I’ve hinted a lot in the past few months at the wave of changes this season of life has brought to our family. It’s a natural thing, this unfolding growth we’ve been experiencing. My husband and I have been married 23 years this Saturday; several of my dear friends were born the year I entered middle school. Middle school, people! We have children in college. We’ve lived all over the country. We are old enough to go for annual physicals and wonder what our blood pressure and cholesterol will look like.
We’re not the people we once were.
And that’s ok. Oh my goodness, it’s better than ok. I like myself so much more at 44 than I did at 34, and way better than I did at 24. I’m comfortable in my own skin. I’m content with who I am, who my kids are, and how God uses our family. I don’t crane my neck to assess the accomplishments of others. I’m right here, doing my thing, and less concerned about who might be double-checking my plumb lines than I ever thought possible. I’m accountable to God, and my husband, and myself, and that feels freeing and right. I like where I find myself today, even if it’s not where I ever thought I’d be.
Which is good, because so much of my day today is nothing that I ever saw coming.
One of the changes our family has embraced (finally) has been a shift in our homeschooling. When we first moved to Tennessee, one of our very first acts was to plug into a co-op. Despite never having been drawn to the Classical Conversations model, that’s where we ended up. I wasn’t overly thrilled about the curriculum, and didn’t really see how my Charlotte Mason method of home education was going to fit into the box defined by the CC culture, but I had known CCers for ages, and every one of them repeated the same word over and over when sharing about their experience— “community.”
Community, I mused, is exactly what we need. See, our primary goal was securing an environment where our younger kids (9, 8, 5, 3, and 1 at the time) could grow friendships. But our secondary goal was mapping out the framework of this new area, finding our footing, and learning our place as we put down roots. The word “community” drew me in, even as countless other learning groups (and I do mean countless— East Tennessee has more co-ops than you can imagine) touted being STEM-based, curiosity driven, interest led, engaging, and creative. Those things I could offer at home. But community? Community I was short on.
So we plunged ahead. And I’ll be honest, the first year was a learning curve I can’t really call a total success. Some days I felt like a newbie, and others I felt like I was forcing on the straitjacket of an educational method that I didn’t believe in and couldn’t bear. I floundered in the basics. I couldn’t find a consistent time to read aloud. I started dreading school. I was a tutor, yet I never quite felt like I knew what I was doing. And when we trudged over the finish line of the year, I was drained, weary, and disillusioned.
Except… darn it… community.
While I hadn’t made any “want to meet for coffee?” friends through CC (yet), my kids had. John Mark and Birdie had loved their respective first years, and were enthusiastically in favor of going back. The kids had somehow learned quite a bit more than I realized, to boot. Simon was hoping to join in. Mary Hannah had been contracted to fill a tutoring slot as well. The only stick in the mud was me. So I did what moms do and I sucked it up, and back we went for round two.
Our second year was better than the first, to be sure. I remembered the number one thing I always tell other homeschooling moms and I quit letting the curriculum run the show and wrenched back control. I prioritized our homeschool vision above the CC memory work and took a deep breath. Some weeks, I felt like we barely touched CC. Others, it was the background music to the Sonlight core we were raptly enjoying. At the end of our second year, I was satisfied with our journey, but ready to stop the experiment and go back to our full-time CM learning environment.
Enough, I thought, was enough. We had met folks. We were fairly well established in our surroundings. We could swim quite well without the safety net of CC holding our hand in East Tennessee. We even made overtures towards starting our own CM-based co-op, to fill what we saw as a need here.
It was a total shock to both my husband and I, then, when we both felt the unmistakeable prompting of the Holy Spirit to go back to CC for a third year.
To be continued Friday…
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