Surviving Motherhood and Homeschooling
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006By Mimi Rothschild
Do you remember the days before you had children? Do you remember the days before homeschooling? Think hard. The memory may be hazy now but there was a time when you had time to listen to music that wasn’t sung by ex-Mouseketeers and did not include the ABC song. You had clothing that wasn’t stained with spit-up or jelly – or “borrowed” occasionally for use as someone else’s nose tissue. You even had time to take baths, not showers, with those little oil beads and the occasional candle – none of which spent their down time locked in a child-proofed cabinet.
Those were the days when you thought that there would magically come a day that you would be “ready” for parenthood and were already quite sure what the word meant. Your children would be well-behaved, honest, polite, and intelligent due to your devoted homeschooling efforts. In a word, perfect.
Now that you have children, you know the truth. And the truth is; you know nothing about children or being a parent. You know less especially about being the parent of a homeschooled child. None of what you read in those parenting books turned out to be applicable to life as a homeschooling parent.
So, how do you go about surviving something that has been happening since the beginning of time (pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood and then the insanity of repeating the process) and has yet to be understood well enough to be described in the countless books on the subject? Homeschooling books alone don’t cover parenting and parenting books rarely, if ever, touch on homeschooling.
You can ask someone who has been through it all. Ask someone who is in the same community or homeschooling group as you and your children are. Ask someone who has raised their children with the same beliefs, homeschooled their children as diligently as you do, and someone who was as frustrated as you are when their kids were the same age as your own. Books are written without regard to culture.
It is impossible to parent and homeschool without the influence of your own culture. Finding someone who lives and homeschools exactly as you do, under the same auspices, is almost impossible. It is unions of advice that will help you navigate the waters of homeschooling and motherhood and survive. Ask those you respect when you have questions and one day, when a young mother in your homeschool group asks you, you may know the answer.