My shoe is broken.  The button on the strap popped off before Thanksgiving and the piece of leather flaps around when I walk.   The shoes are my only real pair for work.  When I bought them two years ago I needed them to last a little longer than they did.

I’ll buy new ones at the beginning of next month.  I said that last month and the month before.  This time I really mean it.  Unless of course my daughters need money for their shoes, books, school supplies, uniforms, activities and sports. 

I know I’m late on the Tiger Mother bandwagon.  I wasn’t going to write about Amy Chua’s book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother at all because I am too busy working and raising my own daughters to write a post about another lady’s point of view on parenting.  My generation loves to read books about parenting. That is, we love to watch authors of parenting books on television and then talk about the latest parenting fads as though we have actually read the books.

I couldn’t buy those books even if I wanted to.  After paying for my daughters’ private educations, I lack the extra cash. 

My husband and I have been the countercultural sort since we were in high school in the eighties.  We never did as most of our generational peers were doing.  We didn’t party, we didn’t smoke clove cigarettes, we didn’t listen to Huey Lewis and the News.  We read books and went on nature hikes.  When we built our adult lives together in the early nineties, we remained on the fringes of everything our friends and siblings were doing.  We didn’t rack up credit card debt, we didn’t make a lot of money through the dot com boom.  We lived in a little one-room studio while I taught elementary school and my husband worked towards his PhD.  We read books and went on nature hikes.

Now that we are in our forties, we find ourselves participating more than we ever have before in the economic party of other people our age.  We have full time jobs in education.  We have a mortgage.  We have a new car.  Yet we also have two daughters to whom we have devoted our economic energy in a fashion that once again places us outside of our culture and time.  

I would call myself a Tiger Mother but only because I am a tiger in defense of my girls.  Our local public schools are unsatisfactory and have a history of violence so I do whatever it takes to keep my daughters safe and their intellectual lives nurtured in a supportive environment.  I send them to the nicest private schools we can afford.

My husband and I don’t go out to dinner, don’t go to the movies, don’t go on vacations to Hawaii.  We don’t take wine-tasting tours of Napa, we don’t have a flat screen television, or cable.  We are not remodeling the bathroom.  I get my hair cut once every three months at the cheapest chain salon I can find.  I buy my clothes at thrift stores. I'm not disappointed or mad about it.  We're glad just to have jobs in this economy, and choice about how to spend the money we do have.

My husband and I have been fully aware of our socio-economic privilege since we were teenagers.  We have shaped our adult lives around scholarship and hard work and paying our gifts forward to our own students and community.  We also understand that providing our own children with excellent education is an honorable way to spend our money.

Meanwhile, my kids go to sleepovers, play sports and have fun with their friends because sacrificing those things for academic excellence is thoroughly unnecessary.  I do have very high expectations.  I expect everyone in my family, including myself, to be kind.  We have a culture of kindness in our house, and we do not allow disrespect or bickering.  If one of us has a complaint or a need to be alone we voice it like human beings and then do our best to accommodate each other.  I would no sooner put up with my daughters telling me they hate me than they would put up with me imposing tyranny.  Home should be an oasis, not a battleground.

I expect us all to do our best possible work.  My first grader knows that every night she will have to complete her homework and that if her letters and numbers are messy or backwards that she will have to rewrite them.  My high schooler studies for five hours a night sometimes.  My husband and I have papers we have to grade and lessons to plan.  Sometimes our homework is boring and difficult and then we all complain, commiserate, take a break for smoothies, and then get back to it.

 We don’t fight over work.  We just get it done. 

I am not proud of my daughters’ successes.  Their honors, gold stars, awards and test scores are for them to be proud of, not me.  I didn’t do their work for them, so I don’t have the right to be proud of what they earned.  I am however, ecstatically happy for them.  I am happy that my high schooler’s hard work has earned her a place among the top students in her class.  I am happy that my first grader earns high marks on reading.  They will benefit from a good education and solid work ethic for the rest of their lives.

I am proud of the fact that my husband and I have made the sacrifices necessary to send our daughters to decent schools.  I am proud that we organized our finances to make it happen.  I am proud of my broken shoe.  I’ll wear a broken shoe for the next fifteen years if I have to in order to provide for our kids.  I don’t need to have fancy clothes and shoes, go out to dinner, get my hair done or take yoga classes.  The world does need well-educated citizens who are kind and who have a better work ethic than most in my generation. 

Call my parenting style the Quiet Song of the Broken Shoe.  I’m cool with that.