Back-to-school debrief

Several people have reached out to me by email and social media to ask how I was doing now that my two elementary-school-aged children are back in school. It’s heartwarming to know that despite the relative anonymity of the Internet, people do care about our family. I work hard at checking my ego when it comes to homeschooling but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that sending the children back to school after three years of homeschooling is a blow to my pride. After all, I have written extensively about homeschooling, I have encouraged people to start homeschooling, heck, I even have a talk and a podcast episode on discerning homeschooling…

Let’s rewind a little in the interest of letting everyone catch up. 3 years ago, we pulled 4 of our 9 children out of school in parallel with our move to the country. Homeschooling was something we had long dreamed about and the move gave us a perfect transition point. We took the jump. Our children were in grade 9, 8, 2 and Kindergarten. The first year went relatively well: hopes were high, and while the teenagers were not thrilled with the move they recognized that taking the time to survey our surroundings before jumping headlong into a new social scene had some benefits. They conflated their doubts about homeschooling with their doubts about the move and we were able to tackle this transition as one big life change.

The following September, I was pregnant with our tenth child and looking forward to a new year of homeschooling. Homeschooling was hard but it was worth it. I was proud of the efforts I was investing in pursuing this dream. Despite our general happiness with the way things were going, we realized that our high-schoolers were getting behind in their academics. It was always important to us that our teenagers maintain or surpass the school curriculum: we didn’t want homeschooling to curtail their post-secondary options.  At first we chalked it up to de-schooling and switching gears. After a year of de-schooling and switching gears, we had to ask ourselves how much longer we could afford to let academics slide: how far behind can you get in chemistry and math before you can’t apply to university anymore?

We decided to register the teenagers in a distance learning program. From my perspective, things were looking up but I had not accounted for the unexpected: in September, I suffered a complicated miscarriage and landed on my butt for 3 months. Complications from the miscarriage started snowballing and my health took a sharp dive. We started to lose ground, not just academically but in the very fabric of our family. My husband had to carry a lot of the management and logistics of the family while I recovered. Relationships started to fray at the edges. By the month of May, I was seriously burned out and we wrapped up the school year early. The thought of homeschooling filled me with apprehension but I reasoned that I needed a break and that I would be back on my A-game by the time September rolled around. During the summer, I started to have anxiety attacks. I didn’t connect the anxiety to homeschooling but as July turned into August and September approached, the anxiety became crippling. It affected all my relationships and turned me into a paralyzed puddle of not-happening.

Combined with my pre-existing poor health, my anxiety over homeschooling threw our family into a maelstrom of stress and unhappiness. Homeschooling through the conflicts and the fighting was eating me alive and not doing it kept me up at night. Our children fought all the time, my husband and I were short with everyone and compassionate with no one. Our grade 5 son refused to do any work, my grade 2 daughter was progressing in her reading at a snail’s pace, one step forward two steps back as we didn’t have the wherewithal to give her the attention she needed every single day.

Homeschooling didn’t come naturally to me. It required a sustained effort in overcoming my temperament, my personality and my own ambitions. Every day was a fight against myself. Normally, my approach would be to fight the fight. But while I thrashed and fought to provide a modicum of education to my children, I was taking everyone down with me. My usual drive and energy were depleted and I had nothing left to fight with.

Last December, we decided to send the elementary school-aged children back to school.

How is school doing? Things are still in flux. On week 2, the children are still learning to navigate the social landscape of the classroom. Our very gregarious 10 year-old made friends who happen to be girls — he and his older brother have always related better to girls being largely surrounded by sisters — and he is getting flack for it. He is strong in his determination to be friends with whoever he well pleases. On day 2, we had an interesting experience with our daughter in grade 2 who came home saying it had been the worst day ever. We probed her quite a bit before learning that some of her classmates had to be disciplined for talking when they were not supposed to. We asked her if she was one of them and she said, mortified “OH NO! But I felt really bad for them!” Seeing her new friends get in trouble had completely ruined her day. I know that in time she will learn not to care and this breaks my heart in a million different ways.

The children are showing signs of stress but their attitude is positive. They are thrilled to be back in school.

The truth is that I’m relieved. But I’m also disappointed. There is no doubt in my mind that sending the children back to school was the best decision for them and for our family. But my pride is hurt, I won’t lie. I still believe that homeschooling is a beautiful thing. I still wish I could pull it off. In my life, I try to see failures as learning opportunities, so that failures are never pure losses, they bring with them a nugget of wisdom, new knowledge for the road. But for now, I am at a crossroad unsure of which direction to take.