After School
Reflections from a midlife, post-homeschool grandmother
I suppose this is part of my life I need to lean into.
When I was first working on my manuscript in 2019, I was worried it would turn into a book about homeschooling and I really didn’t want it to be a book about homeschooling. “It’s not a book about homeschooling,” my writing friend assured me after reading some early drafts. “But homeschooling is a part of you, so of course it’s going to be in the book.”
In its current iteration, I have said it’s not a book about grief. “But of course grief is threaded throughout the book,” another friend tells me after reading it.
Six years later I’m pretty settled on what I’m writing about in that book, and They are right when They counsel you to start with a map. Make an outline for goodness’ sake.
I have tried to lean away from parts of my life, as if that would make me unique or interesting (everyone is writing about XYZ so I don’t need to). Which is silly because homeschooling is still fairly unique and niche…which is also why I don’t write a lot about it. Is it so niche no one cares? It’s a vicious cycle of bias—I think everyone is writing about XYZ because I am reading a lot about XYZ.
In reality, homeschooling has occupied nearly half my life so it’s fitting that some of what I write will be about homeschooling.
In the early years of teaching your children, you are everything. Every letter sounded out and every bean counted is a minute of your life ticking by; bye, bye. Everything is you. You are Teacher.
Around sixth grade, you become less Teacher, more Guide. They can read, follow directions, move on to the next assignment, ask you for help with math so you’ll stop what you’re doing and come stand beside them as they instantly solve the problem on their own, the minute you arrive by their side. You are less, but you probably have more children to teach so it never really occurs to you that your job is changing.
In high school, your kids become less your Students and more your Research Assistants. They will fill you in with fun facts you didn’t ask for. They will fact check you. Pro tip: Assign them books or courses you wish you had time for yourself, and then require a narration to grade their understanding. In ten minutes you can have a pretty thorough overview of the War of 1812 or The Renaissance. This is better than an audiobook or those sad, sad apps that give you a condensed version of someone’s life work, summing up their whole book in 5 minutes (the fact that this is legal blows my mind).
High school is lower teacher involvement, higher return on investment. It’s the vista you climbed to see.
If your kids attend college or trade school or any specialized programs, and you yourself only finished two years of community college (but 23 years of homeschooling someone give me a degree) they will share whole new worlds and experiences with you, lives you never lived. You will be offended by their professors but redeemed by your kids’ success. They will write essays about The Best Teacher they ever had and you will be the star. They will get “real diplomas”.
Even with Google and AI and all their degrees, they will text you with questions they trust you have the answer to. They will ask you first, because you were their first teacher—even if you have to “use your resources” as we say, and Google the answer yourself. It’s fine. They want to hear the answer from you.
After School
It’s been almost two years since I was responsible for anyone’s education but my own, and I’m just now starting to really process that. This is why I will never be good at hot-takes, thank God. It takes me awhile to realize what’s going on because there is just so much going on.
The transition from homeschooling to not homeschooling was less monumental than I ever imagined; or more likely, I just never really imagined it. It’s like many shifts in life—you work and work and work and one day you don’t buy diapers anymore. You don’t have to cut anyone’s food. You are done with phonics, gradually everyone grades their own math lessons, nobody needs your help with chemistry, and no one needs reminded to correct their essay and return it to you. One day you sign your last child’s homemade diploma and put their grades on their high school transcript and you are done homeschooling.1 Voila.
You throw them a big graduation party but forget to celebrate yourself.
For us, the grandkids came before we finished homeschooling our youngest child. I was adjusting to being Grandma as I was transitioning to life After School. In the years from 2020 to 2023 we endured the pandemic, my dad died, three of our children were married (in a 6 month span), we remodeled and opened another business, our youngest graduated homeschool, three kids graduated college, and we became grandparents.2 It was the best and worst and blurriest of times.
You work and work and work, and one day you realize how much the work has shifted, and how thankful you are for its gradual change. How the slow change from being Everything, to being Someone You Can Call, allowed you to pick up some of the books and skills and pursuits you used to wish you had time for.
For me, buying the deli was probably the biggest help in transitioning from the homeschool years to this After School time. I have poured myself into writing but if writing were all I had, I think I would be spinning my wheels too much. I need to be busy, but with the freedom to be flexible. I need a project to keep me focused. The deli has taken a lot from me, but it’s also been key in my formation I believe.
I can no longer frame my life and schedule around my children’s, but all the parenting and homeschooling has taught me how to take a wide open freedom and tame it into a place I can flourish. Throw in some huge responsibilities, like running a business with 15 employees and helping my husband with his business, and my days are pretty full.
I’ve loved every stage of parenting and I can honestly say we are now loving this empty nest and grandparenting stage. We talk for hours in the morning, eat small dinners at night3, and go to bed whenever we choose.4 We hang out with our grandkids as much as we can and oh my goodness, do we enjoy our children’s children.
I haven’t really had to figure out what I’m doing After School because the seasons of life have overlapped so naturally. I see the same thing in my homeschooling friends who are in this stage of life—some have turned hobbies into businesses, or taken up travel, or followed a passion into a ministry. Our lives didn’t end when our central role as Homeschool Mom ended, because we took the time to nurture our own brains in the midst of teaching algebra and literature.
This is important for any mother. The goal is to move your children into their independence, little by little. Do not shelve all of your own interests for later. Let your children see you being a real person, with real interests and pursuits that do not necessarily have anything to do with them, and one day they might even be your biggest cheerleaders.
After School is a time of transition for moms, whether you homeschooled or not. When your kids are done with their formal education and your home starts to empty, what do you do?
And hey. If you’re in the thick of it, remember you can always narrow the hustle down to this: read good books together; talk or write about them; go outside. 5
True story: The first graduate’s diploma has a typo on it, courtesy of moi.
Okay so I don’t feel so bad for taking six years to write my book.
YOU GUYS. Dinnertime is so low-key and not stressful this time of life. I can’t even tell you how nice it is to not worry about being home in time to make dinner because either 1) we have leftovers, 2) we can afford to get takeout for two people once in awhile, or 3) we are content with a quesadilla. I am a decent cook but the daily-ness of coming up with dinner has always been a thorn in my side.
It’s 7:30 pm, folks. ; ) Not every night, but sometimes.
I’ve been writing online since 2012 and have a backlog of posts about homeschooling, if you’re curious or nostalgic. This is not a complete list yet—many posts need reformatted because I imported them from my old website.
Thank you for this. Your essay is a gift for me and unlocked a door that I didn't know needed to be opened and let me walk through into a place I needed to be. And as it sat with me it finally gave me a word, a name for what I've been going through.
I'm in my 13th or 14th or maybe even 15th year of homeschooling-- depending on how you count it. My oldest is 20 and my youngest just turned 13. This last couple of years have been a struggle and I've been praying for clarity and guidance and for the untying of knots in my life. And your essay was most clearly an answer to a prayer.
It was specifically this passage: "In high school, your kids become less your Students and more your Research Assistants. They will fill you in with fun facts you didn’t ask for. They will fact check you. Pro tip: Assign them books or courses you wish you had time for yourself, and then require a narration to grade their understanding. In ten minutes you can have a pretty thorough overview of the War of 1812 or The Renaissance. This is better than an audiobook or those sad, sad apps that give you a condensed version of someone’s life work, summing up their whole book in 5 minutes (the fact that this is legal blows my mind).
High school is lower teacher involvement, higher return on investment. It’s the vista you climbed to see."
This has not been my experience with high school. My teens are autistic/adhd and two of them have learning disabilities (all diagnosed within the last three years). What you outline is what I've always expected high school would be like: a time to step back and let them take the wheel, a time for less involvement on my part. That's what I thought these years would be. But that has not been my reality. Instead I have two teens who need very intense one on one time with me and who are not ready at all to let me step back. I have no idea what I'm doing and it's terrifying. I've been feeling my way in the dark without a map, trying to grope for some picture of what this is supposed to look like for my specific kids, feeling like a failure, wondering if it was a mistake to even try to homeschool my kids in the first place.
To be frank, this passage I quoted stuck in my side like a thorn. It made me so angry and resentful. But I knew that I wasn't really angry at you or at any other homeschooler whose experience maps onto the expected route. And as I sat with that anger, wondering why I couldn't let it go, praying about it, wondering about it, one day suddenly it came to me, clear, like a bell ringing. This feeling I'm feeling is Grief. I need to allow myself to mourn that our day to day isn't like I expected, that it doesn't match the map that everyone else seems to be following. I need to allow myself to mourn for those lost hopes and dreams and expectations. And maybe then I can accept what is, having let go what is not. Grief. Acceptance. Those were the words I needed.
I wanted to let you know, Tresta, that God was working through your writing in ways that you couldn't have anticipated, and that this essay has been a gift to me, a gift of clarity and insight. Your themes of homeschooling and grief are your own and yet I feel a strange kind of echo in my very different experiences. Thank you for your gift of writing.
It's interesting how you talk about things threading through. Feels like training an AI; you try to optimize for new output, but the initial dataset's biases alway persits. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature of your unique experience. So insightful, keep writing!