If you desire to be happy about homeschooling, look for the reason you believe homeschooling is the best thing or something that warms your heart about homeschooling. Don’t allow the negative or the tough to weigh in on the decision.
Happiness is a choice I believe.
As parents there are lots of things that we could do without in the parenting realm – temper tantrums, attitudes, changing nappies, midnight feeds, sibling rivalry, messy rooms and on and on and sometimes on again – but these things don’t get a say when we are deciding if we love and are happy with being a parent. The warm fuzzies rule when we think about whether we love parenting or not.
It can be the same way with homeschooling. Don’t decide whether you love it or not on the days when the kids leave their brains in bed, when you wonder if the kids have brains at all, or when you have to start the day by dragging the kids, frothing at the mouth, out from under the bed or table. Look for the moments – they don’t necessarily happen every day or even every week – when you think to yourself, “Gee Whizz this is nice”, like when you catch the kids actually smiling as you read to them, or you see the ‘ah-ha’ moment on a child’s face as you teach them something, or you look at your teenager reading and think to yourself, “I taught him how to do that”. Those, not so often moments, counts for more than all the drudgery.
If you look at the work, the pain, the frustrations, the mess, the years still to wade through, who wouldn’t give up and send them packing. In fact we’d question ever being parents at all.
But think of the gold miners of old. They worked day after day, doing back breaking work, digging, and panning and hauling dirt, in the hope of finding a few specs of gold dust. It’s no different for homeschooling. We work hard, day after day, for the benefit of our family, but often feeling discouraged and just bone tired at the end of the day. But we keep going because our thoughts are on those rare golden moments. That’s why we’re doing this – because there are riches hidden in our work.
We can’t avoid the work if we are in this for the treasure. We have to be consistent and put in the work. There are many avoidance strategies we can employ but they only make us feel better because they are putting off the discomfort. If the work has to be done, then we just have to do it. Don’t stop to give thought to the struggles of the day ahead. Just jump in and start digging. The sooner we get to the work, the less energy we waste in procrastination and the closer and greater the rewards become.
At least that’s how I look at it.
