A letter to myself

Dear Emily,

It’s September 2009. You’ve just moved to a new state with a new baby. I cannot tell you how long you will live here, or how many children you’ll end up with. I’m writing to you from September 2019, so I know the answer to both of those burning questions. I know you won’t believe me, but I’ll say it anyway: you shouldn’t know the answers yet. It truly is better this way.

You won’t believe me because you’re hurting right now. It feels like you have a giant hole in your stomach, all the time. You keep wondering when your well of tears will dry up, but it seems there is a limitless supply. You have been ripped open in so many ways. You are pulsing with pain.

You’re begging me to tell you how long it will feel like this. When—or even if—you’ll get relief. If you only knew, you tell yourself, then you could manage.

The trouble with that is that then you would not grow.

So I cannot tell you how long, how hard, how much, how soon, how painful, how low. You have to discover that.

What I can tell you is that you will live through it. And you will become a far more beautiful person for having done so.

You want to challenge me on that too? I understand. Because ugliness is coming out of that gaping wound of yours. And you’re confused and frightened by it.

It’s supposed to be this way.

I know, because it’s how you get to where you’re going.

The “how” is what everyone thinks they need to know in order to get “there.” But the “how” can only be revealed one step at a time in the present, and only understood by looking back on it afterward. So the wisest thing you can do is to stop asking how, and start saying yes.

Yes to pain.

Yes to doubt.

Yes to fear.

Yes to loneliness.

Yes to the callousness and betrayal and abandonment you feel from what you thought you could count on.

Yes to what has been stolen from you.

Yes to the pain you cause yourself and the pain you cause the people you love.

Yes to the fighting and the denial and all the screaming, so much screaming, in your head.

Until you learn to love this mess, you can never clean it up.

But how? you ask again. How can you love what has gone so terribly wrong?

By believing that God can make something even more beautiful from all these ashes.

By believing that you’re strong enough even when you feel more weak and tired and defeated than you’ve ever been.

By trusting that it’s supposed to go wrong. Which, in reality, means it’s not wrong at all.

That feels like a cosmic practical joke, I know. Like God couldn’t possibly exist, or even worse, that He doesn’t care.

But nothing couldn’t be further from the truth.

I will give you just one glimpse into the future to show you what I mean. I don’t think He’ll mind.

In a few months, you will be sitting at your computer while your baby is napping. You will write a beautiful piece, born from pain, about your pain. You will feel desolate. And writing will be the only place you will know where to put it.

Ten years later, you will be sitting at your computer while a baby is napping. You will write a beautiful piece, born from pain, about your pain. You will feel whole. And writing will be the only place you will know where to put it.

The piece will be this letter. And you will know that while you wish so badly you could ease the pain your past self is feeling, you wish even more that she will experience it. Deeply, fully, as painfully as possible. And you will feel so so sorry. And also so completely sure that it is the right course.

Because you will have learned by then that the right course is the one that is.

The “how” is not your business to know now.

It’s yours to know then.

When you are feeling joy every bit as exquisite as your pain.

You will not believe now, or then, how lucky you are.

How incredibly blessed your life is.

How much love you have.

You will not believe it.

But it will be so.

And writing will be the only place you will know where to put it.

So weep now, and write your words, and nurse your baby, and feel your pain. Feel it intensely. Completely.

All is well, both now, and to come.

It’s on purpose.

Even—and especially—the not knowing.

Love,

Yourself

What should my homeschool look like?

I get asked about homeschooling a lot.  Many people have entered my home for one reason or another, and almost immediately asked, “Do you homeschool?”  I used to be one of those people, curious about this alternate universe and wondering if I could, or should, live there too.  What would it look like?  How would I know if I was doing it right?

When I decided to homeschool, I went looking for answers.  I was quickly tempted, disoriented, then discouraged by Pinterest searches.  It was full of contradictions.  Everyone claimed the best schedule or curriculum or method or blog or room layout or supply list.  I learned I needed less suggestions, not more.  One or two mentors was better than ten or twelve.  A straw, not a firehose, is the only way to drink in homeschooling.

Plenty of online strangers were more than happy to tell me the right way to homeschool.  But when I asked the mentors whose opinions I most value about curriculum or classroom furniture or daily schedule, their answers seemed nebulous. 

And now, as a mentor myself, I know why.

Because schedules and curriculum and classroom setup may seem like the logical place to start, but they’re not.  Not only that, but they are subject to change.  And they are unique to each family.  They were not the formula for successful homeschooling that I was searching for.

So what is?   What will make sure my kids get a quality education?  Everyone says to do what’s right for your family, but how do I know what’s right for us?

Start with your why. 

Pin down not how you’ll do this homeschooling thing, but why you’ve decided to do it in the first place.  Why you want it, why you’ll keep going when it gets hard. 

Then figure out your philosophy of education. 

Then look at your children (and yourself) as people, as learners.  How do they learn best?    What are their strengths?  What are yours?

Then write your mission, and a vision will slowly materialize.  Get clear on your why and on your commitment, and the how will take care of itself.

I remember wanting so badly to feel solid in the curriculum, schedule, and homeschooling method that would be right for us.  But the truth is, they will always evolve.  Just like everything else in parenting, the minute you think you have it figured out, it changes again.

But that won’t sound so scary after a while.  Because you’ll slowly realize what really makes a homeschool a homeschool. 

I have found that when the environment, the role model, and the relationships are sound, my children’s learning follows.  So the longer I homeschool, the less I worry about and research curriculum, and the more I work on myself and my relationships with my kids.

As Charlotte Mason famously said, “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” 

Everything you think you know about school and education will crumble almost immediately when you begin homeschooling.  It will put your flaws and shortcomings under a microscope.  And it should.  Because homeschooling isn’t just for your kids.  It’s for you.   You will be forced to rethink your beliefs, broaden your views, and redefine things you thought were set in stone.  Just as we want our kids to learn to do.

Your children will learn exactly what they are supposed to, sometimes because of—and sometimes in spite of—your best efforts.  And a more beautiful, more compassionate, more intelligent you will rise from the ashes.  

Your only enemy is fear.  And your fears are imaginary.

So let your goal be not to mold your children a certain way, but to allow your children to surprise you.  Choose the child over the lesson.  Run with your strengths, and have the courage to let them run with theirs, no matter what it looks like.

Homeschooling will be nothing and everything like you imagined.

Be willing to surprise yourself. 

Because you will.

Pulse

One of the highest honors of my life is to be a daily witness of how each of my children navigates the world.  The interplay between how they see the world and how they are received by it so often seems divinely orchestrated.  It's like their very beings were made to nestle into the world just so.

And yet this carries with it not only ease but friction.  Because each of us, inevitably, will often encounter spaces in which we do not fit.  I am grateful in these moments that I am not merely observer of my children, but mother.  That God in His infinite mercy not only gave my children to me, but me to them.  To fall back on when they smack into one of life's glass windows like a bird, unawares.

I give my children the  gift of homeschooling both to enable and to protect.  To free and to limit.  To play to their strengths and provide for their weaknesses.  To allow us both to be surprised by what those are.

Because as mother, my hand is on their pulse.  My chest rises and falls with theirs.  I know when to push and when to pull back, when to immerse and when to dry off.  When to work, when to play, when to eat, when to rest.  It's both well thought out and completely intuitive.

While my children are young, I will sit behind the wheel and make the micro adjustments needed to stay safely on the road.  Someday they'll take their turns in the driver's seat.

Squabbles, yes.  Wrong turns, absolutely.

But we are headed somewhere worth going.

And worth going together.

Bricklaying

Early in my homeschooling journey, my two boys and I were perusing the local bookstore when a title caught my eye.  I purchased it, took it home, and put it on the top of my bubble bath book stack.

It was a book about education reform.  On the first page, it asked me to consider if school really was as pointless as most of us think it is when we are going through it.

He believed it is.  He said the big problem with our traditional public school system is that learning has become decontextualized.  That we think with each assignment, each lesson, each test, we are giving a child a brick.  The idea is that after they have enough bricks, they will have built a house.  The reality for far too many children, he claimed, was that instead of having a house at the end of their twelve years in school, all they have is a pile of bricks.  And they don’t have them for long.

It painted a pretty bleak picture, and yet it resonated with me.  I appreciated that he was willing to challenge assumptions, even at the risk of the reader’s discomfort or outright outrage.

He didn’t offend me.  He turned on a flashlight.

I worked hard to give my children not only bricks, but blueprints for how to build a house.  I was keenly aware that my example was that of master architect, and I was keenly aware of my every misstep.  I learned as I went along, with only the occasional brick thrown back in my face. 

After a few more years of homeschooling, however, I discovered something.  The purpose of these days with my children is not to help them build their houses.

We’re building something else entirely.  And I’m not the master architect.

Because they may not want or need a brick house when they turn 18.  It’s not my job to prescribe that for them.  There’s no crystal ball, no way to know what they’ll be asked to face ten, twenty, thirty years from now.  The world is changing too fast.

Then what are we doing here, day after day, brick after brick? 

We’re laying these bricks not for a house, but a path.

I don’t give my children bricks very often.  They find them everywhere.  They pick them up and come running, shouting, “Mom!  Look at this!  Is this a good one?”  My job is to show them that bricks are worth finding, lifting, and laying.  So I send them outside, I give them some mud, provide some trowels, and set to work myself.

It’s messy work, and snail-slow going.  But we’re on hands and knees together.  And I’ve noticed that they only grumble when I do.

Our path is a little longer now, and stretching toward green hills.  You can stare too long at the brick in your hands, and forget how far you’ve come.  You can sit, discouraged, on the path you've built and wonder why you're not getting anywhere.

Or you can go find another brick, and trust the process.  Sometimes there's sun, sometimes there's rain.  Sometimes you're hungry or tired.

And you think to yourself, "Well, if we're hungry, we'll stop to eat.  If we're tired, we'll take a rest."  And you keep on going tomorrow.

Your neighbor is riding an escalator into the clouds.  A passerby, or maybe even your child, asks why you're not.  "Oh," you say, "I suppose it's because that's not where we're trying to go."

"Why not?" he might say, curious now.

"Because," you answer.  "That's not where things grow."