When I was a kid, playing school was one of my favorite things to do. I lined up all of my stuffed animals and made them copy the notes I wrote on my makeshift blackboard into their tiny notebooks. White Monkey was my star student. Sylvester the Cat was the class clown. He often got sent to the principal’s office. I spent hours making sure all my “students” got their notes and homework assignments written correctly. That their books were covered and labeled. That Sylvester completed his time outs. To be honest, I can’t believe this is how I chose to spend my play time. I’m finding myself bored to tears just writing about it. And yet, this is how countless hours of my childhood were passed. The greatest irony is that I often pretended to be sick just so I can stay home from school. And when I did get to stay home, this is what I played.

Maybe the part of me that was secretly drawn to the idea of homeschool has always been that 10 year-old teacher—the one who played and replayed the scenes she saw in school hoping to figure out how to make them less stressful, only to discover over and over again that she can’t. But grown-up me put the idea of homeschool away with all the other “crazy“ ideas I love to fantasize about but will never actually attempt.

Enter the year 2020 and the Covid19 pandemic.

My son just turned 5 when the quarantine began. He still had traces of baby fat in his cheeks. He was in Kindergarten, in a great school. AND, zoom tortured him.

5 years old.

Torture.

One day, I walked into his bedroom to find his teacher’s face on the iPad screen on his desk calling out “David! David Hasbani!“ while my son was spread out, face down on the carpet like when we used to play dead-man-floating in the pool.

I started to think of David’s relationship with school in general. David started daycare when he was 2. He loved learning. I couldn’t get him away from books. By the time he was 3, we moved him to a bigger preschool. He knew his shapes, colors and alphabet letters by the end of that first year. By 4, he could read.

But he didn’t make any friends. We were never invited to birthday parties by his classmates, except the select few who invited the whole class. No one initiated play dates with us, and many moms didn’t follow through with me when I tried to set them up. David hardly ever appeared in picture updates that his teachers posted daily. Here’s a group of boys on the slide—Where’s David? A big group of smiling kids at the Thanksgiving feast—Where’s David? It became a frustrating game Salim and I played at night when the kids were in their beds.

We asked David about it. We asked his teachers. We figured he was shy and would break out of it eventually.

He didn’t.

What choices did we have? We were deep into looking for a new school for him for first grade when I found him on the carpet that day. That was the moment I finally saw my son. He was lying in the middle of a bright room surrounded by shelves stacked with books and toys that have not been touched for months. There was no light in his eyes. Nothing excited him. School was a dirty word. He hated everything about it.

He was 5.

Right then and there I decided to homeschool.