No Comparisons
Have you noticed that homeschool families, particularly us moms, have a tendency to believe that everyone else who homeschools has a lovely, clean, peaceful home, creates nutritious, delicious meals from scratch and never yells at their children. You all know what I am talking about… Everyone else has their stuff in a pile but you, right? Wrong.
That subtle competitiveness that exists amongst homeschooling moms is something I want to speak about today – but from a different perspective… you’d think, after all, that I would have it together after being at this craft for some seventeen years, right?
Just for your amusement, and for the ability to talk myself off the ledge of insanity, I want to compile two weeks in my house into a short retrospective… My 11 year-old son had to have his tonsils out… So, surgery day arrived, and what should have been three hours tops, ends up a whole day, because he has a reaction to anesthesia. He is distraught and uncomfortable when he comes home, and every sip of water is a fight… His 5 year old brother, when reminded to be nice to him, asks if he has holes in his neck!
I walk into my office to find one of my four dogs limping. Long story short – she has slipped a disc and that means she has to be on a leash, with me 24/7 for two weeks. Swell.
48 hours after the surgery, despite threatening him with waterboarding, my 11 year old is back in the hospital because of dehydration. We spend a restless and disturbing night with his IV alarm sounding off about every 45 minutes. And they think it is the pain medication that makes patients act goofy!! The nurse says he may not use sign language – he has to talk. I am not sure who he is angrier with – her, or me! You can see the steam pouring out of his ears every time he wants to make a request.
We return home, to a house full of chaos. My 16 year-old’s hard drive, which had EVERY piece of homeschool documentation from 5th grade forward on it, as well as ALL of the compositions this kid has written in the past ten years – she is a habitual story writer – was knocked off the desk by the 11-year-old. Two different computer companies have not managed to successfully recover the content, and so it has to be shipped off to CA for a “forensic drive recovery”, to the tune of more than $1000. The 11-year-old is watching his newspaper boy’s bank account dwindle, because, despite it being an accident, he will have to pay for it. The hard lessons of life come early around here.
I usually get up and walk two of my dogs at 530 every morning. This works well and my husband decides to join me… until last Monday when he walks across the parking lot of the local grocery and breaks the largest load-bearing bone in his foot, resulting in 6-8 weeks in a non-weight-bearing cast.
A trip to the orthopedist, a nice big blue cast, and no more “fight club” for hubby… And we return home to find one of the aforementioned dogs has gotten into something she should not have, and sicked up all over my office and den. Now I am the best of moms if you have cut yourself and are bleeding, but if you decide to hurl, you are going to do it by yourself… but I don’t have a back up for this gig, so I pinch my nose and muddle through.
And in the midst of all this, we still did accomplish a bit of school. Ever have a time in your life like this? Believe me, we can ALL empathize. Remember, the next time you are on the ledge, the rest of us have been there too…the wisdom is in finding someone to talk you down!
