In January 2003, I enrolled my five year old in the local Kindergarten class and watched with great reluctance as she left to catch the bus. Putting on a brave face (though I, too, wanted to cry), I consoled my two and four year olds as they watched their sister bound happily away to the bus stop with her father. We watched them from the living room window as they got smaller and smaller and finally disappeared from our view, though we were the ones who felt small and very, very lonely.

Heaving a collective sigh, we got up off the couch and headed down to our cheery family room where even the murals and brightly colored toys couldn’t chase away the heaviness in our hearts. The time until 11:30 seemed like an eternity as we wiled away the few hours before the bus would return with Emily, enabling us to settle back into ourselves.

Feeling such reluctance, why did a mom philosophically committed to homeschooling enroll her child in public school? Wasn’t I selling out?

Selling out. That phrase resonated in my brain as I lay awake nights, trying to come to a decision about the crossroads had reached in my life. At 32 I had three small children to whom I was deeply committed. All three had been exclusively breastfed, had shared my bed and had been cared for solely by my husband and myself their whole lives.

See, as graduate students Jim and I tag-team parented, passing the babies off as I went to teach or do library research. Now, however, Jim had finished his post-doctoral residency and taken a permanent position at a National Research Laboratory, and I had just completed and defended my own doctoral thesis. Although for more than four years I had enjoyed the “best of both worlds”—career track and stay-at-home mom—I was now faced with the next step. It was time to begin my own search for a position in Academic America.

I began my job search and diligently researched all my childcare options, carefully considering Montessori as the closest institutional replica of what we enjoyed at home. All three children could attend the same school, there was far less age segregation and, nominally, more freedom than most programs. But it was still five days a week, and I planned to work from home, thereby limiting my number of campus hours, still looking for the best of both worlds.

Ultimately, I decided that the local public school offered the most flexibility because of its proximity and the fact that Julia and Sam, at least, would still be at home. Emily was excited about the possibility of riding the school bus with the other neighborhood kids. Jim and I reasoned that if there were a chance Emily would be attending first grade, then half-day kindergarten seemed like the only kind way to ease her into the rules and structure of a traditional school setting.

Everyone from grandparents, aunts, siblings and neighbors congratulated us for making the best decision. How good the experience would be for Emily and her siblings, how much she would learn. So, why did I feel like I was selling out?

Why, indeed, when all my academic friends told me how homeschooling was selling out liberal education—something to which I was supposed to be committed. As a Ph.D. and educator, I was obligated to improve and uphold classical education. I was the institution, so how could I be criticizing institutional learning—even turning my back on it when it came to my own children? Surely, at this point I could have referred them to Holt or Gatto, but instead I internalized the criticism, allowing it to echo in the back of my mind—“sell out.”

Likewise, my fellow feminists secretly wondered how I could be dedicated to feminism and women’s issues yet choose a lifestyle that smacked of traditional family values. Wasn't I simply urging women back into the home under a new banner? “Sell out,” they silently whispered, “sell out.” My task as a feminist was to do it all—the high-powered career and motherhood—and up till now I had been well on my way. I taught class the morning I gave birth to my first child, returned to the classroom in less than a week after the birth of my first two, and mothered all three while researching and writing my dissertation. I was doing it all—why did I want to throw homeschooling into the mix?

My nights of insomnia increased in frequency, which I simply attributed to the stress of the defense and job search. Really, however, the feeling of being pulled in so many apparently oppositional directions was the root cause of my anxiety. No matter which voice I listened to, the echo didn’t change—“sell out, sell out, sell out.” My core identities were clashing, and I needed to find a way to reconcile them, to navigate my own way through motherhood without listening to everyone else’s opinion.

As it turned out, I had made my decision years before when I decided to have a family in graduate school instead of waiting until tenure and my forties. Geographically limiting my job search, I found only four positions within a three hour radius of my home. I soon learned out how detrimental my family choices had been to my career. Had I stayed at my graduate institution to teach, write and raise two children while my husband pursued his postdoctoral work half way across the country, had I been willing to continue a commuter marriage (as so many academic couples do) for the sake of a job anywhere in the country, I may indeed have been able to have it all. These, however, were not viable choices for me, and I did not get the job 45 minutes away, nor those that were an hour and a half, two hours and three hours away.

As I laid awake considering the realities of a six hour commute, three to four days a week, I breathed a sigh of relief. What was I thinking? Why would I do that to myself or to my family? What could possibly be my motivation? Would I be happier teaching literature to other people’s children than I was learning alongside my own children? I didn’t think so. Would I prefer being able to tell people that I was a professor over a homeschooling mom? Perhaps. Would it be nice to have well-intentioned people off my back about my decision to homeschool? Yes. Now, I didn’t have people second guessing my parenting, educational or feminist choices, but neither did I have my daughter. She was going off to school.

Emily lasted a week before deciding that she did not like the whole school experience, which was about three days longer than I had lasted! By days six and seven, she was crying and begging to stay home, and I was silently cheering, “Yes, yes!” On day seven I had my portfolio review with the school board for the previous semester of homeschooling. The sympathetic reviewer asked me why I’d even enrolled my daughter in school since she and I were clearly so much better suited to homeschooling. I had already made my decision. Emily returned to school the next day, accompanied by her mother and her siblings, to return one library book and to officially withdraw from Kindergarten.

Ironically, it was the public school system itself that made me realize that I wasn’t selling out homeschooling or academia or feminism. I was selling out myself and the things that made me happy—a lifestyle that made me complete and a way of mothering that I felt deeply. Ironically, it was the school experience that reinforced for my daughter, for myself and for my family how strongly we were all committed to a lifestyle that intrinsically involves homeschooling. Once I came to this realization, I stopped worrying what everyone else thought about my decision to homeschool and got back to the business of mothering my children in the way that's best for us.