Who would've thought that homeschooling for me would be so incredibly fulfilling and also in some ways incredibly hard? Well, probably most other moms that homeschool could've told me that, but I truly went in to this thinking, "Ya this is what we want to do so let's try it out! Wahoo!" But when I realized the other day that we've only homeschooled for two weeks I was amazed! It feels like it's been a few months at least already. And I think it's because it's been huge ups and huge downs for me.
The reason that there have been downs - hard moments/days/middle of the nights - is because of perceptions I've been hanging on to. Slowly realizing what the perceptions are that are holding me back.
Perception #1: Being alone means being lonely. This brings up traumatic feelings for me. I felt lonely growing up and the reasons for it were traumatic ones. Homeschooling can mean being alone more. For me, I haven't wanted to join coops just yet so that I can figure out how we want to run this for our family. I will say now at this point I haven't felt lonely too often but before we started and that first week there was a lot of anxiety I was dealing with. I was afraid of not feeling supported and also it was just past feelings I was dealing with even more than the prospect of being lonely. So there was some healing over that for me which was good. But I did not want to give this up in order to make more time to be with friends. Which is something I've done in the past - given certain things up in order to be around people so that I don't feel lonely. My goal this year is to invite others to be part of what I'm doing that I love instead of changing to follow others. And I like it. And, the bottoms line is being alone isn't the same as being lonely.
Perception #2: The only way to school a child is to do it the way public school does it. Boy, this one has been harder to let go of than I thought it would be. It created so much stress for me though and made all of this a lot less fun! I love the ideas in Waldorf education, and even some of the ideas held by unschoolers, and I just love the idea that we can learn what and how we want. All of that really is a limb that you're climbing out on when all you know is public school!! And when it's different and there are a lot of opinions out there on this. So, learning to let this go is helping sooo much.
It's amazing to me how easily these kids retain things just from reading and when we do things together. We've been learning about ancient Egypt this month and Cole has been reading a lot about it and he is constantly teaching me new things! And Gracie just seems to be blossoming in every way. She's constantly creating things whether it's a complicated toy train track to a new game to a new song on the piano. The capacity of these guys to learn, create, and do is astounding to me. We went to Costco yesterday and at lunch we sat by the windows that show what the workers are doing in the kitchen. These kids watched everything for twenty minutes just watching and making observations about the pizza machines and who those work, and what the workers were doing. They were mesmerized. They've always been that way about things, but I think the fact that we are learning so experientially brings that out even more in them. Wow, I love this.
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