Home Schooled

I was quite apprehensive. This is Carmella's future being placed on on my very unqualified hands. All the while I was sitting at the home schooling orientation seminar, the nagging question in my head was if I can really do it.
It was right in the middle of the school term when Carmella was diagnosed with her illness. By the time she recovered, it was already too late to go back to regular school. Since she will also need further treatment, Cecille and I agreed we will home school her instead and I will be her mentor.
I always believed mentors were endowed with special gifts since birth. Gifts like patience and perseverance both of which, sadly, I do not have.
Still, I have to prepare my daughter for the world. I have to believe I can work on my patience and also persevere. I can see the fight up ahead but have decided I will win.
We are now on our second year in home schooling. Her reading has improved, she loves science class and is quite good at math. We have our own unique methods and we try as much as we can to incorporate fun into our learning. I am not the perfect mentor but a work in progress.
I have to admit it was a struggle, and it continues to be. I can sometimes be mean and overbearing. She, on the other hand, can be a handful when in tantrums. But together, we learn so much from the whole exercise. It is a journey of discovery for both of us and the rewards are far more than I imagined. The hugs are now tighter and more frequent than ever.
A home schooling mom once told me that she was quite firm with her kids back when she was still mentoring them. She was then always afraid that her ways more than what she taught them is what they will bring up with them in later life.
If one asks her children today, most of whom have gone off to college, of what they remember most during their homeschooling years, it will always be the love their mom had devoted in teaching them. Not those long, tear-filled hours of going over the same subject until they grasp the concept they recall but a mother's patient perseverance. Love is hardly forgotten.

Apart from the books we read, the math problems we solved, I hope that later in life, it is in the little things that we did together that will make the most difference in Carmella as a person. I hope it is in my being a father and a friend that she will remember most.