The Other Side of the Story

Grinnell College has this strange, essentially antiquated alumni social network called Plans -- it's sort of an early version of Facebook, with no pictures, no "like" button, but even more bickering.  It's awful and wonderful all at the same time.

Last week, a friend on Plans asked me if I could write a blog post about how difficult homeschooling is, lest she be tempted to try it herself one day.  Fair question.

My initial answer was that it really isn't that hard.  Through no fault of my own, my kids are fairly easy to deal with, academically and behaviorally.  They're excited about learning, I've had a lifetime of experience teaching young kids, and the three of us generally have a great time together.  "Doing School" with them goes fairly smoothly.  

If I'm being honest, though, this is an incomplete answer.  The school part of Homeschooling may not be that difficult for me, but being a Homeschool Mom certainly is.

So now, for a moment, let's talk about the hard part of homeschooling...

I'm Wasting My Life

I know, I know, I'm investing in my kids, I won't regret this time, I'm making some sort of eternal difference, blah blah blah.

But let's be real: I'm an attorney and your garden variety over-achiever.  If you knew me for even five minutes in school, you know that I worked hard.  I went to one of the best liberal art colleges in the country (so what if our social network is rudimentary...), a top-tier law school, and graduated at the top of my class.  I put everything I had into becoming whatever (admittedly awful) thing it is that someone who obsessively does these kinds of things grows up to be.  

By all rights, now that I've successfully gotten my kids to a reasonable school age, I should get to drop them off in car line, trade in the workout-clothes-that-smell-like-spit-up for a tailored suit, and go do something lawyer-like that changes the world.  Instead, here I am still at home, still wearing workout clothes (but they smell a little better), trying to get one kid to read three-letter words, the other kid to hold his pencil correctly instead of pretending to jab it into his eye, and both kids to care even a little bit about where Egypt is.     

Once in awhile, I meet a mom in homeschool circles who tells me that, even as a child, she knew she would homeschool her kids one day.  It's her life's dream; it's all she's ever wanted to do (except wear long skirts, not drink wine, and perfect the fake Jesus Smile).

When I meet these sweet ladies, I smile politely and move away as quickly as possible (they're probably moving away from me, too).  If spending your entire life teaching your young children doesn't fill you with shock, horror, and at least a little nausea, we'll never understand each other.  If teaching mindnumbing first grade math to your (mindnumbing) first-grader doesn't make you reevaluate everything you ever thought about your life, we just can't be friends.

In short, The Who I Am in no way resembles Who I Thought I'd Be, and that's hard.  

It's Monotonous

We try to keep things interesting over here, but this homeschooling that I never really expected to do happens every day.  Every.  Single.  Day.  I have to wake up every morning and know that, give or take, my day is going to look substantially similar to the one before it.  I'll face the same struggles, in the same rooms, with those same small people.  

Seriously, it was a little demoralizing just reading about it, wasn't it?

Nobody Will Leave Me Alone

This is the hardest one for me.  I'm a girl who likes my alone time but it's become apparent to me that when you homeschool, you don't get any of this.

School is a marvelously guilt-free place to leave your kids.  So what if you spend the entire schoolday watching reruns on Netflix or...watching reruns on Netflix?  It doesn't matter, because you didn't ask for that time alone; the time was merely a byproduct of your kids becoming educated.  Really, you were just passing the time by yourself, depressed, waiting for your little angels to finish their self-improvement and come home to you.  

Now that I'm a Homeschooling Mom, my best option is to leave the kids with my husband when he's working from home.  If you've ever tried this before, you know that it begins with a fifteen minute lecture on what does or does not constitute an emergency worth interrupting an important conference call.  Then, you have to drive as fast as you can to the spa grocery store, buy only what's on your list, and race home before the kids start yelling through your husband's office door that one of them may or may not have scratched the other one during a particularly raucous game of Mountain Lion.

Just so we're clear, this does not qualify as Alone Time.

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Thankfully, there is grace for all of this mess.  There's grace for the occasional, minor setback -- the brief temper tantrums, the resistance, the exhaustion.  But even more than this, there's grace for the bigger, deeper, What Am I Doing With My Life moments.  Contentment in the mundane.  Peace in the chaos.  A sudden glimpse of purpose hidden in the day-to-day futility.  A few extra minutes to myself that I know without a doubt came through supernatural intervention.  Grace.

In all honestly, the parts of homeschooling that you see on my blog will probably always paint a picture of a light-hearted, homeschooling utopia where the worst thing that ever happens is that we make a mess.  Just know that before we did whatever that awesome thing was that on my blog, I was drinking a cup of coffee and asking God why I'm throwing my life away.  Know that after we wrapped the activity up, I was thinking of ways to get out of doing whatever it was I'd planned to do afterwards because I was running short on energy, patience, or both.  Know that throughout that entire day, part of me was threatening to die if a child said "Hey, mom" one more time.  

Know that homeschooling isn't entirely easy or fun, even if it looks that way on my blog -- it's just that the hard parts are internal and make for a boring story.  Quite simply, there are just better, more interesting tales to be told.