It Does Not Do to Leave a Live Dragon Out of Your Calculations
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
My favorite line in all of literature has become a metaphor for my life, and if you have been around here for any length of time, you already know exactly what I mean. I write about it every year, usually right around the time the new planner comes out and the booklists are being finalized and every homeschooling mother I know is sitting down with a fresh page and a heart full of hope for what the coming year might hold.
I homeschool with my dragons.
What I Mean by Dragons
A dragon is any real and unmovable limitation that lives in your house with you. It presses against your time, your health, your effort, and your energy in the very hours you had hoped to spend teaching your children. It does not go away because you have found a better curriculum, and it does not shrink because you have finally settled on the right morning routine.
Your dragon may be a body that has been depleted since the baby came. It may be a husband whose work keeps him gone through the good hours of the morning, so that the whole weight of the day rests on one set of shoulders. It may be a child who needs so much of you that the other children have learned to wait, or a house that will not stay quiet enough for the lessons you imagined giving in it, or a job that takes more from you than it gives back, or a stretch of life that has simply been harder than you expected it to be.
These are the creatures that live in the mountain. Every homeschooling mother I have ever spoken with has at least one, and most of us have several, and we know their names perfectly well even when we would rather not write them down.
Why We Plan as Though They Were Not There
There is a pressure in this work to treat our limitations as temporary. We are encouraged to believe that the right system will finally slay the dragon by October, that a more disciplined version of ourselves is waiting somewhere just past the first term, and that the woman who shows up on the page of our planning is the woman who will show up in the schoolroom in the middle of a long February.
So we build a year that only a mother without dragons could ever carry out. We schedule six subjects into the exact window of the morning that has been interrupted every single day for the last two years. We choose the ambitious history rotation and the full nature study plan and the read alouds and the handicrafts, and we do it in a house where a dragon is sleeping in the next room, breathing steadily, waiting for the season when he always wakes up.
Then he wakes up, the way he was always going to wake up, and the whole beautiful plan buckles under the weight of a limitation we refused to account for. The guilt that follows almost never lands on the plan where it belongs. It lands on the mother. She decides that she is the problem, that she lacks discipline, that other women are managing something she cannot manage, when the honest truth is that she made her calculations in a house she was pretending not to live in.
Taking Inventory
So every year I imagine the beautiful year we are going to have. I write down all the things we want to read and see and learn together, all the poets and the composers and the long afternoons outdoors, and then I sit with that list and reconcile it against the dragons who live here with us.
The practice itself looks ordinary on paper. I name each dragon at the front of my planner. I count what each one actually costs me in a given week, in hours and in energy,. Then I plan the year with that cost already subtracted, rather than discovering it in the middle of a hard month when I have neither the margin nor the composure to respond well.
That single practice changes what I choose. It tells me which subjects hold the center of our days and which good things belong to a different season of our lives. It shows me where I need help, where I need to lower my voice and lengthen my patience, and what the smallest faithful version of our school day looks like when everything else has to be set down for a while. A year planned this way has room in it, and room is the thing most of us are missing.
What the Dragons Have Given Me
They keep me accountable, because a woman who has counted the cost cannot pretend she did not know. They keep me settled, because the plan I am holding is one I can actually carry with the strength I actually have. They keep me humble, which is more than any ambitious plan I have ever written has managed to do for me.
And when they crawl out from the depths of the mountain, they do not surprise me. I have known all along that they were sleeping there, and a mother who is not surprised is a mother who can keep going. She does not lose three weeks to the shock of it. She adjusts, she reaches for the version of the day she prepared for this exact season, and she keeps teaching her children.
My Dragons Aren't Bad, but They Do Live Here
That is the sentence I come back to every single year. My dragons are not evidence of failure, and several of them are the direct result of good things I would choose again without hesitation. They are simply the shape of the life I have been given, and they live here in this house with me and my children and all the books we love.
Remembering that has been essential to the success of our homeschool, year after year after year.
While you’re planning take an honest inventory of your own. Name them, count them, and factor them into your calculations while the page is still blank and there is still time to build something you can carry. Let this year be built around the house you actually live in rather than the one you imagined in the quiet of a summer afternoon.
The dragons are already here do not leave them out of your calculations.
