Red Flower Lake “Heart is Breaking” Tells the Story of Our Decision to Homeschool
“Heart is Breaking” is one of three songs from our Three Truths EP out in September 2020.
Written by Rahimah Wright
About eight years ago, during the school year, I got to have an hour to myself on Fridays (sometimes more, when I was lucky) while my husband (and Red Flower Lake bandmate) Abel took the kids to school. An hour to myself, as in: nobody in the house except for the cats and dogs, dishes, and me.
Not having a piano – my more natural, go-to instrument – I reached for my guitar every Friday morning (after doing the dishes) to try and get a sense of what the hell was going on internally before the list of things to do set in and Abel came back with my little one, who was still not quite old enough to go to school, too.
I had discovered the voice recording app on my phone that year, and that new capability really got me stoked. It was so cute – and sometimes not – to have the voices of my little ones in the background and foreground of almost every single one of the songs I ever recorded. It actually hasn’t changed much, except their voices aren’t quite as tiny — I still catch them in almost all of my recordings outside of the studio.
The trouble with the Friday morning hour to myself was what it took to get everyone out the door. The amount of anxiety and early morning challenges had me absolutely heartbroken by the time I got to the quiet moment once they left. It was everything from waking the kids up way before they were ready to be awake, getting their lunches together (lunches they rarely ate), almost always fighting with Abel because he was not even a little bit of a morning person (the grump factor was major back then, and I took it all very personally), to trying to justify why it was even a good idea to send our most precious gems away in the first place.
It still makes my heart and throat close up thinking about it. The cycle of it just not working and trying, trying to get it to work. “Just Be Nice” is all I could think of when it was too much for the man of the house to get out of bed so I could have a tiny bit of time to myself. Even I was just barely sure it was a good idea to even advocate for such provocative indulgence. That was the core issue: We were parents but also small, wounded children ourselves, thinking we were secure enough to care for people with whom we shared the same amount of emotional intelligence. It didn’t work very well. Hurt people hurt people, and we were all hurting pretty badly. I can’t say enough good things about good therapy.
The lyrics, which became part of “Heart is Breaking”, say:
Can’t help but feel my heart is breaking
Love’s gone awry again
And it can’t be unshaken
Here’s the broken heart’s ultimate dilemma
You want love to come again
But you know it won’t last forever
That’s how it felt. Mornings were really hard. Lots of disappointment, yelling, and uncertainty. Often the questions in my head asked whether staying in a family unit was even a healthy choice. How could it be healthy? I hadn’t seen a healthy relationship yet, and I couldn’t imagine it working. But, that’s how “Heart is Breaking” was written, out of that feeling.
I recorded it on my phone one Friday morning. It was just the guitar intro and two stanzas when I sent it to Abel. The intro to the finished song still has the original phone recording in it at the beginning. Makes me glad the guitar was in tune!
What surprised me was Abel’s vocal part. It may have been the first time I really heard his heartbreak vocals. It was a profound moment for me. I was so honestly concerned he was a better singer than me and I was just making a fool of myself, I considered quitting making music with him for a good solid day or two. (What an example of how certain levels of maturity were not present!) I feel really grateful we are getting better acquainted with the adult versions of ourselves – just under the wire of 40 years old. But hey, better late than never – at least when it comes to growth.
‘Better late than never’ was never quite true when it came to sending the kids to school, though. When we were on time, it came with the price of an unhappy and stressed out family, and when we weren’t on time, it came with a whole different kind of unhappiness and stress. Thanks to the encouragement of some neighbors, we started to face the reality that our dream lives are significantly less conventional than sending our kids to traditional school, and we finally decided to homeschool/unschool. It makes an enormous difference to our quality of life. The kids have energy to explore and engage with all sorts of endeavors, and we are available to do more because we aren’t living by a school’s calendar and schedule. We are all engaged in a sort of family project – the project of being a family that is living and supporting each other’s dreams. We finally listened beneath the beasts named Concern-for-Outside-Approval, and Shame-On-You-For-Being-Unconventional. Instead we heard our concerns as parents, voices called Look-At-How-We-Are-Hurting and What-Are-We-Going-To-DO-About-This.
Now instead of experiencing anxiety every single day, we enjoy rising to the sounds of early evening birdsong. (Just kidding). We wake up just before afternoon starts, and we go to sleep just before morning begins, and it feels like absolute luxury – like living in a dream. I know our lifestyle would make some people crazy, but Abel and I never enjoyed school nor a conventional lifestyle ourselves, so it makes sense that school didn’t work for our family. Finding something that does work feels like a miracle. I wish everyone the freedom, flexibility, and support to find what works for them. I really believe our situation is a barometer indicating a failing system – that it doesn’t work for so many families.
These days, I’d say my family has moved out of “Heart is Breaking”, at least for now. I feel grateful for the chance to reflect on all this. It helps me remember how blessed we are and how crazy it is to be a mom and a dad, but being parents also seems to be guiding us to our blessings, because if we had stopped fighting our dreams, the pain would have never let up.
