“Sure, sometimes. But it’s a gorgeous day outside!”
Oakley smiled, charmed by her younger daughter’s word choice, but she wouldn’t be so easily swayed.
“We live in Hawaii,” she responded. “It’s always a gorgeous day.”
“Not lately,” Harper whined. “It’s always wet and rainy. But the sky isbluetoday, look!” She pointed to the small patch ofsky that they could see through the kitchen window.
“You still have to learn things.”
“Can’t we learn outside?” she pleaded.
“Don’t bother,” Hayden muttered, picking at the flaking paint of the kitchen table that had also come with the house. “It won’t work. We just have to sit here and learn about–” She paused and peeked at Oakley’s lesson plan for the day. “Mitochondria.” She rolled her eyes again. “Really?”
“What’s mitochondria?” Harper asked.
“The powerhouse of the cell,” Hayden droned. She turned to Oakley. “We did this last year in school. Can I skip it?”
“I don’t want to do science alone!” Harper exclaimed.
Oakley leaned back in her chair and took a moment to soothe her frustration before responding. She picked up the last piece of apple and munched on it thoughtfully.
Apparently the girls took her silence as a refusal, because they pulled the science printouts across the table and looked them over with morose, resigned expressions.
Homeschooling wasn’t turning out to be as much fun as she had hoped. Bundled together as it had been with the massive upheaval of divorce and a move to Pualena, the girls hadn’t responded to the prospect of leaving school with the excitement and joy that she had once envisioned.
She had even kept them at their old private school for a while, trying to ease the transition, but leaving Pualena before dawn to make it up to Waimea in time had been exhausting for all of them. Nothing about it was sustainable.
Oakley felt like she had failed her daughters somehow, by locking them into a rental near her family instead of giving them the stability of finding something in the same town. But at the time, that degree of proximity to Trent and Jennifer hadfelt unbearable. And she had so badly wanted to homeschool the girls and spend more time with her family, even before Trent brought the axe down on their marriage.
And so she soldiered on and made the best of it. It gave her more time with her daughters – and since Trent had claimed their weekends, she would hardly see them otherwise – but being their teacher in addition to being their mother was creating a lot of added struggle during a time when they were all already struggling.
Several times a day, she asked herself the painful question of whether she had done the right thing, taking them out of school and moving them down to Pualena. She tried her best to convince herself that she had, but she never fully succeeded.
She didn’t think that parenting them in isolation in Waimea would have been any different. Keeping up their old schedule and stressing over homework wouldn’t have necessarily been any easier on anybody.
Homeschooling was meant to be an improvement on all that.
So why did it always feel like a fight?
Maybe Trent had been right all along. Maybe she just wasn’t cut out for this.
No.
Oakley brought her hand down on the table with athwack.
She wasn’t going there. She wouldn’t allow him that space in her head.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” she decided. “We’ll take a beach break–”
The girls cheered and jumped up from the table.
“But,” she added, “Hayden gives Harper a lesson on mitochondria in the car. I’ll give you my half of the lesson plan and everything.”
“Cool!” Hayden brightened at the prospect of taking the lead on a lesson.
“The powerhouse of the cell!” Harper shouted, both fists in the air.
“So we’ve got a deal?” Oakley asked.
