Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we get back to old times because I have a story to tell.
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I’ve been on a pretty political kick lately for my newsletter. Sometimes it’s a little unavoidable, given the nature of my job, which requires that politics consume my life five days a week. However, I’m returning to my old roots today because I have a story I need to tell y’all.
If you’ve been a longtime reader (by the way, thank you because I’ve enjoyed every minute of growing this thing with y’all), you know that I mainly see this newsletter as a way to explain why I parent or handle marriage the way that I do. Our world seems completely insane at the moment, so I write about stories from my life in hopes that my younger cohort can see there is another way to live that brings beauty and structure to their lives.
This brings me to my week. But before we get into that, here’s a little message from our sponsor.
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My husband has been gone all week. This is (unfortunately) a pretty normal occurrence. He travels a lot for work, which makes for an exhausting week for our girls and me. There’s no one here to lend a helping hand or shoulder any of the parenting decisions that arise.
We are one of the few families who don’t send our kids to summer camps because we think it’s important to treat summers as a chance to connect. The school year sends us in a million different directions, and we firmly believe that summer is the perfect opportunity to relax and reset. Still, my oldest daughter had the opportunity to take an AP Biology class this summer, and we accepted it.
While this is a bit out of the norm for us, we felt it would be a good opportunity for her to bring home an easy A that would bolster her overall GPA. I don’t think any of us were prepared for the reality that she would be required to teach herself the material. Four days a week, she studies at home, and on one day she goes in for her lab. She’s never had to work in this type of structure, so it’s been an adjustment.
This week has been particularly difficult for some reason. She’s had a hard time concentrating and is overall feeling insecure about her ability to succeed. To me, this is all insane because she’s incredibly intelligent, to the point where I know that she is smarter than I am. Still, it’s been a struggle to get her to complete her work.
My husband wasn’t scheduled to come home from his trip until Friday night. I was prepared to handle this moment solo. I spent the week balancing writing in my office and keeping her on task. When Thursday came around, it was like pulling teeth trying to get her to focus. At one point, I threatened that if she didn’t get it together, I was going to make her pull up a chair at my desk and she’d have to work under my constant supervision.