How I Made the Decision to Homeschool
When our daughter was three, I begged my husband to find a job in the DC area because I really wanted to move.
I was a young mom with three small kids and the loneliness was overwhelming. None of our friends were married much less parents. Our church was young and filled with college and working young adults so when I showed up with three babies, they were totally unprepared to help so I just had to sit in the hallway by myself.
We moved, searching for an area with other people in the same life stage and just like that, I went from being alone in a hallway to finding myself in a church where there were over a dozen kids in each age group!
At first, it was really nice and lots of fun, but then I began to experience the parts I was unaware of when I was the only mom in a group.
Like comparison and competition.
After about a month of socializing with our new friends, I was chatting with a few moms on the playground and one of them asked me where I was going to enroll my daughter in preschool.
Ummm, I had not thought about it. We were new to the area and were still getting used to everything.
She then proceeded to tell me that the best preschools all had waiting lists and most likely, since I had not signed up early enough, I wouldn’t be able to get my daughter into a good school for the next year.
The other moms were nodding their heads in agreement and I started to panic a bit inside, kind of feeling like I had dropped the ball and had already put my daughter behind everyone else by not knowing about these things.
Then they started to discuss the pros and cons of each school. Like which ones prepared the students better for public school placement tests and such.
The next day I called several of these preschools to set up visits so that I could get my daughter on the waiting lists.
The thing is, I really didn’t want to send her to school.
Growing up, I hated school so much and I just didn’t want to think about her going.
I visited the preschools, hoping that my heart would change and grow to be happy in sending her.
Rather, all I could see was cinderblock walls and chain-link fences, reminding me of prisons and making me feel suffocated. My heart just grew heavier and filled with dread.
I went home not knowing what to do since all they could do was put me on the waiting list anyway.
I spent the next few days watching my kids play together, so happy and joyful, but I was so sad thinking about school. I just couldn’t bear it so I did the only thing I could do.
I prayed.
Although God doesn’t always give us what we want, I know that He gives us peace in all circumstances. And my kids DID have to go to school, so I fully expected God to give me peace and to find me a school.
I prayed about my laundry list of worries:
- How would I be able to pass on the tenets of our faith when she is not with me most of the time?
- How can I remain the strongest influence in my children’s lives if they are not with me the majority of time?
- How do I protect them from evil when they are so young and defenseless?
- How can I make sure they are individually nurtured to grow to their fullest potential? A teacher with dozens of students cannot do that.
- How can I teach them the importance of family when friends consume the majority of time?
- How can they learn to socialize and navigate relationships in healthy ways? Public school definitely does not teach this.
- How can I make sure my kids aren’t boxed into Asian stereotypes?
I had so many more, the list just went on and on and on!!
Then about two weeks later, I received my monthly issue of Parents magazine and there was an article, several pages long, on homeschooling.
I had never heard of such a thing!
It was crazy because the article featured several families with quotes about why they homeschooled. And every single quote addressed one of my concerns. I literally felt like they were talking to me.
This could not be the way God was answering me.
Did He remember that I barely made it through high school and failed my first year of college? He did know that I couldn’t do fractions, right?
And who would do something so crazy anyway????!!!!!
But I couldn’t deny the jump in my soul I felt while reading the article so I prayed again. But this time, God brought back something in my memory from a long time ago that I had forgotten.
My mom was a tailor and her customers loved her. Once when I was in middle school, one of my mom’s long-time customers invited our family to her house for dinner. My mom told me she had a daughter about my age. I was apathetic about the visit as most pre-teens are about anything.
We went to their house and I met the daughter who was a year older than me. I was suspicious, snide and annoyed since I was living through the hell that is middle school. But the thing that struck me immediately was how genuinely kind she was. I remember thinking that I had never met anyone my age as kind as she was.
She was just so so so nice. And happy. I felt no anger, no angst, no competition, absolutely no negativity coming from her.
AANNNDDDD…I learned that she didn’t go to school!!!!!!!!! Wha???!!!!!! Was she crazy or LUCKY???!!!!!
This memory flooded back to mind, so I told God that if this was what He was telling me to do, he was going to have to let me meet one of these people in real life.
Sure enough, one week later, I received one of those neighborhood parent/community newsletters on my porch and as I glanced through it, there was an ad in the event section for a get-together for Montgomery County Homeschoolers.
I went and only one other woman was there, which was all that mattered because she was one of the kindest people I had ever met. It was just the two of us, so she spent all her time talking to me, answering all of my questions and encouraging me. And man, I asked her the stupidest questions!
****Lori, wherever you are, you definitely changed my life and I think of you often!
She invited me out to her house to look at her curriculum and invited us to a roller skating social so that I could meet more people.
Needless to say, I was very impressed and overwhelmed by everything I saw and everyone I met, and I knew I had my answer.
———————————————————————————
This was just the beginning of my journey and I still had a lot of work in front me. Namely, convincing my husband and overcoming my own insecurities. Trust me, I had many battles to fight.
It’s incredible that of all things, this was the path set before me. It was terrifying because my own education was so inadequate, the last thing I wanted to do was mess up my kids.
If you knew how little I knew and how unprepared I was, I’m sure you would have been one of those people to discourage me. But when you are desperate for radical change, isn’t this the way life works?
