Every once in a while I long for the days of being a stay at home mom. I always knew that I wanted to stay home with my young children. As a pre-school teacher, I had watched parents drop their kids off at 7:00 AM and pick them up at 6:30 PM. They would have just enough time to run home, fix dinner, feed and bathe their child and then put them to bed. I always thought that I got the best of their children. I (being young and foolish) often wondered why they even bothered to have children if they didn't want to spend time with them. I now know how difficult the decision to return to work can be, and how important it is to stay relevant in the work force. You never know what can happen and how difficult it can be to return to work after a long absence.
I had planned to return to the classroom as a teacher as soon as my children were old enough to go to school. I even tried to put my son in pre-school for a few hours a week so that I could spend some alone time with his newborn sister. It didn't work. His behavior was out of control. He tantrumed for the entire two hours he was there. I was told that they couldn't manage him, and that I would need to find other arrangements. I tried another placement with the same result. They said that they had never seen a child behave in this way. They were worried about their ability to keep him and the other children safe while he was with them. I should have been on high alert, but I figured that he just needed a little more time to mature.
It's not like I didn't notice something odd about my 3 year old son. He spoke like a miniature adult. He skipped the baby-talk stage altogether. It seemed as if one day he was silent and the next, he spoke in complete sentences. People would honestly stop me in the grocery store and marvel at his use of language. Listening to my son talk was probably as creepy as watching the talking baby on the show "Family Guy". He also had the same humongous head as that creepy baby. I used to joke that my sons' head was so huge because it was so full of brains. For me, the size of his head explained his amazing use of language. After all, intelligence is genetic, right? I wrote off his upside-down chromosome as the "genius gene" that he had inherited from his father.
The odd behaviors and tantrums continued, and the much awaited first day of public Pre-K was a nightmare. I should have seen it coming. I should have known that he would have difficulty, but I didn't. I put him on the bus, did a little dance, cheered a little cheer and happily went off to visit with a friend. I didn't have a cell phone in 1996, so I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. I went to pick my son up at noon only to find a principal, at his wits end, trying to keep my son from running out the front door of the school. My son was hysterical and I felt awful. After about a week of his tantrums, the school asked me to wait a year before attempting to bring him back. They felt that he needed a little more time to mature.
It took him many, many years to reach that needed maturity. Instead of returning to work, I worked for free at his school. I pretty much spent every day at his school helping the teachers to manage his behaviors. I really tried to make public schools work for him. The school did what they could, but I watched the light in my sons' eyes grow dimmer and dimmer. His love of learning was being extinguished. His self confidence was eroding. Here was my "genius" son believing that he was stupid because he couldn't memorize his multiplication facts. It was difficult to watch. One day, another student asked me if my son had cheated on his book chart. The students were recording how many books they read each week and my son was far ahead of the other students. I told the boy that my son had truly read all of the books listed on his chart. I saw the look of surprise on the boy's face before he blurted out that my son wasn't smart enough to have read that many books. Eventually I gave up on public school and began homeschooling him. That is the part of being a stay at home mom that I look back at with longing. As crazy as it was, I wouldn't trade those homeschooling years for anything. Neither would my children. We all remember that time as being the best years of our lives. If you knew what life threw at us during those years, this would really surprise you.
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