Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  I breathed easier when we stepped outside, where Julia could wander the boxwood maze in the Palace Gardens, or skip down Duke of Gloucester Road singing aloud. I bought her a penny-whistle in an outdoor market, and she walked the streets composing tunes on the spot, utterly unconcerned that no one else around us was playing a musical instrument.

  Her chief delight was The Revolutionary City—an outdoor theatrical production consisting of more than thirty professional actors and amateur reenactors, who spread throughout a few cordoned-off blocks on Main Street. That afternoon’s performance featured scenes a colonial citizen might have witnessed between 1774 and 1776, when America was on the brink of war. The production began as Julia and I sat in the grass outside the large brick Capitol; an actor playing Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, appeared on the balcony to announce that, in response to acts of rebellion in Boston, King George had dissolved the Virginia assembly. From there, Julia followed a procession of actors and tourists down the street, moving from scene to scene. Here was a loyalist daughter dressed in pink calico defending her father’s political views and lamenting how all this revolutionary fervor was infringing on her social life. And here, gathered surreptitiously behind one house, a group of African slaves debated whether they should join the Continental Army and gain their freedom at the end of the war. Julia ran from building to building, listening to everyone, asking questions and joining in debates—precisely what the actors encouraged, although most of the onlookers were blasé adults like me, happy enough to watch, but not eager to play the game.

  Looking back, I view that day as a great homeschooling pleasure, even though plenty of American families have enjoyed the same Williamsburg experience without ever having to dabble in home education. One might insist that Julia could have absorbed her colonial lessons on any well-planned family weekend; homeschooling wasn’t necessary. In our family’s case, however, that’s not quite true. Had Julia’s sisters been present, the event would likely have degenerated into arguing, poking, and kicking. In less than two hours I would have been hurrying for the exit.

  With Julia as my only charge, I managed to find a bench in the shade and settle down with a novel, frequently glancing up the street at my child, safe in the hands of other educators. Julia was happy, and we stayed all afternoon. That night we slept in a motel on the York River, with the tiny historic district of Yorktown at our backs, within a mile of the spot where the French Comte de Rochambeau helped to block the Chesapeake Bay so that a stranded Cornwallis, denied reinforcements, was compelled to surrender.

  These days, if you ask Julia who Cornwallis was, she usually doesn’t remember. She does recall, however, the jellyfish in the shallow York River, small and white translucent creatures pulsing up to the water’s surface then sinking back down to the sandy bottom, trailing little fish in their tentacles. To Julia, the lessons of the landscape were more memorable than history lessons, and that was okay with me. When she revisited Cornwallis in high school, in the two years when all of her American history would be repeated, I hoped she would recall wading in the York River, peering into the cave where Cornwallis hid, and walking around the battlefield. Our field trip had given her a tangible reference for bringing to life the words in a textbook.

  Arriving home from our mid-April travels, Julia and I had reached the final stretch of the school year, and once again we had to adjust our daily schedule. I was committed to teach a six-week intensive class at Washington and Lee called Reading Lolita in Lexington, based on Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Now I would be spending six hours each week discussing Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and Austen with twenty-five students, while guiding them through the history of Iran and Islam, from Cyrus the Great to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Every second week would bring another stack of student papers.

  “You’re going to have to spend more time with Dad,” I explained to Julia. “I’ll be home on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons you’ll need to stay at VMI.”

  Not a good plan, one might think, given John’s busy schedule and the lure of the VMI weight room. But John’s work always settled down by late April, with the cadets busy preparing for exams and mid-May graduation, and in recent months John had begun to show some promise as a homeschooler.

  The previous fall, in the wake of Julia’s aborted flute lessons, John had picked up some of the home-ed slack by assuming a new role: art teacher. He was much better suited to the task than I. After Julia’s knitting lessons, I had assigned her various art projects; “Sculpt a velociraptor. Draw some Mayan hieroglyphs. Sketch a medieval knight according to the instructions in this how-to drawing book.” I had tried to think of projects that matched Julia’s units in science and history, but in my artless ignorance, I could offer her no practical advice. “Looks good to me” was my constant refrain as I admired her sketches and clay creations.

  My own artistic efforts had withered in the sixth grade, when a teacher presented my drawing to the class as an example of what not to do. She had told the class to draw her face, of which she was obviously proud, and although I had tried my best, at the end of the period she had held my paper up beside her aquiline nose and lamented: “This doesn’t look anything like me!” Couldn’t I see that her hair had a dark sheen far superior to the generic straw that I had sketched? After that I carefully avoided art for the rest of my school years, such is the power of one bad teacher.

  John’s encounters with art were consistently happy. He came from a family blessed with artistic genes, from his sister painting murals in her daughter’s bedroom, to his great-grandfather painting murals inside Rockefeller Center. John preferred sculpting; he specialized in small, cartoonish clay figures—four-inch cadets in full regalia with sabers at their sides, or three-inch hockey goalies doing half-splits to block a puck. Two years ago, after teaching Julia to play chess, he had sculpted a set for her: dinosaurs confronting dragons. Gathered on one side stood pterodactyl knights, triceratops bishops, and his-and-her T. rexes serving as king and queen. Facing them were purple dragons perched on turreted castles, Chinese dragon knights holding emerald balls, and pawn hatchlings breaking through oval eggs. When I saw him paint the figures, I remember thinking: Does this child know how much she is loved?

  Since November, John had been overseeing Julia’s art projects, and in the process he had learned to appreciate all the art teachers from his past. “Now I know why those teachers always started with an apple or a glass,” he remarked one afternoon. “Julia and I started out trying to draw the front of Scott Shipp Hall” (one of VMI’s castle-like buildings). “I was planning to do the whole thing, so I could show her how to draw shadows. But you know what? We spent an hour just drawing part of the roof.”

  Art lessons gave John and Julia a wonderful chance for father-daughter time. “We’d do drawings together,” John recalled months later. “I’d do one and she’d do one. We drew faces, we drew each other, we tried to draw trees. Art was so much easier than music.”

  This was a strange comment from a band director, but apart from reading and creative writing, art was the only activity Julia would happily pursue for hours, without constant oversight. While John met with cadets, Julia painted still life watercolors of fruit that he had arranged on his desk. While he conferred with administrators, she built an Aztec temple out of sugar cubes, painting it gold with red drops spattered on the stairs. “Blood,” she explained. “They threw the bodies of their sacrificial victims down the temple steps.”

  In art, John had found his homeschooling niche. Years later, I would feel proud to arrive home and see him in the yard with our girls, kitchen chairs arranged in the grass behind short easels, a small table cluttered with brushes and paints and mugs of water, while they all concentrated on acrylic paintings of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Now that spring had come, and I would be leaving Julia with her dad three afternoons each week, I gave John an extra charge. “You can teach Julia about the Civil War,” I announced one
morning in his office. Placing our Children’s Encyclopedia of American History on his desk, I opened it to the 1860s and said, “Knock yourself out.”

  John didn’t flinch. He’s a Civil War enthusiast, the sort who makes a biannual pilgrimage to Gettysburg, and who lies awake at night reading volume after volume on generals and battles and the trials of foot soldiers. In our earliest, child-free years of marriage I followed him to Antietam, Appomattox, and Shiloh, but while John felt something spiritual at most battlefields, I was thoroughly bored, kicking my toes into the side of yet another earthwork.

  “What better place to study the Civil War,” I told Julia, “than at VMI, on ground shelled by Union troops?” After VMI’s cadets marched up the valley in May of 1864 to help the Confederacy win a brief victory at the Battle of New Market, the Union’s General Hunter marched down the same ground, burning crops as he went. When he reached the outskirts of Lexington, he set up cannons across the Maury River from VMI, and proceeded to bombard the place. John showed Julia the Union cannonballs still embedded in the back walls of VMI’s barracks.

  He also took her to the VMI museum, to see the bullet hole in the sleeve of Stonewall Jackson’s leather coat, from the day in 1863 when he was accidentally shot by a Confederate soldier. (Jackson died of the ensuing gangrene.) But Julia was too troubled by Jackson’s stuffed horse to care about the general’s coat. Little Sorrell, VMI’s monument to taxidermy, had recently been refurbished by a Smithsonian conservator, inspiring the cadets to feature in their student newspaper a picture of the horse wearing platform shoes and a tilted ball cap, with a caption that read, “Little Sorrell: Pimp My Ride.”

  Julia wasn’t impressed. “Little Sorrell looks creepy,” she said. “After all his service to his country he gets cut open and made into a big, dead doll with glass eyes.”

  In fact, she was skeptical about VMI’s entire culture. Another girl might have become enamored with military regalia, spending so much time on the campus of a military college, surrounded by men in uniforms, gray and green, and young cadets wearing crisp white trousers and gray jackets. College boys who usually slouch around in jeans and T-shirts can resemble Prince Charming when decked out in gold buttons and white gloves. But they didn’t interest Julia. VMI’s culture was too masculine, too regimented, and too anti-individualistic to appeal to her idiosyncratic mind. In fact, our most memorable homeschooling event that spring turned out to be an antiwar protest, prompted when VMI announced its choice for graduation speaker: Donald Rumsfeld.

  VMI’s senior class had made the pick, raising groans from the college’s moderate professors and quiet grumblings from career Army officers who hadn’t liked Rumsfeld even before he became secretary of defense. Now that the Iraq War had descended into a muddled mess, with Rumsfeld hovering on the brink of resignation, he seemed like a bad choice for graduation day. Nevertheless, each year VMI’s seniors are allowed considerable leeway in choosing their speaker, and Rumsfeld was slightly more legitimate than the cadets’ selection a few years earlier: G. Gordon Liddy.

  An impending visit from Rumsfeld was a rallying cry to all Lexingtonians who had opposed the Iraq War from the get-go, and I was solidly among those ranks. I had spent seven months prior to the U.S. invasion working with area Quakers to plan local rallies, organize carpools to D.C. marches, and distribute hundreds of self-designed red buttons that looked like little stop signs reading, “No War Against Iraq.” During those months, Julia, Rachel, and Kathryn had become accustomed to waving signs at local protests, and although my activism was a touchy subject at a school like VMI, the best antiwar speech I ever heard took place at that college, when the International Studies Department held a forum on the possibility of war in Iraq. In a surreal moment, General Anthony Zinni explained to a packed crowd of eight hundred cadets and civilians why invading Iraq was a bad idea. As he put it: “I’ve spent the last ten years watching this guy, Saddam Hussein. And I’m here to tell you, he ain’t Adolf Hitler, and he ain’t Osama Bin Laden. He’s Tony Soprano. He’s a gangster…and he’s not worth the life of a single lance corporal.” It was like a scene from a Vonnegut novel, to watch hundreds of uniformed cadets howling with cheers as a general told them about the lunacy of a war in which they would soon be fighting.

  Once the war started, I had converted my activism into support-the-troops mode, but Rumsfeld’s visit was an irritation too great to be ignored. One faculty wife suggested that a group of VMI spouses should disrupt the speech, standing up halfway through and pulling out banners previously hidden in our purses. Lexington, however, is a very polite community, and the local peace activists opted instead to gather at the northern entrance to town, where a bridge crosses the Maury into Lexington. With the turreted walls of VMI visible in the background, protesters would occupy the sidewalk along the bridge and advertise their anti-Rumsfeld sentiments to all the passing drivers.

  “Julia and I are going to join the protest against Rumsfeld,” I told John a few days before the event. “I think it would make a good civics lesson.”

  John looked up from his computer with eyebrows raised. He usually responds to my activism with a “That’s nice, honey” wave, and a repetition of his old refrain: “Just don’t get me fired.” This time he was more specific.

  “Make sure that it’s not your face on the evening news, okay?”

  The night before the protest, Julia placed a big white poster on our kitchen table and got out our Magic Markers. I wrote the words: “Support Our Troops: Fire Rumsfeld.” Julia handled the pictures: a line of toy soldiers along the bottom and, above them, a cannon with flames emerging from the word Fire.

  “Do you understand who Rumsfeld is?” I asked Julia.

  “Not really,” she admitted.

  I explained to her about a president’s secretaries, but I think she envisioned female typists. So I told her that Rumsfeld was a man in charge of the military who had pushed hard for war, when peace was still an option. These days, I explained, most Americans feel that our involvement in Iraq was a bad idea, costing a lot of lives and money. Julia could fathom all of that.

  The next morning, we gathered at the bridge with forty people—a tiny number by urban standards, but a large crowd for little Lexington, where most peace vigils draw fewer than a dozen usual suspects. One person had dressed as the grim reaper, pacing with his scythe; another wore a grotesque George Bush mask. Everyone brought posters and picket signs and banners, and drivers who supported the anti-Rumsfeld message honked and waved. Others passed by stone-faced.

  Keeping our promise to her dad, Julia held our big poster in front of our faces when two television cameras scanned the scene, and that night, the protest accomplished its objective: major news channels covering VMI’s graduation included clips from the bridge. Whether the event accomplished any teaching objectives, I can’t say. After fifteen minutes of yelling, “Down with Rumsfeld!” and “Stop the War!” Julia soon lost interest. She disappeared behind the line of sign-waving adults, and when I searched her out after another half hour, I found her sitting with her back to the bridge’s concrete railing, hidden behind the crowd, reading a fantasy novel while all the ugly thoughts of war and politics slipped from her mind and into the river below. I supposed I couldn’t expect a fifth-grader to be filled with political passions, especially a child like Julia, who had a very limited interest in the troubles of human beings. Had we been trying to save whales, or free monkeys from a science lab, her imagination might have been sparked. I could see Julia as a stubborn tree sitter. But as for some old, stuffy guy named Rumsfeld? Julia didn’t really care.

  “Can we go eat some lunch?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. As we walked off the bridge, she rolled our poster into a more useful object: first a megaphone, then a percussion mallet, which she beat on the hood of our station wagon.

  “What did you think of the protest?” I asked across the car roof as I looked for my keys.

  She held the rolled poster to her eye, telescope-style
. “It was okay, I guess.”

  “What would have made it better?”

  “An after-party,” she replied. “With lots of creamy dips and crackers. You could have talked politics with the adults, and I could have watched TV.”

  Years later, when I showed Julia her comment, she remarked: “Did I really say that? I think what I meant was that if I cared about a political cause, I would rather go to a party than to a protest. Or maybe to a restaurant, where half the profits were going to support the cause. But I’m not the kind of person who wants to stand around holding a sign for hours, and I think most people feel the same. I mean, even at the protests in Washington, they have to have a rock band there just to get people to come.”

  Back in 2005, as the cadets packed up their barracks’ rooms and drove off with their parents, our year of homeschooling was rapidly drawing to a close. One week after the protest, Julia’s violin recital took place, suffering only one glitch. When we arrived at Washington and Lee’s music building, the accompanist shuffled through her piles of piano music and exclaimed, “Oh no!” She had left one book at home; Julia would have to perform her movement of the Seitz concerto a cappella.

  “Do you mind?” I asked Julia.

  “Why should I mind?” she responded.

  One of the advantages of tuning out social norms was that Julia never appeared nervous when performing before an audience. As a child, I had suffered through annual violin recitals with my bow arm trembling and my stomach clenched, so I admired my coolly confident daughter, who seemed unconcerned with any eyes upon her. No piano accompaniment? No problem. Julia took the floor unfazed, and in the first long stretch of rests, where a piano should have been playing the orchestral part, she lowered her violin and sang the melody with unself-conscious abandon. Inspired by her gutsy solo, I joined her (though more quietly), and her violin teacher occasionally piped in as well. In the end, Julia had her accompaniment, and she concluded with a dramatic, deep bow.