What's the hardest thing about homeschooling?
The first twelve months.
Why?
1. You come face to face with how impatient/bossy/angry/
2. You get to grapple with how much others' opinions of you matter to you.
3. You may get a really unpleasant look at exactly how your child's behavior/accomplishments/
4. Your children's needs may feel overwhelming because other people have been meeting many of them up to now.
5. You may want to have "me time", but they're always there.
6. You may come to realize that you don't really know your children as well as you thought and that you don't yet like one another well enough to spend all-day-every-day together. It takes time.
7. The gaps and gaping maws in your own education become terribly obvious. And they make you feel incompetent.
8. You realize that you know a lot about schooling and not a lot about education.
9. You are LIVING in your house and it's not only not House Beautiful, it's not even House Reasonably Tidy.
10. You realize that you are now responsible for things you had previously not even thought about. Surprise!
11. You may find that your children don't like curriculum, wipe out at about mid-November and say they hate it in mid-January. This is confounding. And scary.
12. Having been forced to input information and skills they have no interest in, your children may begin fighting with you. And you may begin fighting with your spouse. So there's that.
13. Everyone homeschooling around you seems to be doing just great (they're probably not) and you're feeling like you're doing it all wrong (you're probably not).
14. Your specter of your childhood will probably rise up with regularity and ask you to dance a really unpleasant dance with your growing understanding of how you want to raise your children.
15. You're probably budgeting like a maniac because you've gone from two incomes to one. And co-op is spendy and so are museums. Which, who didn't want That stress?
16. Your friends are sending their kids to school and they get to do things during the day that are not only out of your schedule's reach but out of your budget's reach as well.
17. There's a lot more cooking and cleaning and laundry than you had anticipated with everyone at home.
Now that's a party right there, Buttercup. Can you imagine the advertising campaign for that? I'm trying to figure out if it would feature zombies or a person going through an old-timey washing machine wringer. Woo-hoo! Sign me up!
The first year of homeschooling is like the first year of marriage or the first year with the firstborn. It's a sea change. You can fight it or you can roll with it. Go with your instincts or listen to your fears. It is almost impossible to feel June Cleaver happy the first year. Acknowledge you're doing a lot of personal growth and relationship growth and family growth and intellectual growth. That's fantastically important. And that's plenty. Believe me. In fact, that's probably more than enough. If you figure out anything about learning that first year, well that's just gravy.
And the next year is easier.
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