The Magical Year
We made the difficult decision to homeschool our daughter the first full school year of the pandemic, back when everything was so unknown and the unknown was too anguishing. She would be separated from the friends, teachers and school that had become so foundational for her. We had hoped that perhaps others from her cohort might join us in a homeschool “pod.” In the end, we were alone. And we made a go of it. We called it “The Magical Year.” The teaching would be project-based, child-centred critical inquiry. And joy would course through it all. I would document everything in images and words in a daily chronicle I called “The Daily Composition.” The whole thing, the whole year, was a gift of love. And if I am to be honest, it was a gift to myself for the child I once was who, growing up, yearned for this kind of education.
I gave her my everything so she might love being in our little school. I look back at that year – our most magical year together – and I am filled with such tenderness. I miss spending our daytime hours together, pouring over books and ideas, interviewing neighbours for our project on community, running in the sand barefoot and shouting our wishes into the ear of the wind and the mouth of the sea. And that missing for our time spent together is acute. It has the taste of sweetbitter; it has the taste of motherhood. I taught her to read and write in that year. I saw her flourish. I saw her sad and lonely for doing this without classmates. The everyday mattered. And that everyday was what made us happy and tired and filled and everything. Everything.
Follow me on IG @thedailycompositionstudio for more portraits and find us @thedailycomposition to read our chronicles from that year. You’ll also find there an archive of our magical learning through the weeks on the highlight bubbles. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter to receive more chronicles of a life lived well, remembered well. XO, Yoon Sook
During the summer of the Covid lockdown, Laila spent countless hours drawing and painting. This is a photo of her reflection in the mirror holding up a self-portrait of herself as a superhero and examining it against her own likeness. She would soon begin her year of homeschooling — away from her school, her friends, everything that had once held her and in which she flourished — and she did it with such aplomb, such bravery. I like to think that I — her primary teacher, her mama, her friend, her everything in that year — did it with a measure of daily courage, too.
Here we are in a moment of quiet: tired and cuddling after a day of homeschooling together. That we had such a moment after spending the whole day together: still loving each other and wanting to spend our time together like this. It is also a moment of stillness somehow undisrupted by the logistics of getting this shot: tripod, camera, and the hidden trigger. But it does underscore for me even here — in the taking of the photograph itself — the work of it all: to be a mother, to be this mother to her in a specific time in our lives together. This exhaustion. This total love.
Always time for imaginative play. Today we are spies… shhhh!!!
Laila, moments before her zoom party started. In the year of Covid lockdown this is what parties looked like. She was so proud of everything she had done for the party: she baked the cake, put together her party frock, made all the decorations (which she taped along the wall of the living room) and added others that she felt meaningful (including a seal bone she had found on the beach). A few special lovies were also invited. She was so excited, but became suddenly shy in the moments right before we went live. My heart here for her.
But her shyness didn’t last long. Showing off Penelope and Baby Penelope to her family.
In the middle of our Magical Year, we decided to leave San Francisco to be with our family in Vancouver. Here is Laila rediscovering her toys as we sorted through her old things in packing up for the move. In a year when we were sheltering in place from Covid, in a year when home meant everything — the place where school happened, where family life happened — we decided to leave the only home Laila had ever known. And yet, here she is, rejoicing upon finding her things anew. Her gaze reflected in the mirror above her head thrown back in joy. Mama gaze finding hers, so full. Mama gaze as the translation of her fullness into my own meaning.
Laila with her dog, Beckett, on a mattress in a borrowed room. It would be one in a series of temporary homes before we left the country. Without the routine of their own home, their own beds, their own things, their own anything, they still had each other. We lived out of two suitcases and a cardboard box that carried all her homeschooling materials. Mama gaze when the question of what constitutes one’s home is put into question. Mama gaze when she looks back clear-eyed in the midst of this, her gaze meeting mine.
Laila on graduation day. So proud of this kid, of her resilience and wild imagination, of her abiding love of all things magical. And of myself, too, for being her teacher just as she’s always been and will always be mine.