Home Is Where the School Is: The Logic of Homeschooling and the Emotional Labor of Mothering

8. Looking Forward: Empty Desks, Empty Nests

166 > 167 Mothers fell into two categories when responding to this question: those who had solid ideas about how they would move out of homeschooling, and those who wanted to extend the intensive mothering identity. Interestingly, mothers fell into these categories along first- and second-choice lines as well. Moving On: Second-Choicers and Careers Second-choice homeschoolers were much more likely than first-choicers to talk about their future plans in concrete ways. Throughout their homeschooling careers, they had been on the lookout for conventional educational programs that might fit their children’s needs. In chapter 6, I discussed how three of the remaining four second-choicers had enrolled and disenrolled their children in school several times, trying to find a fit, and feeling disappointed when it did not work out. Each of these mothers had been ready to pursue a career upon getting her children into school: Emily Ashton had gone into counseling and started her own nonprofit, Darlene RooneyHenkel had tried to find work in faith advocacy and social justice, and Tracy Chadwick had started a music education program for children. Each of these women had specific plans to pursue her career when her children got settled.1 Of these three women, Emily was having the hardest time. Her career plans had once again been postponed for several more years because she had just resumed homeschooling two of her children, the youngest of whom was only in sixth grade. When I asked Emily how she felt about delaying her plans, she explained that she consciously imagined her future career path (running the counseling nonprofit) by putting together “vision boards,” collages of inspirational words and pictures, which helped her with “dreamingtype stuff for the future” and to “keep focused [on] where it’s going.” This, along with the “gratitude journal” she talked about in chapter 6, kept her from becoming “very resentful and very cranky.” Emily was still doing temporal emotion work to manage her problematic feelings, which arose because she once again put her own interests on hold to homeschool her children. Her vision boards helped her to sequence by imagining a future in which she would achieve her own goals, and her gratitude journal helped her to savor by focusing on the good things she had in her life at the moment, despite deferring her own goals. Darlene, however, was in a different situation because her children were in school by the time I talked to her in 2009. With her son a college freshman pursuing video game programming and her daughter a high school junior, she was ready to ramp up her professional career. Darlene felt her 168 > 169 Darlene, she was careful to say that, although it was an intentional choice, it was not ideal:4 My goal was to give [my kids] that kind of [private school] education for free. And so what got sacrificed was my own time. And again, not that I subjugated myself—I chose that—but it wasn’t the best situation. It would’ve been better for them to be in a school all along. . . . And I was really clear all along that I wasn’t just doing it for them, and that I wouldn’t just do it for them. I’m not a martyr type. That’s not right. . . . [But] I always knew that this time was short, so I was fully engaging myself in this endeavor [homeschooling]. And that later I would fully engage myself in another endeavor. I just didn’t know what it was. But I knew it was coming, and it was allowed to unfold when time opened up. In Tracy’s view, homeschooling motherhood had “martyr” potential, so she had been careful over the years to meet some of her own needs through homeschooling. During the first interviews, second-choicers talked a great deal about how their lack of me-time threatened to eclipse their sense of self, and because of this, they had felt more conflicted about sacrificing so much to homeschool their children. The follow-up interviews showed that over the years, retaining an independent sense of self remained a salient issue for second -choicers, which is something that previous research on homeschooling and mothering has yet to reveal. By the time I talked to Tracy in January 2009, she had sent her daughter back to school the previous September and was preparing for her son to...