The first year of homeschooling
is similar to your first year of parenting. You look at your kid and feel
overwhelmed by just how much you’ve taken on. I mean
in my old job, if I had a bad day, I wrote a lackluster article for a campaign
newspaper that most people probably tossed in the recycling anyway. As a
homeschool mom, if I have a bad day (and I have plenty of bad days), it’s my
kid’s education, my kid’s childhood, my kid’s future. That’s a lot of
responsibility.
At
the beginning of the year, I remember
saying, "If I’m going to homeschool, I can’t homeschool half-way. I have to
really do it well. I will design my own curriculum units. We will wake up each
morning and jump into homeschooling before anything else. Learning will be the
most important thing!" So, I threw myself into my cause, and God chuckled.
Because I soon realized I was in way over my head. Starting homeschool with a toddler and an
infant on board changed everything. As I
staggered around the kitchen with my third cup of coffee, I realized morning
homeschool was just not happening. How about we cram as much as we can into
naptime? Trying to design my own curriculum while totally sleep-deprived meant
that I fell asleep on the couch watching tv instead of planning. Nothing turned
out like the big vision in my head. Paint got spilled, the baby had to be fed,
diapers had to be changed. As we snuggled on the couch to read aloud my
favorite books, the toddler was literally pulling my hair out and screaming at
the top of her lungs. Yeah, nothing like my ideal.
So I started the year plagued by
this question: if I am doing something I think is really important for our
family, if I love my kids and want the best for them, then why do I feel
discouraged all the time? Why do I get so angry? Why do I feel so overwhelmed?
I had no idea that God would
answer my questions so profoundly this year. The first thing he showed me was
that the reason I felt so discouraged was a direct result of something I had
always thought of as positive: my own idealism. I have always been an idealist,
to the point that I sometimes think I am better at creating wonderful fictional
realities than living in the real world. Give me a germ of a do-good idea and I
will run with it in my head until it’s this amazing scheme that’s going to
change the world. In my twenties, we went to this awesome, enthusiastic church
who loved to ask the question, if there were no limits to your time, energy, or
money, what would you do with your life? We loved dreaming those dreams and we
did some pretty crazy things and failed in some really big ways. But in my new life as a mom in my thirties,
there were real and definite limits on my time, my energy (especially my
energy) and my finances. I could dream big dreams, but my reality just couldn’t
match up to them . So I spent a lot of time disappointed, sometimes even
depressed because I couldn’t reach my own high expectations.
It really isn’t a bad thing to be
an idealist, but the problem was that my idealism often turned
into perfectionism. It caught me as surprise when God
showed me that I was a perfectionist. Because if you were in my house yesterday
when I turned on the ceiling fan and balls of dust flew everywhere so that the
children remarked “It’s snowing dust!” your first thought would not be:
perfectionist. But as I was reading a description of my personality in the
Myers’-Brigg personality profile earlier this year,(“Yes, I am, you guessed it,
“the idealist”) this line stood out to me: “When an INFP has adopted a project or job which they're interested in,
it usually becomes a "cause" for them. Although they are not
detail-oriented individuals, they will cover every possible detail with
determination and vigor when working for their "cause". When it comes
to the mundane details of life maintenance, INFPs are typically completely
unaware of such things. They might go for long periods without noticing a stain
on the carpet, but carefully and meticulously brush a speck of dust off of
their project booklet.”
So
I began to realize just how this perfectionism was hurting myself and my family.
Because my kids had become my project, my cause. And if they misbehaved in
public, or had anxiety issues, or wore clothes that didn’t match, it reflected
on me and my success as a mother. I spent so much time fearing that I all of my
deficiencies would be found out.
That’s
when I found this wonderful book Grace for the Good Girl: Letting Go of the Try Hard Life by Emily Freeman. This book
was like holding a mirror up, it so described who I have always been: the good
girl who always follows the rules, that always appears to have it together
while hiding her true self beneath, struggling with shame whenever I screwed up
or anyone saw that I wasn’t perfect. In any situation, I knew how to figure out
the rules to how to belong and succeed, Then I do everything I can to do well and
to be regarded by the people in charge. Because I am a really capable person
with really high expectations for myself, I did fairly well in life at the
things I was fairly good at (school, writing, church-related stuff), and
avoided the things I was not so good at (math, sports). I got the straight As, I was given the
leadership positions in clubs, people trusted me to get things done.
Then
came parenthood. When I became I parent, I looked all over for the “rules” of
being a good parent. That’s a harder job then you think because there are a lot
of different sets of “rules” and most of them claim that following any other
set of rules will make you a bad parent. So I gave up reading parenting books
because of this. Instead, I studied other mom’s blogs. I watched the mothers
around me. How are they doing it? Am I doing it as well? What kind of mommy am
I? What is my niche where I can succeed? My head was filled up with a lot of shoulds.
I should make all my own food from scratch using local, organic ingredients. I
should make creative and educational projects to engage my kids in learning. I
should get my kids to have daily quiet times. My kids should watch less
television. I should switch to cloth diapers. I should volunteer for nursery at
church. I should sign the kids up for gymnastics, t-ball, and swimming lessons.
With the first kid, I stumbled along, but I wasn’t totally falling apart. With
two, I was still doing okay. By three kids, my edges were beginning to fray. I felt
imbalanced, depressed, tired. Then I found I was pregnant with number four, while
cradling a nine-month-old on my hip, and I realized. I am in totally over my
head.
With
all my background in spirituality, you would think, the answer would be “Turn
to God. Ask for help.” It is actually the answer, but that’s never the way I
have operated. Grace for the Good Girl helped me see that. I’ve always known
exactly what I was capable of and pushed myself to get things done. If there
weren’t people to help, I would do it myself. Even if I wasn’t doing something
I liked or felt gifted at, I always knew I could get it done, and since I
didn’t want to disappoint people, I did. But finally I had come to this time in
my life, where I was at last at the end of my capabilities. That’s when I began
to realize that I have never really trusted God, I’ve trusted my own
self-sufficiency. I’ve always felt like I have to perform to get favor. That
included performing for God. I had no idea how to interact with God if I wasn’t
doing all the things I should do, if I wasn’t earning his favor through my own
effort.
Then
around the beginning of the year, I had to take my oldest daughter to the
dentist. I had procrastinated this for a lot time because she’s an anxious kid
(and frankly, I’m an anxious mom). I really wanted to find the perfect first
dentist experience for her. Now things had gotten bad and her tooth would have
to be removed. I was drowning in waves of suckitude. Not only was this proof
that I was a bad mom, but my kid would have to go through a painful operation.
I felt buried in all the things I should have done.
That’s
when God began to show me the meaning of grace. Before when I had negative
thoughts about my parenting skills, I would just try to think of all the other
ways I was performing well. To do that, I would often look around and try to
find someone else doing worse than myself and judge them a bit to prove that I
was okay. Now, I began to realize that I judged because I was afraid others
would judge me. It wasn’t that others around me couldn’t live up to my high
expectations, it was that I couldn’t live up to my high expectations, and I was
afraid you would see me failing. That is why I was so discouraged with my life
because I was constantly not meeting my own expectations of perfection. I got
so angry at my kids because I liked following rules and you know what toddlers
like—not following rules. So it made me crazy.
As
I was sitting in the oral surgeon’s office, the words of a song came running
through my head: your grace is enough. God began to show me that grace is not
something you earn by following the rules, that grace is by definition the
unmerited favor of God. So God loves me
when I am doing well, but he loves me just as much when I screw up big time. I
looked at this situation in my life and said, “That was a painful and costly
mistake. It was a mistake, but maybe it doesn’t have to be my identity.” I tried
talking to myself in a new way. I said: “I procrastinated and my kid is in pain,”
but this time I ended that phrase with “…and God loves me.” And I started trying
to do this in my life whenever those failure thoughts flooded my mind. “My
floors really, really need to be mopped..and God loves me.” “I didn’t get
around to homeschooling today…and God loves me.” “I lost my temper. I screamed
at the kids…and God loves me.”
I
began to see all the ways that I had been trying so very hard to get straight
As in parenting, the ways that I had been putting so much pressure on myself to
be the perfect homeschooler. When I thought about the possibility that I didn’t
have to homeschool perfectly, it was like this big whoosh of air into my life.
If I didn’t have to try so very hard to be the perfect mom, maybe there might
be space in my life for other things I cared about too-- like finishing my
novel. It seemed like such a relief to
have some space in my life. So I started relaxing a little more with
homeschooling. I gave up needing to be uber-creative and post fancy projects on
my blog to earn people’s approval. We played more and flew by the seat of our
pants. Some days we didn’t get around to homeschooling, but others we did. I
began to learn to release the “shoulds” in my life, and replace them with “I
can’t do that…and God loves me.” I tried to let go of my need for my kids to be
perfectly well-balanced and well-behaved for me to be okay as a mom. I’m still
working on that. I’m not perfect …and God loves me.
