A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Image by Abhisek Sarda

That big decision you made? Stick with it. It takes time for everyone to settle in, to adapt, to understand the new contours of this unfolding change.

The emotional highs and particularly the lows are part of the movement of this “new thing.” The stiff unfamiliarity is temporary—like shoes that need to be worn so the leather straps soften, and the soles mold to your particular feet.

Sometimes there are blisters and sore toes along the way, but eventually, the fit becomes “right.”

In the meantime, while everyone gets familiar with the new reality, stay the course.

The tone of your home is set by you—I know how challenging that is. It’s all on you—the mood, the energetic field you create—your family looks to you to know if they should worry or trust, if they can be freely happy or ought to be careworn and subdued.

It’s exhausting to lead with joy and alacrity; self-doubt is the most natural part of the breaking-in process during the “new thing transition.” While you lead, you also monitor (you can’t help it!). The undulating emotions are feedback that can at once validate your decision, and then a day later, shoot it in the heart.

Beware: wait 48 hours before making adjustments. Allow the waves of happy and sad to subside before evaluating each aspect of the new thing. Sometimes emotion is vented and over.

Give the new thing a real chance—to become a way of life, not just a “test run.” Invest. Believe.

You can tweak—make it your own, do it your way, adapt it to your particular situation. But don’t give up too easily. Trust that your hunch was a good one and live into it.

Stay the course… a little while longer, and see what happens.

Cross-posted on facebook.

Image by Tammy Wahl. Used with permission.

When you wonder how to handle that crisis with your child, stop. Remember: how would you have liked your parent to react to you, in a similar situation?

It takes a moment to shift from responsible adult to the memory of vulnerable child or curious middler or risk-taking teen. It’s a felt sense, more than a logical thought process.

Re-inhabit the child you were. Go small. Imagine your limited awareness, your feeling of anxiety that you were “in trouble” or that your parents were “going to kill you” or your disappointment in yourself that you had failed to live up to your parents’ expectations.

What did you want from them? (Ignore for a moment the temptation you have as a parent to teach lessons, or give consequences, or explain mistakes.) Instead, imagine the tone you wished your parent had taken, or the path to redemption your parent may have offered, or the help the parent could contribute to alleviate pressure or danger or lost opportunities.

Carry on an imagined dialog of how your parent might have handled a crisis that would have helped you. Or recall the caring conversation your parent did have with you that helped you.

Once you’ve helped yourself “re-feel” what it was like to be young and in trouble, make the subtle shift. Imagine how you might be the “parent-you-wished-you-had” for your child now, in her crisis.

We like to say in Brave Writer: Offer help, because help helps.

Be kind—even if you have to issue consequences, you can still do so with gentleness, kindness, sympathy, awareness of pain.

If you are looking for remorse or regret in your child and don’t see it, remember how most kids use hardness as a posture to ward off a parent’s intensity. If you reach out in the opposite spirit, you may catch your child off guard and find that he or she opens up to you or lets down and shows fear or anxiety or self-recrimination.

When in doubt, remember who you were, what you wanted, how you felt in crisis, and how you hoped your parent would respond to you.

Go and do likewise.

Cross-posted on facebook.

Who’s the boss of you? You are.

Are Mr. Saxon’s spiral-math lessons in charge of you? Nope.
You get to skip a lesson or take a break or switch to a new program or hire a tutor. Mr. Saxon doesn’t decide for you.

Is Sonlight’s Instructor’s Guide the boss of you? Nope.
You get to pick and choose which writing project to do, which novels to finish and which to abandon due to boredom, which activities to complete and which to overhaul with your own imagination, what pace to go and what weeks to toss in the round file. Sonlight doesn’t decide for you.

Is classical education the professorial boss of you? Nope.
Ancient texts and four year history cycles don’t control what you study today. Written narrations in every subject don’t have you pinned. You get to act out a narration or never discuss a book or brush by 500 years of history, if you want, if stuff going on today in our world is more fascinating or more compelling. Your kids will get it all again in college, anyway. You can relax because you can decide.

Is your charter school the certified boss of you? Nope.
You can quit and go it alone, you can give up the state money to be free to do what feels right for your family, you can campaign for reform to get a charter school to match what you need and want. You can decide if you *want* to be affiliated with a charter school.

Is your best friend the boss of you? Nope.
She has enough to worry about. She doesn’t need to handle your homeschool too. You get to decide what works for you and your kids, no matter how smart she is, no matter how long she has homeschooled, no matter how good her advice.

Is the language disorder specialist in charge of your child? Nope.
You get to decide how much of the diagnosis you believe, how many of the therapies you apply, how much you let those diagnostic terms define how you see your child. You get to say your beliefs and stick to them, if necessary. You get to advocate for your kid. You’re in charge.

Is your cherished homeschool forum the boss of you? Nope.
The members are as likely to switch from one program to the next, and get confused about what’s the best, as you are. Don’t listen to them. Take their ideas, test the ones that sound good to you, and discover which can become your own. It’s not up to you to prove to them that you are “one of the faithful.” It’s up to you to be true to who you are and what you actually do at home, damn the torpedoes.

Is unschooling the unwitting boss of your unschool? Nope, nope, nope.
You don’t have to live up to the far-reaching ideals, but you can try to if you want to. Why not? Or you can go halfway or not at all once you see it and know what it is. No one gets to tell you if you are a legit unschooler or not—you decide for you. Definitions help groups cohere, but you get to define for you what happens in your house. You’re not a “group member.” You’re a mother or father with the most intimate knowledge of your family. You decide. Are you an unschooler? Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t. It’s up to you.

Are the Common Core Standards in charge of your homeschool? Nope. Emphatically no. This is why we left the state to begin with.

YOUR standards are the boss of you.
Your vision.
Your children.
Your beliefs about education.
Your aspirations for your family.
Your flexibility and your rigidity.
Your weaknesses and your strengths.
Your joys and your personal pains.
Your vision and your limited sight.

This is YOUR homeschool.

YOU ARE THE BOSS OF YOU.

You get to have the homeschool you choose. In fact, you already DO have the homeschool you choose.

Embrace it.
Love it.
Feed it brownies.
Share it confidently.
Live it boldly.

You do you.

Why not? No one else can.

Have you ever noticed that you reinvent homeschool every year? You would think, particularly after having one child go through a certain grade level, that when the next child in line hit the same age and stage, you’d have it all dialed. You’d pull out your notes, books, and memories from the first kid… and apply them as a template right over top of the next one!

Yet it rarely works that way.

Instead, the next child comes down the pike and you find yourself doubting the old tricks and books. You’ve since heard of a sparkly new program that teaches itself and you want to try it. This child is so different from the last one that the old way just wouldn’t work.

Sometimes you will be three children in and realize that you never did like that math curriculum and now that you’ve figured it out, you can’t spend ONE MORE DAY looking at that hideously designed book with its awful colors and nonsense explanations, no matter how much you spent on it.

As you grow in your career of home education, you also get smarter. What satisfied you the first year often feels cramped or schooly to the new brave you that sees learning through new eyes. You feel freer to risk, to try avant garde strategies. You stop quantifying the hours of the day and allow yourself to “count” card games and nature hikes as part of your children’s education.

I had a phone call with a mother of nine children, with two of them grown and raising their own kids, say to me that she was unsure what writing program to buy. She’d already successfully reared, homeschooled, and married off two kids yet was not quite sure if she had the best writing plan for the last two kids still at home.

If anyone should be at ease in this home education business, you’d think it would be a mother who could reassure herself that with two successful homeschool grads, she must be doing a good enough job with the tools she’s already got!

But that’s not how it works.

The truth is: we homeschooling parents are on a never-ending campaign to do right by our children.

That means we tirelessly turn over rocks looking for the next best rightest brightest choice for this specific child at this specific stage of life.

Not only that, we’re a part of the equation too. We want to be stimulated.

We look for triggers for our creativity, we feed our learning curve new ideas and philosophies, we expand our sense of fun and imagination, and we want reassurance that we are making measurable progress with our children.

To that end, homeschooling parents reinvent their homeschools every single year.

It’s a part of the warp and woof of this lifestyle. It’s what enables parents to sustain 20 year commitments. It’s what creates tailor-made educations that accommodate the wide-variety of people in our families.

As you spend time researching what you’ll do next year, allow yourself to go on the adventure of reinvention.

Ask yourself 5 questions to stimulate your thinking

1. What works? How do I feel about it?
If it works, you don’t necessarily have to change it. But if it works and you are sick of it or the child is bored or you’re going through the motions, it’s fine to change it up—even if it’s “working” in theory.

2. What’s not working? What can I do about it?
If it’s not working, you may need more than a new book. You may need a whole new perspective or view of how to work with this particular subject. Read about the philosophy of education with regard to this subject area and shift how you see it.

3. What do I wish I were doing that I’m not?
Try doing it – for a month or more – to see! Take a small bite of the apple. You don’t have to go in all the way… yet.

4. What am I doing that I wish I weren’t?
Can you give it up for a week, a month, or reduce it to just a couple times a week? See how that feels?

5. What do my kids wish we were doing that we aren’t?
Get it on the schedule—plan it, do it!

Enjoy reinvention. No guilt. No self-doubt. It’s one of the many great rewards and satisfactions of being a career home educator.

Top image by Horia Varlan (cc text added)