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.

 

 

 

 

 

How You Will Actually Spend Your Summer “Vacation”

Have you felt it yet?… The sweat? Namely, the boob sweat?

That means summer is here, mommas! Rejoice! Salve, Maria?! Don’t the longer days sound just great??

Or how about blue crabs covered in Old Bay washed down with a cold beer? Or American flags flying everywhere in your sleepy small town? And you can’t forget late nights spent chasing fireflies in bare feet. At least, those are my go to summertime fantasies here in Maryland.

Now, we take a moment of silence to reflect on how we made it, moms. Or at least, how we’ve almost made it. There are probably still teacher gifts to buy, more class parties to make it through that are always smack dab in the middle of the day, and did you get tricked into chaperoning half a dozen field trips this spring??

The month of May is a catastrophic marathon that tests the mettle of any parent’s sanity.

But you can do this. 

If you send your kiddos to school, you probably signed a million and one worksheets this year, fielded parent-teacher phone calls like a high-powered CEO, and made a dozen gluten-peanut-GMO-covfefe free snacks for class parties.

If you homeschool, you made it through another year of arguing to get reluctant bottoms in chairs on time each day. You were parent, teacher, principal and jail warden all wrapped in one.

Now it’s warm. The birds are singing. The schedules are clearing. It’s summer.

Which is great, right?

How easily I forget how this plays out every.single.year.

The first few weeks are a welcome respite from our hectic daily routine. But after the first week, the children are “bored”, the house is a wreck and my sanity starts to deteriorate faster than the universe at the end of Infinity War.

Every year, I forget that I actually need to be proactive about how these summer days are going to play out if my sanity is to be preserved. But, as usual, reality and reason need to rule the day as much as our idealism. 

But summer vacation is hardly a vacation. Think of it like an in-office work casual day. Most of the same stresses are there, just everyone is allowed to wear casual clothes.

 

So here, parents. I made you this list of what you’re actually going to do this summer. (Results may vary)

You will spend your vacation:

1.) Settling petty sibling disputes over the television remote.

2.) Settling petty sibling disputes over who was sitting in that chair first.

3.) Settling petty sibling disputes over who was breathing the air in the kitchen first.

4.) Planning to take your kids swimming. Then spending two hours trying to get to the pool because they all need help getting into their swim suits and you have to hazard spray them with sunscreen. About the time they are dressed and you are packed, you’ll realize you are out of swim diapers for the toddler.

5.) Killing mosquitoes.

6.) Wondering why the car smells the way it smells…like salty feet covered in stale juice.

7.) Staring at the magazines in the grocery store checkout line trumpeting celebrity beach bodies and tropical vacations while you purchase a box of Pop tarts and boxed wine.

8.) Listening to your children tell you they are bored.

9.) Listening to your children tell you they are hot.

10.) Listening to your children tell you they are bored AND hot.

11.) Yelling, “for the love, IN OR OUT!!!” after your children have come in and out of the house nine times in the last thirty minutes seconds.

12.) Killing house flies.

13.) Struggling to put sunscreen on your octopus-armed toddler.

14.) Forgetting to put sunscreen on yourself and getting burnt.

15.) Having your children swat at your sunburn for five days straight.

16.) Telling yourself that when you don’t brush and/or blow dry your hair between the months of May and September, you can say you have beach waves going on, so it’s all good, just don’t mind the nest of birds and scattered pop rocks up there.

17.) Picking up damp towels and swimsuits off the bathroom floor.

18.) Picking up damp towels and swimsuits off the bedroom floor.

19.) Remembering that you left a bag full of damp towels and swimsuits in the back of the car last week…

20.) Helping your child squeeze their ice pops to the top so they can take a bite. Then watching them squeeze so hard all the ice falls out.

21.) Watching $12 worth of ice cream melt all over your children.

22.) Bathing children who have sand in hidden crevices scientists haven’t even discovered.

23.) Finding sippy cups that were carelessly tossed under a seat that have been baking in the sun and now have a pulse.

24.) Making thirteen trips to and from the car at the beach.

25.) Wondering why you are the only mom you know who seems to sweat more than Evander Holyfield.

26.) Yelling, “CLOSE THE DOOR! WE AREN’T AIR CONDITIONING THE WHOLE NEIGHBORHOOD!!!!” as realize you have turned into your parents so your life is over now.

27.) Wondering what happened to all of those people who used to party at the MTV Beach house.

28.) Worrying if the neighbors just heard shouting curse words at the dog through the open windows.

29.) Having your children interrupt your favorite song on the radio with questions about chicken nuggets.

30.) Wondering which child walked off with your sunglasses.

31.) Realizing you were jamming to Nelly and Beyonce fifteen years ago, and now you’re asthmatic after inflating all three of your kids beach balls.

32.) Telling your children not to run at the pool.

33.) Putting your kids to bed late after a busy day, thinking they will sleep in…

34.) Only to have them wake up earlier than usual and, also, hangry.

35.) Sitting in traffic.

36.) Trying to make up answers to all of your kid’s questions about when you’re going to take them to the: zoo, splash pad, pool, museum, movies and…

37.) Shaking a pound of sand and dirt out of your children’s shoes. Sweeping up sand off the floor. Vacuuming sand out of the car.

Here’s the truth. Summer has a magic all its own. Just now that you’re the parent, the magic is going to feel different. So, so different.

Now we have to look a lot harder to find the good stuff.

Like, picking up seashells with your little one.

Having a viable excuse to eat watermelon and cantaloupe for dinner.

Watching your children be overjoyed at the sight of fireflies.

The smell of salty hair after a swim in the ocean and coconut sunscreen.

A glass of wine on a warm summer evening.

Watching your kids eat ice pops, drink little huggies drinks and nom on ice cream, and it reminding you of your glorious summer days of old.

 

See? What did I tell you. Magic. You just have to look for it.