This week I started my eighteenth year of homeschooling, counting from the year my oldest turned four and I began my first overambitious morning time plan. My homeschool now looks so much different from those early days. The children are three times as big and the baby that I had that first school year is now starting college. Once again, she will be in my home but not part of the homeschool rhythm.
Instead of sitting at the table with open books everywhere, plotting out reading schedules and putting together plans, I opened up old files and cut and paste columns of page numbers. I took the checklists from last year and changed the book titles. I guess I made good enough homeschool plans in the past that now homeschool planning has become boring. You can hardly call it planning, unless you take a look at my weekly time budget. That piece definitely gets harder with teens!
About a decade ago, when I was barely thirty and in the thick of the glory homeschool days, explaining my thoughts and plans to a friend, when she made a keen observation. She said, “You know, I’ve noticed something. All the young moms with five and six year olds are the ones who desperately want to know everything about education and homeschooling. The moms with kids around ten years old are eager to tell the younger moms the best ways to do everything.” At the time we had this conversation, this is the stage we were at.
She continued, “It seems like they like to get as many others as possible to do what they’re doing. Then the moms with teens almost never give you answers to questions about specifics. The moms who have graduates and who we really should be listening to, seem to avoid talking about homeschooling and parenting all together.” She didn’t draw any conclusions afterwards. My friend is an astute observer and insightful generalizer, which makes her very fun to talk to. She was “just sayin’” as my kids now would call it.
Of course these observations are not universally true. It’s not like every mom homeschooling elementary kids is a curriculum evangelist. However, it does seem like the majority of curriculum evangelists don’t yet have teens.
Now, I’m speaking as someone who has been reading and writing and sharing about homeschooling for nearly twenty years. I’m in my forties and sharing my observations. It’s really not an age-of-the-mom thing, but rather a life stage thing, and we all hit different stages at different points (or even skip some stages entirely). Many moms are my age but haven’t quite hit the mom-of-teens stage, much less graduate and grandma stage.
I remember puzzling over and even being frustrated over the lack of women in later stages sharing about their homeschool. You can follow any number of moms with young kids homeschooling. Watch their stories of average homeschool days. Hear why they picked this or that curriculum.
But where are the moms with older kids still sharing all the nitty gritty details? These days there aren’t none. Sharing on social media is more common than it was 10 years ago, when older moms were mostly simply not on the platforms. Still, there’s no denying that they are fewer. I so desperately wanted to see the stories of those moms ahead of me, just as I had when all my kids were preschool. Maybe older moms just get more selfish. Why won’t they share?
And now, here I am, and about the time my oldest was 16 and my third was on the brink of teen years, making me the mother of more teens than not, I stopped not only Instagram cold, but also stopped making annual posts about the curriculum choices I made. Was I being selfish? Why does this happen?
It’s kind of like how I’d smile and nod and internally roll my eyes when grandmas would stop me at the grocery store with a cart full of small children, saying, “It goes so fast!”
“Can it be fast until nap time?!” I’d think to myself. Now, I am that grandma. I find myself wanting to say, “Oh, it goes so fast!” I don’t want to be annoying. I don’t want to be trite. But it turns out the grandmas actually knew the truth better than I did. Instead of being silenced, I continue the custom of telling the young moms truth they do not understand. Someday they will, and they will smile themselves as they say the same thing.
For many things I tell my kids, I’ll add the tag, “You’ll thank me when you’re thirty.” It’s true, Lord willing, but it’s also shorthand for, “I don’t care if you like my advice or not. It’s true, and, whether you take it or not, when you’re thirty you’ll know I was right.” Perhaps this is the grandma version. You’ll thank me when you’re sixty. Or forty-three.
Looking back over my own decades of mothering, I remember the many pieces of wisdom handed down to me from older women. I also remember looking around and thinking that the older women around me didn’t meet my standards for women to seek advice from. They weren’t ideal, their families weren’t ideal, so how could they help me become my ideal? Heh. Maybe it was all a clue. I wasn’t going to be ideal either, and I could learn much from them about how to handle trouble, trial, and imperfections all around.
Here’s what I’ve learned. You don’t need to find one woman who has all the answers you want. You need a community full of women to learn from. Learn from each one’s strengths. Learn from watching them interact and help one another. Learn from their mistakes as well as their successes. This is healthy community - where we don’t put any one person on a pedestal, but rather pull together in love and grace.
When you’ve been homeschooling for nearly two decades, whether you’re forty or fifty or sixty, and have graduated a few students, it’s hard to maintain your enthusiasm. Your homeschool isn’t cute. Your homeschool isn’t fun in the same way that homeschooling everyone ten-and-under is fun. True, the kids are older and no longer catching butterflies for science. Also, coffee doesn’t hit the same way it used to and energy doesn’t come with adrenaline highs anymore. Over forty, there is no more running on fumes and pulling it off.
There’s no real need to mourn the loss of the ability to run high on fumes, either. Our children don’t need energetic cheerleaders so much as they need steady, stable, wise counselors. Wise counselors don’t go around giving everyone every bit of advice they have, either. They wait to be asked. They wait for a receptive moment. They give a small dose and a baby step, not an information dump and ten-step program.
When you’ve seen four decades or more, you know that even though time flies by, it also won’t hurt anyone to wait a day or a week. Uncertainty, awkwardness, and learning the hard way are all normal and possibly even good for us — not situations to avoid at all costs.
When we’re twenty and possibly even thirty, we want the older women to give us the answers. One reason they don’t, it turns out, is because we don’t need answers as much as we need faith, hope, and love. We need faith that God’s in charge and working through our less than ideal efforts. We need hope that God will keep His promises even while we are messing things up. We need love of God and love of our children to direct our daily choices in how to respond and what to do. We need to repent, rejoice, repeat.
So instead of looking to older women for answers so you can avoid all their mistakes, watch their way of being. If they are wise women, copy their manner of life. You don’t need them to apply their wisdom to you; you need to follow down their path so you can gain wisdom of your own to apply.
You need to follow their God, Who will be as good to you as He has been to them.
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