Where Our Journey Began

Homeschooling was not even on my radar. In fact, when a mom I knew decided to homeschool her daughter instead of sending her to kindergarten, I thought the idea sounded crazy. I’m pretty sure all I asked her about it was ‘why do you want to do that?’ I had known a few people who had homeschooled when I was younger, but never thought anything more about it than ‘you do your schoolwork at home.’

Both my husband and I grew up attending public school, went to a state college and so it never occurred to us to do anything different for our own kids. We sent our oldest two to a private christian preschool, which was well known for its high academic standards. Our oldest had the foundations of reading started before entering elementary school. Our local public school was highly rated (10/10) and focused on college prep. The kindergarten room had the teacher’s college mascot proudly displayed. It felt as though we had been able to set them on the path for success.

Once my daughter started kindergarten we experienced the excruciating task every parent must face of getting her to do her homework. It made the idea of someone choosing to homeschool seemed even more crazy. We are barely surviving doing homework with her, why would I want to try to do a whole day of schoolwork with her? Hours were spent with her at the table coaxing her to complete her work. Many tears were shed, frustrated and angry words uttered in the task of spending more than an hour writing a paragraph on a topic she cared nothing about, which was then thrown in the trash a week later. Once I found her writing poetry, but had to halt that activity for the sake of these assigned paragraphs. I found myself repeating those words that felt empty of truth, “You’ll need to know this one day.” I myself hadn’t written a single persuasive essay since graduating.

My oldest loves music. I have a treasured video of her singing all of Amazing Grace before she was even two. She was a good student, but she broke one of the school rules: she sang or hummed while she worked. It wasn’t even a conscious action; it came from her love of music in her focused state. Her teacher made her a sign to signal to her that she had to stop singing. When her teacher told us about it we laughed, we understood how it might be distracting for others in a class for someone to be singing, but it was also sad for her to be constantly corrected for doing something she loved. It reminded my husband of his childhood, where he was rebuked every year for his inability to not talk for the length of a class. It seemed ironic as those things which got him in trouble in school, talking and interest in other people, are now what make him great at his work being a pastor.

One of the rules at her school was that you weren’t allowed to tell another kid that you didn’t want to play with them. I understand the heart behind it; not wanting for kids to be unkind by excluding others, but the unintended message to kids was that if someone was unkind to them, they couldn’t say no to playing with them. While I want my kids to learn how to be thoughtful and include others around them, forgive those who hurt them; I also want them to be able to say no to spending time with people who are unkind or cruel. I want them to learn healthy and God honoring boundaries.

Outside of school, she was doing well socially. It was a joy to see more and more of her personality shining through. But I started feeling the time with her slipping through my hands. I worked most Saturdays, my husband worked every Sunday. Both of us worked long days, and tried to stagger our schedules so we didn’t have to utilize daycare. Our family time felt lacking, and too much of the time we did have was spent on that dreaded homework. At one point I realized we hadn’t had a day home together as a family for more than 3 months. We did take her out of school for family camping trips or vacation and laughed off the letter from the school that came due to her ‘frequent truancy’. While her teacher didn’t think that she was missing enough school to cause her to become behind, I had that nagging feeling that as she got older it would be disadvantageous for her and we would have to stop those mid-year trips.

As much as homework could be an ordeal at times (it wasn’t too bad every day), she did very well in school. She was at the table with the group of kids that were doing a little more advanced work, and all of her report cards gave glowing feedback. There were those things mentioned above that didn’t sit right. But she was doing well. We were naturally proud of her and what she was accomplishing. Her younger sister was doing well in pre-school (if that’s a real thing), and we hoped that her desire to always move would settle so she wouldn’t be in trouble when her turn came for kindergarten. We were living the American dream, checking all the boxes that told us we were doing all the right things. We were taking our kids down the same path we were familiar with, navigating how to do that in a world that was not the same as when we were kids. Then God planted a seed that started to grow and take shape into a call that changed the direction of our family’s life.

Finding Our Path: the next step on our journey