“Shannon, please, I would like to have a conversation with you.”  Nazgul calls to me from farther back on the path, then hastens to catch up, her slip-on shoes sliding on the slick trail.  The airlines have lost her luggage, and this is the 10th day she has had to make do with insufficient clothing and gear.  

Our family is participating in an exchange with the Republic of Kyrgyzstan.  Nazgul and four others are here for twelve days to learn about life in Upstate New York.   On this day, Saoirse, Ula and I have joined them at Great Camp Sagamore in the Adirondacks.  I’ve persuaded the group that the rainy morning is a gift, a reprieve from black flies, and it’s a perfect opportunity to go for a hike.  I expected Nazgul, with her insufficient footwear, would stay back at the lodge and relax.  Meanwhile, I was eager to hit the trail as fast as possible, to walk away the memories of my personally wretched week.  The exchange with the Kyrgyz has been delightful enough, and I’ve stayed pleasant on the surface, but a few private incidents have left my personal confidence shattered.   But Nazgul doesn’t let the shoes deter her.   She won’t leave me to my brooding thoughts on the trail.

“If it is okay, I would like to ask you about homeschooling,” she says.  “We do not have this in Kyrgistan.”  

I toss a platitude over my shoulder.  “It’s been a really great experience.  I’m very thankful we have this opportunity.”

“Yes, but…I am worried about my daughter,” she confesses.  “She is six.  And she was so lively and active and happy, and now, since she started school, she is so quiet.  She looks at the ground.  She is afraid to speak.”

She tells me about their education system.  “We are expected to listen only.  Not to talk,” she tells me.  “And we grow to be so timid, I think.  We believe the teacher has all the answers.”

“We try to teach our children that they hold the answers,” I counter.  

“But how do you know if your children are doing well?”

She is asking me to talk about my children and my teaching.  But inside, I’m asking myself the same thing.  How do I know if I am doing well?

Unlike Saoirse and Ula, my life has been rife with report cards, test scores, written evaluations, applications, acceptances, and rejections.  With each A or high score I earned, some mythical golden gate opened to me, giving me entrance to the next level of life’s achievements.  But with each criticism and rejection, the next gate slammed closed, condemning me to purgatory-on-earth until I could find the right answers or the better test scores to appease whatever authority figure stood before me holding the golden key.

I was rejected from Cornell University three times.  I was rejected from publishers and agents and magazine editors.  I was rejected from lots and lots of jobs.  And with each rejection, I forgot every bit of praise, every good grade, every personal dream about what my hands and mind most wanted to fulfill.  All I saw was the black wall of repudiation.  It didn’t matter if my family thought I was brilliant, if my neighbors and friends cared about me, if the land whispered words of love into my soul with every step I made across it.  I felt a giant stamp on my forehead that read REJECTION, and wore an emotional hair shirt embroidered with the word FRAUD across the back. 

I met and fell in love with a man who confronted just as much, if not more, rejection.  Bob still jokes that his freshman year of college was “the best four years” of his life as he negotiated failing grade after failing grade.  He was a chronic disappointment to his father.  He’s been fired from almost every job he ever held.  And yet, when I look at him, I see a man who would put my life before his own, who will challenge me to an intellectual duel with any passing thought I can toss his way, who can make me laugh, who can push me to grow more than any teacher or professor ever could.  

Confronted with enough rejection, Bob and I chose to forge our own paths, to use our mutual love and acceptance to open any golden gate we wished to pass through.  

But as far as our love and determination can carry us, I still crumble at the slightest criticism.  And this week, only a few days before this conversation with Nazgul, I was hit with two.  One critic accused me of settling for less in life, then choosing to be happy about it and disguise it as success.  The other accused me of being overly privileged, of having successes in life that are owed only to the advantages I was born with by virtue of my socioeconomic class. 

It didn’t matter how many people told me this week that I have wonderful children.  It didn’t matter that my mom called me on the phone just to say “I miss you.”  It didn’t matter that Dad and I shared a private joke that we thought was hysterical.  It didn’t matter that one of our long-time customers’ daughters stepped forward and asked if she could work with us during Kate’s maternity leave, because she valued what we do.  It didn’t matter that one of my readers sent me a beautiful card and told me how she enjoyed one of my recent stories.  It didn’t matter that Georgi, our market manager, whispered to Kate “I really like Shannon,” and that Kate brought the message home to me.   It didn’t matter that Kate has been coming back from the farmers market thrilled with her new responsibilities, enjoying the customers.  It didn’t matter that the cafe hopped this weekend, or that a customer told us she’d just had the best burger she’d ever tasted, or that a neighbor sidled up to me and said “You’ve done a really great thing in this town.”  All I could remember from the entire week (until this moment with Nazgul), was that two people I’ve never met don’t approve of me or my work.

This system of grading and judging is toxic.   Nazgul is right.  It starts off with one simple lesson:  “The teacher has all the answers.”  I, too, believed that.  And from there, so much  poison flowed, to the point where the genuine pleasures and successes of life are marginalized so that the outside criticism becomes our only focus.  It starts with the teacher who has the power to judge us.  Then anyone beside ourselves can hold that power. 

How do we know if our children are doing well if we choose not to believe a grade or a test?  How do we know if we are doing well ourselves if there isn’t a paycheck,  a promotion, a title, a performance review, followers, viewer statistics, subscribers, “likes,”   or good scores on our kids’ tests?

I don’t think we ever do.  I remember the year I had the most book sales and the highest number of website hits and earned the most money as being my year of poorest health and greatest insecurity.  I remember the week I lived at a hospital with my dad, brother and sister while we cried and waited for mom to come out of surgery as amazing:   One by one my friends brought food, dragged me out into the streets for walks, or just hung out on the phone with me, reminding me that I was loved… constantly loved.  

But none of this answers Nazgul’s question.  How do I know if my children are doing well?  If I am doing a good job homeschooling them?  

Maybe I know because they are happy.  And happiness is not just a state of bland self-satisfaction. That would turn to boredom.   I think happiness is achieved through perpetually challenging ourselves, and then working to meet those challenges.  And I see Saoirse and Ula doing just that.  They take an online class and absorb themselves in the content with little interest in the grade.  They bring me a piece of writing and it never occurs to any of us to say whether it is “good” or “bad.”  We talk about what’s strong, and what can make it stronger.  And they go back and do it with enthusiasm.  They pick up an instrument and teach themselves to play it, one warble at a time, for the sheer joy of bringing themselves to a new level.  They tackle books and projects because it is in their hearts to embrace the struggle and experience the learning.

I hope that I am teaching my children that the notion of “doing well” is entirely within their control.  I hope I am teaching them to reach and try for whatever speaks to their hearts, and to not give a damn about the imaginary authority police who might suggest their best is not good enough.  I hope I am teaching them that improvement comes from their own internal drive, their own personal quest to grow.  It isn’t forced from the outside.  

And in my effort to teach these lessons comes the most important part of homeschooling:

I hope to learn them myself.