The Greatest of All Home School Myths

The face of home schooling has change drastically since I was a kid. More and more people are doing it and they are doing it for a wider variety of reasons than they did twenty years ago. Because of that, some of the larger home school myths have really been debunked. Home educated children are going on to good colleges, having successful careers, getting married, and socializing with the general public on a day to day basis without issue. Twenty or thirty years ago it was feared that a home educated child would never be able to accomplish any of that.

The new myths about home schooling are different. They come up all the time in conversations I have with moms at dance, Cub Scouts, church and everywhere else. It goes something like this:

Her: where do your kids go to school?

Me: we home school.

Her: oh that's cool. I've thought about it, but you know, I'm just not patient enough.

-OR-

Her: Oh wow. You must have a big house. I wanted to home school but we just don't have space for a classroom.

-OR-

Her: I wish I was organized enough for that.

You get the idea. Non-home schooling moms have this CRAZY idea that all of us out there educating our kids at home live in mansions and are organized enough to pass for Martha Stewart. Oh, and we have the patience of saints. And since they fall short, they can never do what we do.

I'm here to tell you that's not true.

I live in a 1200 square foot home. We bought it when we didn't have kids and we always meant to "upgrade" but we are just happy here so we make it work.

We do school in our living room. Our very lived in living room. It has not perfect. Photos of my real life, realistic living room during a school day doesn't look like anything you've seen on Pinterest. It's not going to be featured in any magazines any time soon. But it's real. And real learning is happening here every day. Isn't that what matters?

Want proof? Here it is. The cold, hard proof that home schoolers do not have to be super organized neat freaks with a dedicated classroom.

As for patience? I have almost none. Ask my six year old. He insists on adding an "n" sound to every word he reads. "B-u-g... bung?  p-i-ck... pink?" Which inevitably leads to me breaking down in tears and sobbing, "Why do you read letters that aren't even there? WHY? WHY? Do you see an 'n' that I don't see? What is happening here?" That happened. Today.

Now I'm not saying home schooling is for everyone. I know it isn't. But I just want to make it clear that the stereotype you have in your head of the kind of person and setting it takes to "do it right" is false. It doesn't exist. At least, it doesn't exist in my house or the house of anyone I know!

And for the home school moms reading this, RELAX. You don't have to be perfect. Your house doesn't have to be perfect. Just do the best you can with what you've got TODAY.

Failure!

I recently realized that I was going to bed every night and whispering under my breath, "wow, I have failed at this day."

I said it out loud to my husband a time or time and his response was always, "Failed at what, exactly?"

The list goes on and on. Here's just a tiny sampling of the ways I thought I had failed in a given day:

• There were dirty dishes in the sink
• The six year old still isn't reading.
• I'm not challenging my eight year old enough.
•  I didn't hold the baby enough.
•  Nobody has clean socks for tomorrow because I never got around to matching them.
•  The kids made themselves peanut butter sandwiches for lunch AND dinner because the baby wouldn't stop crying and I just didn't have a free hand to cook for them.
• I didn't put as much time into my Sunday school lesson as I should have.
• I didn't drink enough water.
• I forgot to pay the water bill. No, scratch that, I kept forgetting that I DID pay the water bill and so I paid it three times and now my bank account is short over $100 because I sent too much to the water bill people. 
• I missed my workout because the baby wouldn't tolerate being put down. 

The funny thing is that I feel like a failure for not holding the baby enough and yet the reason I didn't do half the things I meant to do that day was because I was always holding the baby. In other words, I was being ridiculously hard on myself.

 I started thinking about this sense of failure that I was living with night and day.Where was it coming from? And I think most of us can agree on the obvious answer: Facebook, Pinterest, and Mommy Blogs.

All the places where you see everything everyone else accomplished. And while I think it is great to share our victories with our friends and family, the negative side of that is sometimes we assume that just because they did that one thing perfectly, that they did everything else perfectly, too. The reality is, they probably didn't. There are only so many hours in the day so if a mom finds time to train for a marathon, she probably isn't cooking gourmet meals three times a day. If she's cooking gourmet meals three times a day, she probably isn't sewing all her own adorable boutique-style toddler outfits. If her kids have a closet full of handmade clothes, she probably isn't training for a marathon! You get the idea. We take the strengths of each mom we know in person and through social media and create this Super Mom in our minds who doesn't actually exist. We all have strengths and weaknesses but when we spend too much time online, we get this crazy idea that all we should have are strengths.

I've found too many blogs and Pinterest boards leave most of us mommas feeling inadequate. We go to bed questioning ourselves and whispering such nonsense as, "Today, I failed at everything." And so I decided it was time to create my own blog. A realistic blog. An honest blog. A blog that celebrates that I finally got that bookcase in the living room organized but admits that while I was doing it, my kids had Cheetos for lunch.  A blog that admits it's OK if you don't cloth diaper, co-sleep, cook with all organic ingredients, sew all your own adorable outfits, grow all your own vegetables, run marathons in your spare time and have an impeccably clean home every moment of the day.

And it's ok to actually do a few of those things, don't get me wrong. But it's time we stop making ourselves sick trying to be ALL of those things. Because in the end, it really doesn't matter. Let's start measuring our success and failure by the smiles on the Cheeto-stained faces of our children instead of how we compare to everyone else.