Our Dark Hour, Part 2

Summer 2010 was the calm before the storm. Testing was over; I forgot about school, helped our homeschooling group with several projects, and even found time for some personal interests. Then fall came, and trouble hit. Serious trouble.

Problems often come in bunches, and that certainly proved the case this fall. Lydia began first grade, and for the first time, I had two children to homeschool simultaneously. (Kindergarten had been very light, in spite of her being an early reader.) At the same time that Lydia's education began in earnest, Joe's attention medication stopped working, and he decided that he no longer wanted to be educated. He would sit in distant areas of the house, claiming to do math while I worked with Lydia, and later announce that he hadn't done a thing. The memory of Mom's criticism was not distant, and I panicked. Meanwhile, relationships I had had before began disappearing for various reasons, and I convinced myself I was all alone. The weekend Jim went away was my breaking point; I sat in my bed, crying in despair.

From that point, my personal life went down the tubes fast. I struggled with frighteningly depressive thoughts, of a magnitude I hadn't seen since my early 20's just before I became a Christian. I couldn't sleep, and I began pushing away the people I still encountered. I dreaded waking up to teach each day, and focused on teaching Lydia when I couldn't deal with Joe's resistence anymore. We began going to KCCHS's new co-op, an extremely structured situation which Joe could handle, but I refused to speak to any of the adults involved and was ashmaed to look people in the eye. Guilt and shame consumed me. My entire self-image had been bound up in how well I was schooling my kids, and when Joe stopped making progress, I felt utterly worthless--especially when leaders in our group would quote statistics about the success of home schooled versus public schooled kids. If the Lord hadn't placed us in the gang-ridden east side of Aurora, I probably wouldn't have continued.

As Christmas approached, Joe improved somewhat. His doctor found a new medication regimen that worked, and he had an EEG which ruled out a seizure disorder. I changed my approach: requiring supervision for Joe's work, and combining him in a unit study with Lydia. Unfortunately, my personal demeanor did not recover as well. It is a known fact that people who devote all their energy to "holding it together" without divine help will eventually disintegrate, and that is what happened to me. The weight of taking on all Joe's issues for years, attempting to fix all his problems using my own strength and never succeeding, had caught up with me. I was fine during vacation weeks, when I could forget about school; but when academia returned, so did the depressive thoughts, sleepless nights, and pushing people away. I used Facebook with a "poison pen," venting anger indiscriminately. Although I sought help from my church, I refrained from telling them about my homeschooling struggles because I knew they would tell me to put the children in school; and as difficult as Joe was at home, I knew he would never withstand the drug, alcohol and gang pressures rampant in an east Aurora middle school.