It’s true, homeschool Moms don’t get a Mother’s Day.
Where do kids make their Mother’s Day cards and their cute little crafts to present to their Moms during breakfast in bed?
They make them at school.
Can you imagine that homeschool scene?
“Okay, kids, everyone gather around, we’re going to make a craft for me.”
Right after my kids fell out of their seats from laughing, the complaints would start.
“Mom, do I have to make it like that?”
“Can I make them shooting guns?”
“I wanted to make mine chartreuse, is that okay?”*
After I’d herded them into doing the craft in my head and gotten something approximating the right craft. Just think of how much fun it would be and how self-aggrandizing to announce:
“Everybody get a pencil, now you’re going to write me a letter saying, ‘Thank you, Mommy, for being a good Mom.’ Make sure you use proper punctuation and capitalize everything correctly. Oh, and use your best handwriting. When you surprise me with this letter on Mother’s Day, I want to be able to read it.”
That’s not going to happen. Instead, all of the kids in school get bullied into doing this by their teachers**. I remember teaching first grade and carefully planning out the Mother’s Day craft and writing project.
It was called “My Mom wears many hats.” It was a shape book, and it had 8 pages. Each page they kids came up with a different hat the Mom wore and wrote a sentence about it. ‘My Mom wears a chef hat. She makes me spaghetti.” The p and s would be adorably switched and I would leave it alone because I knew that would be an adorable memory, but I made them write in their best handwriting.
You know what, it’s weird to have my kids write those things.
It just feels weird to stand in front of them as they sit at their desks and says, “Okay now write down all of the jobs I do at home, and come up with clever sentences.”
It just does.
So, on Mother’s Day, I won’t wake up to an adorable craft put together by my kids with the teacher’s help. I don’t get the flower pens in a terra-cotta pot, or the acrostic poem about M-O-T-H-E-R, where the kids really struggle to come up with something for “H” because all the words they can think of start with G. And the R always starts with “Really _______.”
You know what I will get?
I’ll get a hug.
I’ll get slightly burned toast with LOTS of butter, because my daughter loves butter, and cinnamon sugar.
I’ll wake up to whispers of “don’t wake her up as you bring her the food,” or the always worrisome, “don’t spill the tea as you walk in,” because I’m sure my daughter has picked out one of the fancy tea cups because it’s a “special occasion.”
There will be lots of love, because I have a wonderfully supportive husband who will remind the kids it’s Mother’s Day, and they should make me a card. The boys will spend 5 minutes drawing me super-heroes or Minecraft figures. Princess will spend 20 minutes drawing and writing out the perfect card in her mind.
And, for a minute, I’ll regret not getting the adorable craft and the writing project that I know was labored over for weeks in their school classroom. But, I won’t regret for a minute my choice to homeschool and the extra memories and hugs I have because of it.
*Chartreuse according to my colored pencils is a rather ugly shade of yellow/green. I had always thought of it as a pink color because in my head that words sound pinkish. To this day I still think of it as pink despite knowing otherwise.
**No, I don’t think they’re really bullied. I’m exaggerating for the sake of a story. It’s a bad habit of mine, one I’m not likely to overcome any century soon (see I did it again, I’m not going to live over a century)
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