it under the rug, either.

And then she gave the little I don’t think I could’ve done that response, and the little epiphany I’ve been puzzling over popped into my noggin and I decided to try it out on her.

“You know, I think lots of people think homeschooling is beyond them because they’d have to act like a real teacher. All professional and mannerly, or something. But really, teaching your kids to do math is not much different from getting them to clean their rooms.”

She raised her eyebrows at me.

“It’s true! I yell, I threaten, I do all the stuff that teachers aren’t allowed to do. You ought-a see me give a reading lesson, oh boy!”

I stood up straighter, jabbed my finger at an imaginary child, and bellowed, “This is ridiculous! I am NOT in the mood to waste my time while you bounce around in your chair like a freakin’ kangaroo. SIT BACK DOWN RIGHT NOW OR I’LL PUT YOU ON TIMEOUT.”

(Finger jab-jab-jab)

“No, that is NOT an fff. You KNOW it is not an fff. I don’t want to HEAR you make that sound again, do you understand?”

(Foot stomp)

“CONCENTRATE! Look at the PAGE, not my face! THE WORDS ARE NOT ON MY FACE!”

“So see,” I said, bringing my voice back to normal levels. “It doesn’t take any special skills to teach your kids. Just look at me.”

My friend wiped the tears from her eyes and took a couple deep, steadying breaths. “Yes,” she gasped. “I can see that.”

Please note: I am not suggesting that kids learn best when they are yelled at. (In fact, the opposite is true, or so I’ve been told.) I mostly try to not yell, and I succeed about 70 percent of the time. But I am an emoter, and when I get frustrated, everyone knows it.

My point is, I act the same whether I’m supervising a math lesson or checking a just-cleaned bathroom, correcting table manners or giving a piano lesson (my knitting needles poised to stab, I mean, knit), overseeing a laundry-folding party or drilling the multiplication tables.

And when you look at homeschooling thataway, well, anyone can do that. (Now wanting to, well, that’s an altogether different matter.)

This same time, years previous: apple cake, Italian cream cake, The Stash of 2008

That donut party thing we do (almost) every fall? It happened again, oh yes, it did!

I fried donuts for three-and-a-half hours straight, only leaving my post twice—once to run to the bathroom and once to back up a few paces to take a picture.

We had the yard cleaned up, the dishes washed and put away, and the kitchen floor scrubbed before nine o’clock that night. I got my shower, made myself a peanut butter apple, and then laid down, flat on my back, on the sofa.

And then I shut my eyes. The sensation was intoxicating. I was spinning and levitating at the same time.

So I sat up and ate my apple. And drank a couple glasses of water. And then I stumbled up the stairs to bed and dreamed hard (about autumn and Aspergers, no joke) for eight hours. After which I woke up with a headache and lots of laundry to do.

But I didn’t mind. The sun was shining and there were potted plants on my porch and I had nothing else to do. Plus, there was a happy we-made-hundreds-of-donuts-and-fed-them-all-to-our-friends feeling pirouetting through my veins.

This same time, years previous: pepperoni rolls, how to have a donut party: part one, part two, part three, sweet onion corn bake, pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting

After reading yesterday’s post, my husband shook his head and said with a sigh, “I never did understand kids who played with things how they were intended. I certainly never did.” (Thus confirming my suspicions that my kids get their out-of-the-box thinking from him.)

“My brothers and I used to play smash-up derby with our matchbox cars,” he said, chuckling. “You know, making two cars have a head-on collision. But,” and here the chuckle turned to a full throated roar of laughter, “it wasn’t good enough to just smash them together like that, so we threw them as hard as we could against the concrete wall. Smash-up derby, ha!” We were both bent double, slapping our knees.

Once we regained composure, he picked up his book and headed over to the sofa. “We used to have something like a hundred matchbox cars…”

Thankfully, my kids weren’t present for the telling of that tale. I wouldn’t want them to get any (more) ideas.

One of our chickens died. It was an old biddy—we have a bunch of them and they’ve been slowly dying off. It always makes me happy when a kid reports that another chicken bit the dust. One less beak to feed, I reason.

My husband buried this latest fatality, and several days later the dog dug it up and drug it all over the property.

Newsflash: three-day-old, half-decomposed dead chicken does not smell like roses.

And then my husband drove over the carcass. He thought his wheel was slipping on wet leaves, but it was really dead chicken.

Newsflash: three-day-old, half-decomposed, dead mashed chicken is putrid beyond belief.

My husband was in a hurry to get back to work, so he paid the girls to rebury the smoosh. But still, the stench lingered.

A little later when I went outside in search of some fresh air and steadying, hands-in-the-dirt work (I was flipping out at my kids way too much), I kept catching whiffs of mashed chicken. My stomach actually heaved.

Romantic notions about country living are just that, notions.

My husband fell off a roof yesterday.

He came home after work and said jovially, “Well, I had a little adventure today!”

“Yeah?” I said distractedly, for I was in the middle of attempting to make my supper of barley, hot dogs, and beans taste a little less like a supper of barley, hot dogs, and beans.

“Yep. See if you can guess what happened.”

I paused and looked at him. Hard. There was something funny about the way he was smiling and the sheepish air about him, and then it hit me—

“You fell off a roof!”

“Uh-huh.”

“No!”

“Yep!”

“How high up?”

“Eight feet.”

“No! Don’t tell me this stuff! I don’t want to knooooow!” It made no difference that he was standing in front of me, happy, healthy, and whole. The back of my neck tingled and tears pricked my eyes. I set down the container of chili powder and gave him a bear hug.

“Don’t dooo that,” I scolded, as though he had fallen off the roof just for the heck of it.

He had been working on an old metal roof. His foot slipped on some green fungus and off the roof he went, scrabbling and grasping all the way. He landed on the gravel in a Spiderman-like crouch. And he’s fine.

It’s the first time he’s ever fallen off a roof. I hope it’s the last.

This same time, years previous: and the fort goes up (Just re-read it and what I noticed was my baby’s fine, white hair. Gave me a heart-pang.)