New Year's Day, 2011

As 2011 dawns, I find myself surrounded by people making resolutions. Joe, almost 13, wants to start brushing his teeth every day and also open his own business. Hubby Jim wants to lose weight (after the holiday!) and work his way out of his truck-driving job. Lydia, age 6, just wants to play with her friends outside when spring comes, and collect more money from the Tooth Fairy. Ten-year-old David, severely autistic, is the object of our resolutions: get him toilet trained, for the third time, and hopefully stay out of time-consuming biofeedback therapy.

This blog is the child of my own resolution: the resolve to make a fresh start in 2011, to lay rest to the futility and discouragement that colored so much of my homeschooling experience in 2010, to cruise gracefully through midlife instead of retreating into a second adolescence. Christmas vacation has afforded me the chance to put homeschooling on the back burner, to wash my hands of the job for two weeks, bake cookies and pick up a new knitting project. It's easier to enjoy our kids when reading worksheets and math facts are not on the table--yet, come January 3, we will continue.

Why?

I am not the kind of person who is likely to give a testimony before a group. Hopefully, no one will ask me to after hearing the story of our home schooling journey, to date. Writing this has not been easy, and some of what I say may offend; but my wish is that this blog may ultimately bless others, to help them avoid some of the traps I have fallen into, to show them that they are not alone and that it is possible to continue home schooling through very difficult times.

Summer 2010 was the calm before the storm. Testing was over; I forgot about school, did several projects for our homeschooling group, 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 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 picking arguments and 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. 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 homeschooled 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 unit study with Lydia (yes, the same United States study we had done six years ago!) 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, picking arguments and pushing people away. I sought help from my church, but I couldn't tell them about my homeschooling struggles because I knew they were opposed.