“I Stand Here Ironing,” by Tillie Olson is a heart wrenching story of what life is like for folks trying to raise their children without the benefit of home schooling, without the benefit of our Lord.

I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron. “I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.”

This mom has no dreams left for her daughter.

Who needs help,……Even if I came, what good would it it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

Haven’t we all felt the same way?

The problem is public school, adolescence–they all conspiredd to draw this mom’s daughter away from her. “Now suddenly she [her daughter] was Somebody, and as imprisoned=2 0in her difference as she had been in anonymity.”

Imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity.

Finally her mom cries,

I will never total it all. I will never come to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were tears she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondness and curly hair and dimples, she was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were other children pushing up, demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were years she did not want me to touch her. She kept too much in herself, her life was such she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.

Perhaps that is what we home school parents are doing–we aree snatching our children from their “age” and offering them another “age” another “world..”

Once upon a time Karen and I raised four home schooled children. God knows that we could have been20better teachers, probably better parents. But one thing is for sure: we loved our children and in our home they found a safe place to grow up.

Walter Wanegerin argues that the most important present we can give our children is a “name.” We name our children as we raise them. Karen and I hope that we named our children “good,” “pleasant,” “precious,” and “beloved.” What names are you giving your children?

Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom – but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know – help make it so there is cause for her to know – that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.

We are not helpless! We serve an awesome powerful God who loves us more than we can love ourselves. At baptism he gave us a name and said it was good.

When you are ironing at the ironing board . . . think about that.

“A Wagner Matinee,” by Willa Cather is a powerful but heart wrenching message about loss and gain.

The protagonist, an aunt of the narrator Clark, has come home to Boston to attend a funeral. She has lived most of her life in the Great Plains of Nebraska.

When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money, had taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad. There they had measured off their quarter section themselves by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty years my aunt had not been further than fifty miles from the homestead.

She loved Howard, she still loves Howard. But she had to give up so much! An accomplished pianist, she had not been to an Opera or Concert in three decades.

But this kind old lady, who did not play in Philadelphia or Boston or New York, played for Clark, the narrator, and changed his life.

I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the years when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the three meals–the first of which was ready at six o’clock in the morning-and putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her ironing board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me recite Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing or mending, that I read my first Shakespeare’, and her old textbook on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me my scales and exercises, too–on the little parlor organ, which her husband had bought her after fifteen years, during which she had not so much as seen any instrument, but an accordion that belonged to one of the Norwegian farmhands. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting while I struggled with the “Joyous Farmer,” but she seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious woman; she had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her martyrdom was not wholly sordid.

It was not easy, for sure. His old aunt struggled.

Once when I had been doggedly beating out some easy passages from an old score of Euryanthe I had found among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, “Don’t love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that.”

Home school, parents, what have you given up to do what you do? Has it been worth it? I think so.

Clark takes his aunt to a Wagner afternoon opera. It was wonderful! But it was not real. What was real was Nebraska and Howard.

I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.

Does home schooling feel that way? Oh it is exciting enough at the state conventions and on Monday morning. But what about Friday morning when no one has his essay written and Tuesday night when you discover that your daughter forgot to make supper and Thursday noon when you find you misplaced the CD story you had planned for lunch?

That is when in Nebraska you need a Wagnerian Opera to remind you of where you have come and where you are going