We love homeschooling.

Homeschooling offers a high degree of flexibility and personalization, allowing families to set educational priorities that may differ from mainstream institutions. As an organization that puts a premium on challenge and adventure, Dust and Tribe has a soft spot for anything unconventional. And we certainly believe in, promote, and facilitate experiential learning.

All four of my daughters were homeschooled, almost exclusively by their mother, who is now taking the initiative in getting the elders situated at college. I appreciate that. It must be noted, however, that I am not a part of that process.

We are divorced. My daughters live 3000 miles away. Any attempt by me to participate in their formal education would be symbolic at best, disruptive at worst, and annoying at a minimum.

That is problematic for all involved, and my ignorance of the darker dynamics of homeschooling is how we got here. Perhaps the value in my missteps is the possibility that through them you can do better.

Pay attention.

While married, we settled into a division of labor that is very common among homeschooling families. I was tasked with working and managing all household expenses, while my former spouse set about networking with other homeschooling mothers in preparation for building and administering her own curriculum to our daughters. This was an enterprise fraught with stress, uncertainty, and also a fair bit of excitement as the realization that everything was education became more apparent.

Days in the park were now an opportunity to study botany and weather systems. Trips to the market could become lessons on basic math and economics. We could review politics around the dinner table along with current events and even some sociology. We just needed to learn how to provide and capture these moments in a systematic way that allowed for auditing and steady progression.

I’m using the word “we” through the clarity of hindsight. In practice, it was my former spouse who really dug in and got the job done.

And she seemed pretty happy doing it. I would come home from work and hear all about what our girls had been up to. They were making friends, other children from homeschooling families. They had gone out: picnics and get-togethers and trips to the museum or the library or to the farmer’s market. Or maybe it was a quieter day, listening to audiobooks and working on art projects at home.

I got involved on occasion, but for the most part I was pretty self-satisfied with my role as provider. I bankrolled the whole operation. I was complacent and completely unaware of dynamics that were building toward my eventual estrangement from our family.

I wasn’t the greatest husband, and over time there developed cracks in the relationship that would eventually lead to a break-up. When that happened, my former spouse announced that she would be relocating from the west coast to the east coast to pursue a new relationship and that she would be taking our four daughters with her.

She was certainly free to set her romantic priorities, but taking our girls was silly and impossible. Even so, she wasn’t having it any other way and that landed us in court. Tens-of-thousands of dollars later, the judge ruled that her choice to relocate our daughters was neither silly nor impossible.

It was, in fact, preferable.

I would still have the job of financing the whole operation, of course, just without the niceties of catching up over dinner.

Here’s the warning:

A homeschooling mother is so much more. She is a teacher, a medic, the children’s primary disciplinarian and spiritual guide. She is a breast-feeding, co-sleeping goddess. She eschews the advice of doctors, preferring her homemade herbal tinctures and using the milk her body produces to cure wounds and eye infections. Homeschooling mothers commiserate around the downfall of society, their marriages, and the inadequacies of educational institutions. They feel under-appreciated and, in many cases, secretly superior. They see in their commitment to the education of their brood the sacrificing of their own adult dreams and ambitions. Spending all day with children, they lament the lack of intellectually stimulating conversation and all of this builds and builds.

And homeschooled children all but worship their mothers.

I didn’t realize any of this at the time. Or maybe I did and chose to ignore it. It’s been a long time and I honestly can’t remember, but in any case these were dynamics that went unaddressed by me.

That was a grave mistake.

Because when the court was put in the position of having to decide where our children would end up, an evaluator asked our daughters about their preference. And the answer was unanimous.

Mom was all they knew. Mom was everything they needed. Mom was everything.

But before mom took the kids across the country, there was a seven-month period where she got settled into her new life with her new spouse and our daughters were left in my care. During that time, I had to both work full-time and assume homeschooling responsibilities.

I needed help.

I turned to the local Muslim homeschooling network, a collection of mothers, the children of whom were friends with my daughters. The camaraderie and familiarity would be good for my girls. Surely this was a community that would help to get me on track just as they had been doing for years in support of all new and nervous homeschooling parents.

I was turned away. I was reminded that I was a man and that homeschooling conversations would frequently involve the topic of menstruation. My presence would make the other women uncomfortable.

Months later, I saw some of these women in the courtroom. The goddesses had spoken and just like that, my daughters were gone.

This is, as mentioned, a cautionary tale.

It’s about insidious dynamics that can creep into even that most beneficial of projects: the care and education of our next generation. It’s about developing an awareness of those dynamics in order to come up with proactive strategies to address them.

Fathers:

Be involved. If you are the breadwinner, recognize that your financial support is a mysterious abstraction that children cannot appreciate. Pointing to the material fruits of our labor is not an argument that our children will understand.

Children understand presence. We need to create opportunities for engagement with our children, engagement that does not include their mother, both to give her a break and also to give us a chance to be appreciated in our own right. That one-on-one time is our chance to assess our children’s developmental needs free of maternal influence. We can bring our observations and concerns back into conversation with their mother, contributing to the creation and execution of a curriculum that will address any perceived gaps.

Support the mother of your children. She is doing hard work and giving up much of herself in the process.

Mothers:

You are critical to the homeschooling enterprise, but you are not everything. Be careful about deluding yourself into a belief that the only thing your children will ever need is you. You are stunting their development through your hovering insistence that you know best in every case. The father of your children loves them every bit as much as you do, though he will display this love in ways that you won’t or can’t. Do not imagine that the father of your children is inept or irresponsible because he does things differently than you do. There is more than one way to get the job done.

Invite the father of your children into the homeschooling enterprise. Delegate and assign him tasks, if necessary. And tell him when you are feeling overwhelmed. Insist that he be there for you. Don’t be afraid of introducing this bit of tension.

It will only get worse if you don’t.

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