Sometimes, at the end of a long day of homeschooling, I want to crawl under a table and cry. In my heart is a hurricane of emotions, all caused by lots of thoughts, feelings, and challenges that can only be evoked by teaching my children.
If this seems crazy or foolish, I apologize for putting you in the awkward position of having to view my mess. If you are nodding your head in approval and sympathetic feelings are making you want to be my new best friend, I would venture to say that you, too, must be a homeschooling mom.
To further put my wackiness on display, here are ten regrets I often have at around 3:30 every afternoon:
10. Showers and dental care are forgotten. I live in a first-world nation, have running water, electricity, and a clock that accurately tells me the time. Yet, often, I look in the mirror after lunch and realize I look exactly like I did at the crack of dawn. Self-care is easily pushed aside when spelling lists, multiplication tables, and history lessons present themselves.
9. Exercising. Most days, I wake up, pull on workout clothes, and just hope that the day will allow for some time at the gym. Lots of days I settle for a game of HORSE with the boys or letting the Lady give me a ballet “lesson”. The days that I sneak in thirty minutes on the elliptical, I pretty much feel like world peace has been achieved.
8. Never sitting down. Did you know you can fold laundry standing up, while listening to one child recite the Declaration of Independence, and answer questions like “How do you spell ‘special’?”, and “What is twelve minus eight?”. You can also stand while eating a sandwich and doing Spanish vocabulary drills. In fact, you can stand all day long and only realize you have done so when you sit on the edge of the bed to kiss the kids goodnight. Really, you can...
7. Weaving in personal projects. By personal projects I mean things like laundry, dishes, returning church-related phone calls or emails, writing blog posts, sewing curtains, and staining furniture. It’s a mixed bag, I know. But there they are, the little things that cannot be done after school, because that is when cooking dinner and the bedtime rituals commence. Juggling the children’s work plus my own wears me down, but ignoring my personal responsibilities stresses our family in other ways. Unless I take a lot of deep breaths on those days and use keen mental focus to prioritize every minute properly, failure is inevitable.
6. Teaching the Preschooler non-Preschool curricula. The Baby Lady is not in school yet. Many homeschool days she bee-bops around the house with a Barbie in one hand, sneaks candy from the piano jar, sings Shurley Grammar jingles, and colors with Sharpies on the furniture. These are the days I wish she knew all the words to “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” like her brothers did at her age, instead of being able to recite the key history dates from the Middle Ages. It is a very different life experience to be the youngest in a homeschooling family, but it is the life she is meant to live, so I try not to be sad that she knows the whole story of The Hobbit, but can’t sing the ABCs properly.
5. The thin line between Teacher and Mama. Children have an uncanny way of testing all the boundary lines with the people they trust the most. Translation: When Mama is also Teacher, they want to see how far “I won’t do my work and you can’t make me” will go. It takes enormous creativity and patience to overcome this obstacle. This battle alone is enough to make me cry on the rough days.
4. Independent or neglected? My children who are task-oriented and achievement-driven often spend a good portion of their day not requesting or needing my attention, while I face the questions of the emotional or intellectual “needy” students. Suddenly, though, I walk through their math problems with them and realize they are counting on their fingers while doing long division. These things ought not to be so. Back to the basics we go.
3. I love to read. I love to read their History lessons, their Science text, their literature assignment. I love it. I love it so much, I would like to skip any and all application of the information. Of course, I can’t do that. But I am really conflicted with the desire to do so. Maybe there is something I can read about this....
2. Teacher or Referee? Remember the mean kid in your class who never left anyone alone, teased everyone relentlessly, always had a smarty pants remark to share, and laughed when anyone was bothered by his annoying presence? What if that kid was one of your own children? What if it was ALL of your children, depending on the day? That’s homeschooling, baby.
1. This is all self-inflicted. The truth is, I don’t have to do this. I could call up the school around the corner and send them this week. I could be spending hours and hours of my day doing other things, fun things, financially profitable things, or things that would develop me personally. I could write more. I could see my friends more. I could volunteer at shelters, learn photography, or clean my house. But I choose this insanely complicated, challenging daily grind that is homeschooling for lots of reasons. The greatest of which is this: because I believe that for this year, for this season, it is what is best for our family- even if it does make me cower under the table and cry a little.
