Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled: Sample Chapters

A Mother's Eye View

Rachel:

On Mom’s forty-seventh birthday, Jimmy gave her a homemade card. It said, “Forty-seven years. How did you ever make it?” (Heartwarming, isn’t it?)

One thing I know: Mom didn’t make it this far without some special abilities in her arsenal. As she opened piles of homemade presents and cards, most of them hastily slapped together five minutes before the birthday celebration, I knew I was watching one such ability in action. Little toys, slips of paper with drawings on them, bits of material sewn together, an enormous pile of scrap-paper cards―Mom oohed and aahed over all of them. She managed to be genuinely excited over what was, quite frankly, a pile of junk.

Every year on my birthday I am presented with a similar onslaught of gifts, and although I thank the givers for them, I can’t conjure up the sparkle in my eyes that Mom always gets. My mother is not the only woman with this talent; this special ability that looks at any crayon scribbling and pronounces it a masterpiece (provided, of course, that it’s not on the walls). I’ve noticed it in most mothers.

Some people have concluded, based on such behaviour, that all mothers are liars. Otherwise, how could they look at a card like Jimmy’s and say, “That’s so sweet”? I don’t agree with their conclusion. Not all mothers lie. Mine doesn’t. They just see things differently.

My brother Jon used to spend hours digging in the desert dirt-pile we called a backyard. He’d come inside with rusty nails, thorny sticks, and unidentifiable objects in various stages of mangling. They were treasure to him. Mothers can look at the junk hauled in from the dirt and agree that their children have found treasure. They have the ability to wrestle half a dozen scrap-paper-and-packing-tape packages open and become genuinely excited about the contents. They can smile at a little boy and encourage him to keep seeing things differently, because that’s the magic of childhood, and who wants their children to grow up too fast?

Not all mothers have an equal share of this ability, and not all have it in equal measures from day to day, or even from hour to hour. I’m convinced that it comes straight from God, because God looks at things like a mother. He looks at a widow’s mite and says, “That’s treasure. That’s riches.” God looks more at the giver than He does at the gift. And there, I think, lies the secret.

When I turned eighteen, a friend asked if I felt any different. I said no. She told me that when she’d reached that age, she had expected wisdom to magically fall out of the sky and make her an adult. It didn’t happen to her, and it didn’t happen to me. Remembering that, I think I had better start working now on obtaining a motherly perspective (which is also a godly one). After all, I want to be ready when I get my first scrap-paper card and read those magical words on it:

“Dear Mom . . . how did you ever make it?”

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