Why We Homeschool (Part 2 of 762): What Else Was I Going to Do?

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Full disclosure:

I was afraid.

When we decided to homeschool our kids, I was about to enroll my youngest in kindergarten. She'd been in a mom's morning out program a couple mornings a week, so I was used to having about 8 hours a week to myself. I remember surrendering four of those to volunteer at the school where our oldest was enrolled.

I don't remember what I did with the other four.

So now I was staring down 30 hours a week of me-time, and I could not imagine such a thing.


Homeschooling was always part of our plan. We assumed we'd pull our girls out around middle school, so that they'd have as little time around middle schoolers as possible. We'd take one for the team by pulling two middle school girls out of rotation and maybe rent an RV and travel the country for a couple of years, trying to convince the girls that Laura Ingalls Wilder really IS the standard of cool.

But we hadn't even made it to second grade, and here we were, ready to pull the plug on traditional education. We knew we could always change our minds, but we were in a magnet program, which meant that we were not guaranteed re-admittance. We needed to make this work, and really, we needed to make it work for a long time.

Having four full hours a week to myself was nice, and I could taste the deliciousness of 30. Even if I gave two full days a week to the school, I would have three full school days to spend however I chose. I could clean the house. I could shop in peace. I could work out, meet people for lunch, volunteer for organizations. I could say "yes" to other people.

The possibilities were endless, but I could not reconcile any of my ideas of how to spend my potential free time with what I was now feeling was my mission in life. No matter how noble my ideas were - serving my community, staying fit and "taking care of me", teaching a Bible study, writing more, volunteering...they all felt like ways to fill time while someone else was doing something that I could do. Maybe even something that I should do.

It was time for us to give up giving them up. My genetics point to me living past my 90th birthday. If the girls left home at 18, then I'd have the next forty years of my life to take care of me: to volunteer, to write, to serve outside my home. To spend 30 hours a week doing stuff I can't remember. With the clock ticking on those 18 years God gave us to enjoy these kids at home, then it was time for us to start figuring out how to do that.

I wasn't judging school moms or working moms. I was looking at my circumstances and knowing that 30 hours a week to myself would be VERY easy to get used to. And if my plan was to homeschool somewhere down the line, then giving up those 30 hours a week after 3 or 4 years of getting used to them would be excruciating. So the choice was to put them both in school and leave them in as long as we could stand it...or pull both out and find a way to enjoy them at home until God changed the plan.