Archive for the ‘Podcasts’ Category

[Podcast #346] Part One: ADHD and Homeschooling

Brave Writer Podcast

Join us for today’s Brave Writer podcast episode!

In this honest and eye-opening conversation, we explore what happens when the home educator begins to recognize ADHD traits in themselves. From task initiation and time blindness to hyperfocus, novelty, shame, doom boxes, and the relief of a diagnosis, we talk about how our wiring shapes the homeschool experience.

We also name the gifts:

  • enthusiasm,
  • curiosity,
  • side quests,
  • deep dives,
  • and the ability to turn education itself into a living adventure.

Tune in for Part One of a conversation many of us didn’t know we needed.

Show Notes

What If the Home Educator Has ADHD?

We spend a lot of time talking about how to support neurodivergent children. We look for the right strategies, the right accommodations, the right rhythm, the right language. We read the books. We consult the experts. We adjust the environment.

But what happens when we begin to recognize that some of those same traits live in us?

Many homeschooling parents are exquisitely attentive to their children’s needs while remaining strangely unaware of their own wiring. We notice the child who needs movement, fewer transitions, more time, less pressure, or a different path into learning. Meanwhile, we are the ones losing track of appointments, switching curriculum because the new thing feels alive, creating elaborate planner systems, avoiding the calendar because it triggers shame, or wondering why a simple task feels separated from us by an invisible wall.

That wall has a name for many people: task initiation.

Task initiation is not laziness. It is the experience of knowing what needs doing and still struggling to begin. The laundry is there. The email is there. The homeschool plan is there. Even the enjoyable activity is there. And yet, beginning can feel impossible until pressure, novelty, accountability, or hyperfocus finally kicks in.

For some of us, homeschooling works beautifully because it feeds the very traits we once thought were liabilities. Curiosity? That’s a homeschool superpower. Hyperfocus? Welcome to the deep dive. Love of novelty? Every library stack, unit study, poetry teatime, science experiment, rabbit trail, and historical obsession benefits from a parent who can become fascinated on demand.

The ADHD-style brain can bring enormous energy to home education. It can turn a child’s passing interest into a full-family immersion. It can learn alongside the child with sincerity. It can say yes to side quests. It can transform education from a checklist into a feast.

And it can also create stress.

A parent who loves novelty may change course too often. A parent who resists schedules may have a child who longs for one. A parent who underestimates time may turn every departure into a crisis. A parent who avoids the calendar may miss the appointment, double-book the day, or live under a cloud of dread.

This is where self-knowledge becomes a gift to the whole family.

We do not need shame to become better supported. We need information. A diagnosis, a pattern, a vocabulary word, or even a moment of recognition can help us stop moralizing our struggles and start building meaningful strategies.

Maybe that means alarms on the calendar. Maybe it means protected days when nothing gets scheduled. Maybe it means routines instead of rigid schedules. Maybe it means keeping snacks, water, and backup clothes in the car because “prepared” does not come naturally. Maybe it means apologizing when our wiring creates stress for someone else.

Homeschooling is not built by perfect parents.

It is built by human parents who keep learning.

When we understand our own brains, we are better able to create homes where everyone’s needs matter: the child who craves structure, the child who needs freedom, the parent who comes alive through novelty, and the family system that needs enough steadiness to hold it all.

The goal is not to become someone else. The goal is to know who we are well enough to build supports that let love, learning, and connection flourish.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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[Podcast #345] DIY Writing Retreats for Kids

Brave Writer Podcast

What if a writing retreat didn’t require a plane ticket to Ireland?

This week on the Brave Writer podcast, we explore what makes writing feel spacious, playful, and alive. From Julie’s memoir retreat on the Irish Sea to Melissa’s fiction experiments with point of view, we talk about how atmosphere, community, sensory detail, and low-stakes exploration can help writers of every age drop beneath the noise of daily life.

We also share practical ways to create a mini writing retreat at home for your kids, complete with snacks, freedom, feedback, and delight.

Join us as we reimagine writing as nourishment for the intellect and the spirit.

Show Notes

Create a Writing Retreat at Home

A writing retreat sounds luxurious, doesn’t it?

A lodge on the Irish Sea. Waves rolling in all night. Tea, notebooks, quiet mornings, and a room full of writers listening deeply to one another’s words.

Most of us are not packing for Ireland this summer. We have laundry to fold, meals to make, camps to drive to, toddlers to supervise, teens to text, and a dog who needs to go out again.

Still, the heart of a writing retreat is available to us.

A retreat is not magic because of the location. The location helps, of course. Beauty and quiet give the nervous system a chance to settle. But the real gift of a retreat is that it creates permission. Permission to slow down. Permission to notice. Permission to write without producing anything useful right away.

That kind of permission can happen at your kitchen table.

Start with safety.

Tell your kids that this is not a grammar day. No red pens. No grades. No “fixing.” Writing retreat writing is exploratory writing. We are playing with language the way we play with Legos. Dump the pieces out. Build something strange. Take it apart. Try again.

Then make it feel different from school. Light a candle. Put out snacks. Make tea or lemonade. Invite a few friends. Write outside under a tree. Bring clipboards to the porch. Let someone write under the table if that helps. Change the atmosphere, and you change the body’s expectations.

Instead of assigning a finished piece, offer experiments.

  • Write a memory in past tense. Then, the next day, write the same memory in present tense. Notice what changes. Does the scene feel more immediate? More chaotic? More visual?
  • Write a story from the hero’s point of view. Then write it from the villain’s. What does the “bad guy” notice that the hero missed?
  • Choose one object, like a baseball glove, a mixing bowl, a shell, a button, a pinecone. Look at it longer than seems necessary. Smell it. Touch it. Turn it over. Let the object reveal its personality. The physical world is often where metaphor begins.
  • Try a proverb prompt. Gather a handful of familiar sayings: “The early bird catches the worm,” “A watched pot never boils,” “Many hands make light work.” Ask your child to choose one and freewrite a real-life memory that somehow brushes against its meaning.

Most importantly, make sharing optional.

Writing is vulnerable. Even experienced writers can shake when reading personal work aloud. Children may cry, freeze, get silly, or collapse into giggles. Those responses are not misbehavior. They are the body’s way of handling the strange power of seeing private experience turned into words.

When kids do share, ask listeners to notice what they loved. A funny phrase. A surprising image. A sound pattern. A moment that made them lean in. Let feedback begin with delight.

A writing retreat at home does not need to last a week. It can be one morning. One afternoon. One picnic blanket and a notebook.

What matters is the shift: writing is not always a performance. Sometimes writing is a place to enter. A place to discover what we think, what we remember, what we feel, and what we have to say.

That is nourishment. That is the writing life.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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[Podcast #344] Courageous Divorce: An Interview with Alisha Roth

Brave Writer Podcast

What happens when faith, prayer, endurance, and every “right” effort still do not make a marriage safe?

In this brave and deeply honest conversation, we talk with Alisha Roth, author of Courageous Divorce, about young marriage, religious expectations, abuse, motherhood, homeschooling, community loss, and the difficult clarity that can come when a woman finally listens to her own body and life.

Alisha Roth
Alisha Roth

Together, we explore divorce not as failure, but as a serious boundary, sometimes the one that makes healing, safety, forgiveness, and a more honest future possible.

Listen in for a tender conversation about faith, courage, and choosing to truly live.

Show Notes

When Divorce Becomes a Boundary

What happens when you do all the “right” things and the relationship still isn’t safe?

You pray. You read the books. You go to counseling. You choose your words carefully. You try to be patient, forgiving, generous, faithful. You tell yourself that every marriage is hard. You remind yourself that your children need a family. You try again.

And then one day, your body tells the truth before your mind can bear to.

We’ve heard from so many women who know this story from the inside. They were raised to believe that marriage was a sacred container, that endurance was maturity, that self-sacrifice was love, and that divorce represented failure. For women formed by religious communities, the pressure can be even stronger. Stay. Submit. Forgive. Pray harder. Protect the marriage. Protect the family. Protect the story everyone else wants to believe.

But what protects the woman?

That question matters.

A marriage cannot be healed by one person’s devotion alone. No amount of careful language, spiritual discipline, emotional labor, or maternal effort can make an unsafe relationship safe if the other person refuses accountability. A woman can contort herself for years trying to become gentle enough, quiet enough, faithful enough, forgiving enough, only to discover that the problem was never her lack of effort.

Sometimes the most honest act is to stop pretending that endurance is the same as health.

Divorce is often described as an ending, and of course it is. It changes homes, finances, friendships, holidays, family rhythms, and the story you thought you were living. It can bring grief, confusion, fear, and loneliness. It can expose how fragile some communities are when a woman tells the truth about her life.

But divorce can also be a boundary.

A strong one. A serious one. A boundary that says: this level of intimacy is not safe. This arrangement is not healthy. This proximity is causing harm. Something has to change.

That framing can be clarifying. A boundary is not revenge. It is not bitterness. It is not a refusal to forgive. A boundary names reality. It creates distance where distance is needed. It may even make compassion more possible because the person who was being harmed is no longer trapped inside the harm.

For mothers, the decision can feel especially agonizing. We may worry about what divorce will do to our children. We may fear losing the life we built around homeschooling, shared meals, read-alouds, rhythms, and traditions. We may wonder whether choosing our own safety means taking something precious away from them.

But children are not only shaped by the presence of two parents in one house. They are shaped by the emotional weather of that house. They are shaped by what gets excused, what gets hidden, what gets normalized, and what gets named.

A mother who chooses truth, safety, and health is teaching something too.

Life after divorce may not look like the life you imagined. It may require creativity. Homeschooling may change shape. Parenting schedules may require flexibility. Holidays may need new traditions. Community may have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

And still, there can be life there.

There can be sleep. There can be laughter. There can be a quiet home. There can be children who adapt. There can be women friends who let you tell the whole truth. There can be work, travel, dating, solitude, courage, and a new relationship with your own body and inner knowing.

There can be a future you did not know you were allowed to want.

The work is not easy, and no one can make the decision for another woman. There are consequences to staying and consequences to leaving. Each person has to reckon with her own life, her own children, her own safety, her own faith, her own truth.

But we want to say this clearly: your well-being matters. Your body matters. Your fear matters. Your clarity matters. Your life is not merely the support structure for someone else’s story.

You are allowed to live.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

Posted in Podcasts | Comments Off on [Podcast #344] Courageous Divorce: An Interview with Alisha Roth