For homeschooling moms at the start of the school year.

It’s that time of year again.

I remember my “favorite” back to school commercial from when I was a kid. It was a dad gleefully pushing a shopping cart full of school supplies through an office supply store while his kids moped after him three feet behind the cart.

Andy Williams singing “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” blared in the background as the dad popped his foot behind him and sailed down the aisles riding the cart.

A part of every preteen and child’s heart in America grew dark and shriveled every time that commercial aired in the middle of the August heat. It came on like clockwork nearly every year for some time. I remember it as I prepared for elementary school. I remember it when I geared up to start junior high. 

My husband said he always knew when the school year was primed to start again. The country fair booths that dotted the field behind the local firehouse began to disappear as they were stored for winter. The lights came down. The wooden signs were stowed away. And summer seemed to have a faint golden glow that lined everything as the sun warned us it was going to tuck itself away very soon. 

Before we knew it, the summer haze burned away to fall, it was time for midterms and gym class, and where does it all go??

The start of school feels so different for me now that I am a homeschooling mom. This will be our second year. And already, I feel removed from the normal order of things that mark the return of the school year. 

If you’re a parent that homeschools, and have been for some time, you probably have a set routine by now. You know exactly what the back to school season means. 

While other families are back-to-school shopping and arranging their calendars around back-to-school and meeting their child’s teacher events, buying their kids new shoes and jeans and Elmer’s glue, you are lesson planning while you listen to your kids are arguing about chapstick and the tv remote from the other room.

You’re purging the school cabinet from the remnants of last year’s curriculum. You are poring over your planner with a cup of coffee in hand, sorting worksheets into folders and whiting out lesson plans for January 18th of next year while the television is blasting cartoons in the background and the toddler plays in the sink.

Motherhood is lonely enough. Overwhelming enough.

But when you throw being a teacher for your children into the ring along with a job and full or part-time stay at home mom life? The ache can be elevated to another level. There is nothing subtle about the choice to homeschool these days.

There’s already enough to do.

It’s hectic enough raising a young family.

The odds can seem stacked against you from the jump when you try to swim upstream against the prevailing culture of parenting.

You made this choice. This decision to lean in, take a breath and educate your children at home. The reasons are your own. Every family’s decision to begin this journey is nuanced and personal.

You’ve seen brows narrow in your direction in quiet, reserved judgement. You have fielded questions from prying and “concerned” minds that question if you are worried about them being too “sheltered” or “socially awkward.” You know you’ve talked to people who believe homeschooling children isn’t a legitimate form of learning, but perhaps they were too…polite to suggest it to your face.

As if you hadn’t already considered all of those things. As if you haven’t second guessed yourself enough along the way. As if you don’t already feel immensely obligated to not failing your children and your family. As if there aren’t days where you would literally rather be doing anything else than trying to get your child to buckle down and learn about Mozart.

It can be tricky to look around and find other parents who are treading water in the same place as you, trying not to sink. Finding a community can be just as tricky as getting your kids to learn how to tell time.

You already know you love your kids just as much as any other parent. You already know we are all in this together because we want to build and encourage strong children who turn into strong adults. 

Like I said, there is nothing subtle about homeschooling. As with most things parenting related – the choices you make as a parent are up for scrutiny. If someone thinks you are doing it wrong, many people feel at liberty to comment and say so. In fact, they might even feel an obligation to do so. Make any decision that even appears on the surface to deviate from the set norm, and you are going to be asked about it. 

And yet, even with these truths, you’ll be the first person to support the educational and personal choices of another parent. Private school. Public school. Charter school. Homeschool. You know it’s more about whatever is best for a family than one-size-fitting-all when it related to learning and growing minds.

And yet.

Aren’t there days you just wish you could watch them climb the school bus steps and see those doors fold shut?

Aren’t there days you wish, in a moment of weakness, you didn’t have to plan geometry lessons? That you didn’t have to fight about phonics? That you didn’t have to admonish them to sit still? To stop wiggling? When you weren’t the one counting down the clock with more fervor than your children??

Aren’t there days you wish you could draw the line between having to be both mom and educator? Between parent and principal?

I have only done this for one school year. And let me tell you. I thought I had respect for teachers before? It has quadrupled. But my respect for active, involved and concerned parents who are doing their best? You couldn’t number it now. It knows no limits. 

It feels like it can be all for naught at times.

But I’m here to tell you.

You’re going to get to the dead middle of February, and you’re going to want to rip your hair out if you see just one more fraction or if your child takes even three minutes longer to work on the assignment they’ve already been dragging their feet on for the last half hour. 

You will wonder if what you are doing matters. 

You’re going to think about what it would feel like to be at work right now, and command the respect and attention of other adults in a room who appreciate what you have to offer beyond facts about ancient Egypt and multiplication tables.

You’re going to wonder what it would be like if they were in school, and you were washing dishes in peace or out with friends for coffee. 

Your mind is going to wander, just for a bit, as you glance out the window at another dreary winter day spent at home with tiny bodies that can’t sit still. 

But what you’re doing? What you are doing is done in love. The same as any other parent. It won’t finish the assignments. It won’t solve the math equations. It won’t get dinner on the stove on time. It won’t keep doors from slamming and voices from getting raised in anger.

It will matter one day, even if it straight up doesn’t feel like it right now.

We will have to settle for the day in the future when we can understand better and fully just how much it matters. When it gets hard, we will just have to settle for the biggest picture there is when it comes to parenting, and not for hearing our kids say “thank you” or “yes, of course I finished my worksheets, mom.”

But the work done in love? It supersedes everything. 

Except for coffee. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear moms: one day, your kids will miss this.

One of my least favorite lines of parenting advice is the the phrase, “you’re going to miss all of this one day.” I dislike this advice for two reasons.

For one, it’s advice that is in the same vein as telling a grieving person that “everything happens for a reason”, or the person struggling to stay afloat to “shoot for the moon so they can land among the stars.” It can seem more like a brush off than an actual attempt to encourage or commiserate.

I don’t want advice that sounds like a middle school motivational poster telling me how I’m going to make it through each day when there is chaos up to my elbows or the world is on fire. I want practical wisdom that tells me how to get it all done, and advice that tells me that someone else has been right where I am.

The other reason is because it’s too much pressure on us parents.

I get the idea. To savor every moment with your children before they’re gone. Only…it’s hard to see why I should hate the idea that my house will eventually be empty when the other day I had to wash and fold three loads of laundry just to keep the baskets from spilling over.

It’s hard to see a downside to a full eight or nine hours of sleep every night, using the bathroom in complete privacy or not having to break up petty sibling disputes over the t.v. remote – by the way, with the advent of so much new technology, will we ever reach a point where siblings don’t have to argue over a remote of some kind??

We mothers already know.

We know this is a long game. This game where our kids spend eighteen years rearranging our lives, invading our space, losing all of our tubes of chapstick and growing into fully fledged people who leave just as we get used to having them around.

We know. Because we are the ones that put away the baby clothes, drop off the used toys to Goodwill and take kids back to school shopping in the fall because they’ve grown too tall for their jeans. We are the ones that carve the notches into the dining room trim at the tops of their fuzzy heads.

We can look back and tell you where we were in our own lives when they were born, when they were learning to walk or said their first words.

We measure our own selves by how much they have grown.

By how much they have grown us.

We know where the time goes.

I know what meets me at the end of this road. And it pains my heart sometimes that I can’t enjoy everything. That I’m the mom who sucks at being meaningful at bedtime because for the love, children, you have had me all day. Close your eyes.

I’m the mom who can’t fold paper well enough to make origami, can’t sew on a button back on a favorite toy, and who has no desire to visit group story time at the library.

I’m the mom who is still in her pajamas at noon half of the time. I’m the mother who notes every second it takes her six year old to enunciate the word “stem,” who smells like dry shampoo in the checkout line at Target, and who looks at her phone while her kids play at Chick Fil A. I’m the mom who shrivels inside when her toddler asks her to play Paw Patrol.

I already torture myself enough knowing that I don’t savor every.single.moment. with my children like I live inside a Chicken Soup for the Soul book.

Just last night, though, as I listened to three children voice their displeasure with dinner and then move on to fighting over three dollar plastic toys like they were the treasures of ancient Egypt, I whispered to myself that one day, THEY would be the ones to miss this.

They will miss this place where not much is required of them but to do their best. To be happy. To thrive.

Where beach trips just happen, and they aren’t the ones who have to worry about all of the sand in all of the places and slathering sunscreen onto their squirming bodies.

Where someone made sure they had perfect sprinkle covered cookies on Christmas Eve, ice cream on hot summer evenings, and boiled eggs to dye on Easter.

They will miss hot meals served on clean plates (plates they didn’t have to clean), around a table where all of us have locked fingers and bowed our heads in prayer. A place where their sock drawer is always full. Where there is always someone who cares deeply about their hopes and fears and feelings standing at the kitchen sink.

They will go out into the world and realize how much others require of them without caring much about every turning cog in their minds, or how they feel about the movie Jurassic Park.

They’ll find a world that is mostly indifferent to them, save for a handful of good friends and people back home who really know and love them.

They will miss the times when this every day life was their constant.

I try not to let the pressure sink me every day. I try to fight against the urgency to make sure that I get it all right the first time because there aren’t second chances. Even though every new day is ripe with the opportunities to nail this parenting thing.

I succeed when I remind myself why I’m doing all of this in the first place. That I’m building a home because one day, they will understand and it will all matter to them. The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and folded clothes and late night snuggles – they’ll see it as the lifetime of labor that made them who they are.

I hope to build the place they will one day miss.

I hope they know that they had a place where they were held and valued and watched over.

Even if their mother never did papier-mache with them.

 

 

 

 

 

To the first time moms

As I write, there is a child heavily breathing, lost in sleep next to me. Her brother is sprawled across the couch in the living room.

It is nearly midnight.

Tomorrow, we will host a joint birthday party for these two children who emerged on almost the same day, two years apart, in late June, six and eight years ago.

It seems like a lifetime ago. It seems like last week, this hurricane that upended my life.

Your story shifts the second you find out that you are going to be a parent. Then it shifts again the moment they emerge, yowling and slightly gross from your womb, separate from but now an even bigger part of you still.

You were once joined nearly completely, only now you discover that it isn’t just flesh and blood that can join you with a person for a lifetime.

It’s a million yet unspoken words.

A promise, now realized. A thousand more, waiting to be fulfilled.

Your daily life together becomes a series of shifting plots. You think you have learned one thing about parenting, found solid footing, and then the next day, the game changes.

Sleep regression. Colic. Diaper rash. Reflux. Teething. Your internet not working. Misery!

I remember how unreasonable parenting seemed at first.

The thought that I had to carry a person, who practiced Cirque Du Soleil inside of me every time I tried to close my eyes, who burned my innards with the fire of indigestion (equal to the flames of a thousand suns), who I was then expected to spend hours birthing, urging them into the world with cracking pelvic bones and willpower, and then feed them from the battered front of my body, was without a doubt the most presumptuous thing I had ever heard.

Not only was I responsible for birthing this tiny person, for bathing them and noting the number of diapers they soiled each day, I was also charged with making sure they turned into a good person eventually.

And sometimes, I also needed to take them into the grocery store even as they squirmed and cried from their car seat while I lactated through my shirt with enough milk to supply ten dairy farms.

And for all of my work, where did it actually get me? The laundry was never clean. The house was always dirty and neglected. The smallest of tasks increased in difficulty ten fold. I felt like I spent my days flailing. I didn’t see where any of my efforts were gaining any ground.

It turns out, that when you become a parent, you give birth nearly every day. Right there, in the mundane.

The broken body, shriveled breasts, stretch marks, and post-partum raging hormones that whisper that you aren’t enough are some of the “easiest” parts.

You’re then met with the crushing reality of mommy culture. You start to doubt every decision you make for them. You wonder if each one is actually best. You wonder if you need to be making your own laundry soap and baby food. You wonder how anybody ever thought you could do this in this GMO laced world. Heck, you wonder why you’re so selfish to just want four hours of sleep in a row so badly you can cut your teeth on it.

Once you were insecure about the clothes you wore, the acne on your skin, that you didn’t share the same lunch table with popular kids.

Now, you’re worried about when the new loose pouch of skin across the front of you will recede, giving you back an appearance of maidenhood.  You feel guilty because deep down, you already miss your old life and its simplicity. When your mind was quieter than it has been since the moment they arrived. You realize startlingly that the noise may never leave you.

Now, you’re worried about how to feed your baby. How to dress your baby. And bathe your baby. You wonder why your baby doesn’t sleep. You wonder why you never seem to be enjoying any of this like all of the other parents around you. Or why your heart hurts so much when they cry as you frantically pace back and forth to help them find their way to sleep.

Your heart hurts because it’s growing three times in size. Outward, forward. Like an expanding wave of an unfolding and mysterious universe.

You’re so distraught because now life comes with a new set of insecurities, the least of which is that your body will never look like it used to. Some of worst thoughts haunt your mind as you’re trying to sleep, like the fear that this new life will never seem to fit you just right.

The greatest of which is that you’ll somehow mess this all up, mess them up. That you will ruin everything good in them.

I thought I became a mother the day they draped that first baby across my chest. And I did. It was the big bang, a new solar system of life bursting forth. A galaxy now set to spinning outward. Unstoppable. A thousand stars dotting an endless ocean. Here there are no skies. There is only forward.

The life I thought I knew so well was gone. The way things were supposed to be irrevocably changed.

I have spent every day becoming since then. Becoming a mother, and finding with each new phase that I must go further still. 

It’s been eight years. Eight years of leaked diapers. Cancelled plans. Sick children on family vacations. Crying behind closed bathroom doors, or over a dirty kitchen sink. I waited, for someone to tell me that I can do this.

But it isn’t enough to believe that I am good at this. That I can do this.

Now I see. I see what I will be. And what I will be, I already am.

Now it is enough, the belief that I am becoming. 

And yet the sun still shines. The galaxy still spins and unfolds. We move in an ellipsis, dancing around one another, as we move forward. Together. We already are.

And yet we are still becoming.