“You. You have nice kids.” People say this to us.
Often.
And this is what I want to reply: If you put plants in partially acidic soil and leave them there, they will grow but not to their full height.
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Those cement factories overseas, where people labour in dust and despair, with no relief in sight by the power of unions, would be a hard place to work.
Homeschooling our kids is not as strenuous as working in one of those factories. But neither is homeschooling sitting next to the pool, a martini in hand, flipping through a magazine as we ring a small bell every hour to usher our kids onto their next subject. Homeschooling kids would eat you alive if you tried that.
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Head in hands again. Trying to shut out the noise. The kids with their needs swirling around me.
We are homeschooling in February.
Continuing this thankless task in February becomes my annual despair, one shared with all homeschooling families (Except for the perfect families we all hate. Don’t feel jealous. They’ll crash and burn out too. I’ve been homeschooling for a while, so I’ve seen a few things.)
If you are not homeschooling in February, what is your despair?
We all have the odd despair that tries to attach itself to us like an unwelcome leech.
Anyway, I sat on the couch, my overwhelm consuming me. Do I declare (another) fun day and take the kids cross-country skiing?
Should we call all our homeschooling friends and organize (another) hockey party on the free outdoor ice rink?
Do I give them as much “independent work” as I can and try to tackle the mess of stuff in the basement, the pile that seems to have acquired a life of its own and that roars at me as I pass like a Yeti in the basement?
Or do I confront the emotions in my heart that are spilling out onto the couch next to me, a mess I am trying to hide but that is emerging despite my best efforts to pretend I am confidently steering this homeschooling ship?
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to hide behind the fun. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that our home is so disorganized that we can no longer find pencils to do our math. Or that no one cares. “I like using a green crayon to do my math, Mommy!” she asserts.
She is not trying to make me feel better. She is genuinely happy. Her needs are met.
And mine?
“I’m not worried about the kids,” my husband would assert. “I’m worried about you.”
So I offer you tea and a listening ear, dear friend, and ask:
How are you?
Not how are your kids?
Not how is the state of your home (We know it’s a disaster. You homeschool!)
How are you?
People who suppress feelings experience less positive and more negative emotions.
And then your tears, and your head in hands, and I put my arm around you to comfort you.
And as we:
For what, you ask?
To learn the one most important lesson that overwhelm teaches us, which is that:
When we feed ourselves with unhealthy food, our tummies won’t feel very good for a while.
However, This is GOOD NEWS because we can go to the store and buy carrots today!
And how does this relate to homeschooling, for example?
If you follow the crowd and eat whatever they eat (50% highly processed foods), your tummy will get a bit upset afterward. Similarly, if you follow the crowds and set up your homeschool to mimic public school goals, for example, you’ll find that burnout is as certain as feeling bad after eating an entire box of Oreos.
Overwhelm is the blaring red light that tells us that letting our minds and actions drift with the crowd isn’t a healthy option.
There is a better way, friend, and overwhelm, our teacher and friend, unlocks a higher path.
More on the first step of HOW to get out of overwhelm next time.
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Image Credits: Man Upset by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash, Bird Soaring by Kshithij Chandrashekar on Unsplash
I’m mad at you! At all of you with a child over seventeen years old who left home! I hate you all! Why didn’t you tell me it would be this hard to say goodbye when they left for college!?
And all of you with babies too, babies that are older than my oldest baby, I hate you all too!
Before we had babies, why didn’t you tell us that looking after babies would be so hard!?
Ah, yes . . .
It is because we wouldn’t have believed you even if you would have spoken up.
And if our teens truly understood the depth of our loss, many of these kids wouldn’t leave home. They are good kids. I relayed these thoughts to my husband, processing them aloud through my tears.
“And we want them to leave,” I cried out. “Yes, we do,” my husband comforted. Then he shoots me a sideways, knowing look. I remembered that this morning, our teen was DEFINITELY right when she was DEFINITELY wrong, and instead of bursting into tears, I burst into laughter.
I feel some joy mixed with some sorrow.
And so, “Goodbye!” we say as we wave.
Except it’s not kindergarten, and they are heading to school on a bus. We homeschooled, so we missed that milestone. It’s 600 km away, and the tearing, the necessary, painful cleaving continues.
Reflecting God’s nature, He created them male and female. . . Therefore, a [person] leaves his father and mother
I told you it would be that way, Jesus reminds me softly. Many years earlier, in prayer, Jesus showed me a picture of my daughters, one after the other, ready to board a plane to soar off on their journeys of independence. He began preparing my heart to say goodbye many years ago, even then.
Many of us homeschooling parents pushed the love boundary of our hearts a little further than expected when we cracked open those brand new math texts on day one of homeschooling.
The depth of love surprises us all and surpasses the boundary markers we set up to protect ourselves. If we love what we know, we will get to know these kids, and our love for them will transform us. Love always does.
I’m not saying that homeschooling is one domino after the other of perfect days.
I have homeschooled for 4,745 days (I’m convinced you don’t have enough math skills to figure out how many years I have spent homeschooling- Who does?). Of those days, I have NEVER yet had one perfect day.
Nope.
Not one. Just daily joy mixed with daily sorrow. Master storyteller J.R.R. Tolkien explains it this way:
The possibility of [sorrow and failure] is necessary to the joy of deliverance . . . giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
And so saying goodbye to the teen as she flies off to college is just another homeschooling day: some joy mixed with some sorrow.
We are used to that. We’ve gotten stronger over the years. It’s just another part of the daily homeschooling rhythm.
We will be ready because we have been practicing daily for this: some joy and some sorrow, repeat tomorrow.
We’re going to be OK.
And so, as we watch them soar, we nurse our grief a little and then flap our baby wings and listen for the call from Him into a new adventure.
And in the same way that we invest in our future by putting aside a few dollars each month, is He asking us to invest in our spiritual future by putting aside a few minutes each day to listen to Him calling us, comforting us, asking us to set aside the old, and to pick up the new?
How is he calling you to wake up?
Where to next, God?
I can’t quite fly yet, but I am sensing another adventure.
Yes, I’ll follow!
(How about you?)
We enjoy publishing a letter and sending it to all our friends and family for the Holidays.
In this letter, we tell you some of the embarrassing things they (the other family members and friends) said last year!
(Yes, I take notes on what my friends and family say all year, JUST for this express purpose!)
For some reason, however, not many people talk to me much at the beginning of each year, and they seem a bit sulky. But don’t worry – it doesn’t last long!
I’m glad that YOU like me, at least!
I was looking at my husband with tears filling my eyes after I opened a glimpse of pain deep within my heart.
Andy looked back at me and . . . smirked (!)
Me: “Why are you smirking!?”
Andy: “I think you’re just PMS-ing.”
Andy laughs.
I realize he’s probably right and think, “You know you’ve been married a long time when…”
While driving to the ski hill:
Me to Andy: “Why don’t we drop off our ski boots first this time and then…” etc.
Andy: “But I always do it the same way!”
I thought, “Well, I guess that topic has now been exhausted for all time!”
I can sense a compliment coming. I wait in eager anticipation:
Andy: “Thank you for being so… nice.”
Me: (!!!)
The perils of playing board games with homeschooled kids:
I borrowed a board game from the library based on the movie “Dune.” We recently watched the movie together as a family.
Kyah: “I can’t play that board game!” she announced, frustrated.
Me: “Why?”
Kyah: “I haven’t finished reading the book yet!”
Me: “Maybe you want to play squash with me sometime, Kyah?”
Kyah: “Well, I don’t know. I’m pretty aggressive…” (Even though the wind blows her over sometimes)
Kyah continued, “And I also have martial arts, so I’m pretty busy…”
Kyah: “But I love you so… Yeah, sure.”
Andy called me when he was out buying groceries from the list I wrote for him:
Andy: “So when it says, ‘soy sauce,’ do you mean… ?” He lists 10 related items and brands.
Me: “No, when I say ‘soy sauce,’ I mean the stuff that isn’t actually soy sauce. It says ‘liquid aminos’ or something like that on the bottle.”
Andy: “Oh, ok.”
Andy: “When it says ‘noodles- mushroom’, what kind of noodles are those?”
Me: “Those are the ones that aren’t actually noodles. They just look like noodles. They’re long and thin. They’re in the mushroom section. I don’t know what they’re called.”
Etc.
Etc.
Me: “I feel better because I fasted and prayed today. It gives me hope.”
Andy: “I didn’t fast, but I did have a chicken salad sandwich from X restaurant today, so . . . that probably counts.”
Me: (?) “And why is that?”
Andy: “Because it’s not very good! I didn’t have lunch from Y restaurant!”
So, “fasting” for Andy means eating out at a lower-star-eating establishment. Well, we all start somewhere!
I offered our friend a chocolate chip cookie. She excitedly stretched out her hand to take one, but then a look of horror came over her face, and her hand hovered above the plate mid-air.
She asked with increasing trepidation, “Wait. These don’t have black beans or something like that in them again, do they?!”
Happy New Year, friends.
(May you laugh much at your ridiculousness in the coming year, too!)
God will let you laugh again
Oh, and remember!
The next time you say something stupid (i.e., today?), don’t forget to send it to me so we can laugh at you, too, next January!
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
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Today, I thought I’d teach you how to bond with your homeschooled kid by swearing at him!
This advice is a real-world example from my own life.
The weirdest stuff in life is true, so that’s how you can be assured I am telling the truth today.
So, one day, I found my 12-year-old looking downcast and despondent.
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So how do we find ourselves?
We write some stuff, publish it online, and then ask THEM who we are!
What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here – and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.
Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird
For example, I’ve been trying to figure out why people are reading this Substack for a while, and despite my careful research, I haven’t thought up any reasons!
(You already know why I like you.)
And since we’re talking about defining ourselves by how many people on the internet like us, can you please complete this (quick) survey to help me determine why you like me?
Do you subscribe/read these posts because:
(I’m writing for you, actually, even though I pretend I’m not. Don’t tell my ego. And I DO want to help you find a cup of cold water or to share whatever lint or whatever else I can find here in my pocket if you want it.)
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
Halloween is around the corner, so I thought I’d post about the last time I dressed up.
No, it wasn’t Halloween then or a holiday of any kind. Why do you ask? But this got me thinking:
What if people HAD to love us (no matter what we wore or how silly we acted)?
The good news is that depending on what your friends and family believe, they do!
For example, we homeschool our kids, so we read to them from books that say things like this:
Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it.
Then, we go to a church where they read the same stuff.
At church, they HAVE to love us, too! If we find people who don’t love us there, we can find some others to love. We’ll all find true followers of Jesus who promise to love us no matter what our personality – even the “unusual” ones – whew!
So we can finally relax and have fun.
We’re loved!
This is good news for me in particular because I figured out what my family REALLY thought about me lately, and it was a bit of a shock.
Here’s what happened.
We were reading an excellent book together as a family.
Caveat: Before you get the wrong idea of us all drinking hot chocolate and stringing popcorn and cranberries by the fire as we each take turns reading aloud together, singing a song between each chapter, aka Little House on the Prairie style, no, it wasn’t like that. It was an audiobook played in the car during our day-long drive to visit extended family. The book just helped us not to want to kill each other.
Setting the mood.
Anyway, the book was excellent. It was called Jesus Revolution. I would highly recommend it*. We all got into the story, and even the child we initially had to bribe to listen to the story with us asked for more!
At one point in the book, the author, Greg Laurie, is described as having something like “deep spiritual depth and a bit of an unpredictable, crazy personality. You never knew what he was going to do next.”
My husband looked at me sneakily out of the corner of his eye, smirking. “WHAT???” I asked. “What are you smirking about??”
“Oh,” he replied, looking away casually, “just something said in the book.”
“What??” I protested. “I’m not…!” And then he laughed, and there was a muffled chuckle, I think, from the back seats.
So I guess my family thinks that his personality describes me!
And this reminds me of what we did last night! I bought a gift for my family – well, sort of. Okay, yes! I did buy it for myself and pretended to give it to the family!
It is called The Adventure Challenge. You scratch off an “Adventure,” and then the family HAS (Yes, teens, that word is “HAS”) to do the Adventure together. Last night, we strung out yarn as an obstacle course through the basement, and we had to go through it as fast as we could, being sprayed in the face with water each time we accidentally touched a string.
It was fun.
And my superhero outfit? Yeah, I am wearing a bathing suit over the top of my leotards. And yes, the big “S” on my shirt WAS made a spur of the moment. It helped me go faster!
I even got first place!
(Before any of the others went, I was ranked first, that is.)
So relax! Make your teens do fun and crazy stuff with you! If you’re unsure how, try making “fun” a prerequisite to “food,” for example! They’ll thank you later! (When they’re old they may thank you – At least that’s what happened to us!)
Your kids are loved, too!
And that was the message of the Jesus Revolution book, actually. It was about a bunch of crazy hippy kids who were overcome, in some cases literally, by the love of God. That love overflowed to others and transformed a nation (Even Time Magazine did a cover article about this movement on June 21, 1971).
So go ahead and be the real you, whatever that looks like.
And then, after you’ve let your stomach fat and the rest of the real you out a little bit, if you’re desperately looking for a way to improve your self-esteem, spend a few more minutes with the kind of people who believe they HAVE to love you!
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
Footnotes
*If bribing your kids to watch a movie with you is less expensive than bribing them to read a book with you, the movie Jesus Revolution can be rented here.
Discouraged as a homeschooling parent?
Today, let’s talk about the foundations of this discouragement. We will never be able to come up for air, to feel like we are swimming in the lake on a bright summer day (i.e., homeschooling with joy), if public school culture guides the foundation of our homeschooling.
They will be holding our heads under the water. If we do what they tell us, we gasp, struggling for breath during our homeschooling journey.
The truth is teaching kids isn’t as complicated as we thought.
Teaching kids is sort of like the scatological habit of rabbits. (Yes, scatological means poop. Stay with me.)
We have an amazing little bunny that runs all over our house and currently only poops in two locations- in her little toilet and on my husband when he is sitting. If she only pooped in her little toilet, this would be a perfect analogy, but we can’t have perfection. We’re homeschooling!
My point is that you can train rabbits to use their toilet.
Our rabbit has almost attained this lofty goal. But there’s a trick to teaching a rabbit to go to the bathroom. This same trick (well, nearly!) helps us homeschool our kids so that we don’t constantly feel like drowning.
The rabbit decides where she will go to the bathroom.
Similarly, kids decide, at least in part, how (or what or where) they will learn.
Understanding how to work within the nature of rabbits’ scatological habits and kids’ learning habits is the key that sets us free.
I’ll explain.
Pet rabbits were traditionally kept outside in pens, as it was assumed these animals couldn’t be toilet trained.
Someone brilliant figured out that if the rabbits are allowed to choose their place to go to the bathroom inside your home, they will go to that one place with proper training. If a rabbit owner decides on the location of the toilet for the rabbit, complete with carrots, rabbit toys and treats of every kind, this won’t work. They won’t become toilet trained.
But if we set the rabbit free in our home and wait, a fantastic thing happens with some training.
The rabbit chooses her location to go to the bathroom.
So when you find a large pile of about 100 poops (because rabbits poop about 150 times per day), don’t despair, rejoice! Put your little rabbit toilet in that location and let the training begin.
Kids are identical to the pooping habits of rabbits.
If we believe the Ministry of Education that kids need to learn over 300 discreet and tiny bits of information every year and that this changes every year depending on the child’s age, we might as well put the kids outside in those rabbit pens and forget about homeschooling them.
It’s impossible!
Sure, if you have 30 kids exactly the same age and leave them in the same room day after day this could work . . . (Wait, that analogy breaks down. This approach doesn’t work in the classroom either, if we’re honest. But that’s a discussion for another day).
The point is that this approach will kill our kid’s love of learning, our love of homeschooling, and maybe even change how much we like our students (which happened to me once) if we work diligently, trying to do what they tell us, and how they ask us to teach our kids.
Instead:
How specifically to help them do this while we put up our feet with a cup of tea and watch our rabbit use a toilet inside will be discussed another time.
I was discouraged that day.
My head was in my hands as I slumped on my desk. That light on the horizon, the hope I was clinging to, in this case, “summer” for a homeschooling parent, seemed very distant. I reached out my hand but couldn’t touch this horizon today.
I got up, dressed and showered, a “skill” I had learned from previous years of homeschooling. I knew I needed to wear my best outfit and smile like I had a job outside the home. I knew I needed to greet my little students with love as they emerged from their bedrooms in their little onesies and messy hair.
But how do I give my children what I don’t have?
I fall on my face alone in my room.
Then I hold out my outstretched hand containing the seed of homeschooling He placed in my heart many years prior. I have carried the seed close to my heart. I have worked and tended this garden. These seeds (No! – Wait! These small plants!) have been watered by my sweat and hard work, ploughing in the sun and the rain. Will these small plants grow thick, strong roots downward? Will these roots find the hidden, underground springs that will sustain and nourish them?
That is my hope.
That is why this tired mother rises early again, gets dressed, puts on lipstick, and seeks hope in these pages that have fed her in the past. But what happens when we search these pages of the book but today there is no hope to be found? We have searched and turned the pages, but it is a dry season, a time of drought.
What then?
I set my three-minute timer, my little “vacation” getaway. I close and lock the door and lie down on my face alone in my room. I try to ignore any sounds outside my door, for those few minutes.
And do I pour out my heart and explain to God my life situation, knowing at a deeper level that He understands more than I do about my problem?
No.
I put on a worship song, fall on my face in my room, and praise Him for three minutes. Sometimes, the tears flow, sometimes, the anger comes, and sometimes, the drought feels too much to bear. But every time, after a couple of minutes of focusing on Him, the one who created the world, worship reminds me how big God is.
And by definition, I then remember how small I am.
And this is my hope.
When I stop shrinking God down to my size, the rains come. This drought today is over for now. Because He is so big, powerful and wise, He has multiple answers to my problems in His little pinky finger.
Will I trust him, remember His grandeur and pick up the hope that came with this rain of his presence? Will I take a drink? Will I stand in the rain? I’ll be cleansed, if so, my face uplifted to the One who is the source of living water, the God who, by touching the hem of His robe, can make us well.
And I don’t understand it, but I can trust the rain and hope I found today. And this rain becomes living water in my heart so that I can pour out hope on my children today and face whatever dangers, tigers, or math come our way.
And when we stop at the end of the day, decade, or season of life and put up our feet, we can thank Jesus for giving us the strength and hope to keep going.
. . . I provided water in the desert. . . Drinking water for the people I chose, the people I made especially for myself, a people custom made to praise me
Restoring Life 