Why would caring adults ever unnecessarily put CHILDREN in the position to think to themselves, "If I can just get through the day," or "If I can just get through the week," or "If I can JUST make it until June," and so on.
The first day we homeschooled Annie, halfway through seventh grade, it was as if we had woken from a long, bad dream. We looked across the breakfast table at each other with expressions that belied the things going through our heads -- things like, "I remember you! I remember getting up in the morning, having no dread and thinking, "What do I want to do today?" Or as the poet Mary Oliver put so beautifully:
The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
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