Drinking from a Fire Hydrant
An origin story
Every homeschool mom has an origin story. Here’s mine.
I had my oldest child in 2013, and went back to work 7 weeks later. I missed my son while I was at work. I missed being with him in all of his formative moments. I loved my teaching job, but it felt kind of silly to go and teach other people’s children while someone else was teaching my child. My husband and I began to consider the idea of me staying home, but the idea was not common in our friend group and the money just wasn’t there. Even with all the hangups, I still began to loosely inquire into homeschooling.
I only knew one homeschooling family at the time, and I remember the mom telling me they followed a “secular Charlotte Mason curriculum.” When I asked what that meant, she said, “really, we just read a lot.” It sounded lovely to me, since I had always enjoyed reading as a child, and I wanted to foster a love of reading in my kids. If you’re unfamiliar, a Charlotte Mason education is mostly gained through reading what Charlotte called “living books”— timeless pieces that promote the truth, beauty, and goodness in life.
Even though I was still a public school teacher, in 2019 when the time came to enroll our oldest in kindergarten, my husband and I decided to homeschool. We didn’t initially choose to follow a Charlotte Mason curriculum, because my son had never really developed a love of books, despite our best efforts. Within a short time, it became very clear that reading was his greatest struggle. The child that didn’t really like being read to also didn’t like to read. Great.
My husband was the primary teacher in the beginning. In early 2020, about six months into my son’s kindergarten year, my husband came to me one night as I nursed our then year-old baby and said, “I can’t teach reading. It isn’t working. We need to figure out a way for you to take that over.”
The COVID-19 shut down of the school system provided the way. March 16 was the last day I ever went to my classroom as a Spanish teacher. I became the primary teacher of my children on March 17, and I still am.
Within just a short time of trying to teach my son reading, I saw the struggles my son was having. Letter reversals, issues with phonetics, and the list goes on and on. In a twist of irony and God-ordained providence, the last official teacher training I had attended was a seminar on dyslexia. I already suspected that my oldest is dyslexic, but after just a few days of being his primary teacher, I was 99% certain. So, I put all of my “language teacher energy” into my child. I dug into the research on teaching children to read. I bought and read the Orton-Gillingham manual. It felt so good to be nerdy again, especially in the pursuit of teaching my child.
We found the All About Reading curriculum in the summer of 2020, and began making our way through. It took a lot of time and patience on everyone’s part to build up the skills he needed to read well. We had a massive turning point in the early months of 2022, and all of a sudden my son’s reading abilities started to grow by huge amounts each week. This was my cue to follow up on the idea of a Charlotte Mason education that had been lingering in my mind since my first homeschool friend told me about it many years earlier. I made the Facebook post that changed everything in April 2022. My online friend circle had grown to include many homeschool families, so I asked if anyone followed a Charlotte Mason curriculum. A friend put me in touch with her sister, and after several conversations and some online reading, that was it. I was sold. I thought diving into the Charlotte Mason world at this point would be good for my son. I had no idea how good it would be for me.
When I started ordering books and audiobooks for our first year of Ambleside Online, an expertly crafted Charlotte Mason curriculum, I had never even heard of half of them. I was skeptical but hopeful. The early weeks were fun, but I wasn’t sure if it was doing what I hoped it would do for my oldest—give him a love books. Sure, my boys went and played the Battle of Hastings after we read about it in Our Island Story by H.E. Marshall. It was sweet, but was it really changing his heart about books? I had no idea.
My oldest and I raised an ebenezer together in the parking lot of Sonic one afternoon, listening to Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher while we waited for our lemonade. We shared a teary-eyed moment over the adoption of a character in the story, and I knew right then that I could trust Charlotte Mason and the old books. Anything that could bring tears to the eyes of the boy who hated books had to be worth doing. I also knew that the academic passion that had been dormant in me was roaring back to life. How had I lived for nearly 40 years and never even heard of these wonderful books, much less read them myself? How many other beautiful books had I missed out on? I had to know. I had to dig in and re-educate myself.
Since then, I have found myself reading and exploring at every chance I get. I challenge myself with the titles I choose. I have found an adult community, both online and in real life, to share thoughts with. Most meaningfully, my children and I are learning and growing together. I’m filling in the gaps in my own education, despite having two college degrees, while helping my kids to have a better foundation than I did. It’s daunting to think of all the things I have yet to read, but God-willing, I will get through at least some of my TBR list before I die. I am also happy to report that while my oldest is probably not destined for a life of academia, the Charlotte Mason education he is receiving has given him more appreciation for books than he ever had. I am hopeful that in time he will become more than a reluctant reader, but I also know that I cannot be the Holy Spirit for my child. So, I’m laying the feast and letting God give the increase in His time.
This new way of living for our family feels like drinking from a fire hydrant, and I love every second of it.