“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters
compared to what lies within us.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
My husband of 20 years has left me and our 8 children.
There I said it. The truth is finally out. My secret life - the one I have hidden from my homeschooling friends, my family, my church - has come to an end. Despite my hope that we would find a way out of this and my desperate attempts to hold on over the past three years, my husband has chosen another woman, another lifestyle and divorce. Just typing those words crushes my heart and soul because it is so far removed from what I believed in or hoped for my life.
I feel as if I have been sleepwalking and have just woken up, except the nightmare has turned out to be my reality. Accepting this reality and finding the strength to begin to build a new life for myself and my kids is the hardest thing I have ever done. Made even more difficult because I still believe in all the things that we wanted for our family from the beginning. I am still committed to homeschooling the kids, raising them in a Christian home, and creating a strong family unit. I am walking in total faith that somehow God will find a way to make that happen, that somehow the impossible task of being a single homeschooling mother of 8 children will be made possible. I will put one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, until God brings me to the place he wants me to be.
I have very fond memories of the days when my older children were small and I was a nearly perfect mother. There were 3 or 4 of them then and our lives were orderly and predictable. I was confident that I knew the answers to every one of life's problems and could have written several books on my parenting theories.We had just started our homeschooling journey and I was full of enthusiasm and excitement. It's not that my enthusiasm has waned over the past 13 years it's just that I have realized that sometimes parenting eight children is more like herding cats.
Since I am a planner extraordinaire, I love to chart, plot, and outline. In my mind the family path is clearly laid out before us. Now if I could just get those cats to stay on the path! Why do they all want to go in a different direction? Just as soon as I think I have them all on the path one of them decides to climb up a tree or wander off into the bushes. No matter how much I run along behind them, waving my arms and nipping at their tails they won't get in a group and move.
I've found that trying to herd cats is pretty much a waste of time. The herd mentality just doesn't apply to children who are all individuals with unique strengths and weaknesses. The only way my kids will get in a group and get on the family path is if I walk in front of them carrying a can of tuna. My job is to lead not to herd. My job is to open the can of tuna and start walking.
I have discovered that my particular ministry to other homeschoolers is sharing my chaotic life and seemingly insurmountable challenges with them. For some odd reason this always makes other people feel better about their own lives. Go figure. Here is an example I will share from a real day last winter....
First, my husband calls and tells me he's staying in Anchorage with his carving buddies and won't be home tonight. It is family night at Taekwondo and Teen Night at the horse barn where my older daughter works so I get to shuttle everyone around as usual. When my son gets out of the car he accidentally slams my 8 year old daughter's fingers in the car door. She lets out a blood curdling scream. My instinct is to immediatley go for the door handle to get her hand out. The probelm is the van isn't in park...it rolls forward and smashes into the building just below a window, pushing the lower wall into the inside of the building. After assessing the damage (major to the building/minor to the van) I leave the boys and take my wounded daughter back home to put her hand on ice. On the way home a police office pulls me over for...a dirty license plate. (Don't I have enough to clean already?!)
About the time I get home with the wounded hand, my older daughter calls from the barn. She fell off a horse onto a fence and scraped her back all up. I go pick her from the barn and the boys up from Taekwondo. But I notice as I am taking the baby out of the car that she feels warm. I take her temperature which is 102.
My husband calls to see how my day was. Big mistake! I'll apologize tomorrow.
After the dust settles the kids and I decide that all bad days can be cured by eating chocolate. We each eat two BIG brownies and discuss the disaster. My 4th grader has been reading Robinson Crusoe. "We'll have to be like Robinson Crusoe, Mom. He spent the whole book just telling God how grateful he was that his life had been spared. He didn't even care that he had to spend 28 years on an island. He was happy to there." (Okay God, I get the message!) Isn't it great when kids learn character building lessons they can share with their stressed out parents!
We decide that it is a blessing that the window didn't break because that would have been even more expensive to repair. It was also a blessing that the police officer didn't give me a ticket, that Teagan didn't break her back, that the baby didn't throw up in the car, and that my husband may speak to me again in a few days...I hope.
Homeschooling has been a part of my life for 17 years. When my oldest daughter was three months old my husband brought up the radical idea of educating our children at home. Later he gave up his career as an Advertising Art Director and became a Graphic Design Teacher at a local high school. After a year of teaching there was no question about it - our children would be homeschooled!
I had never heard of homeschooling but it didn't take much research to discover that I was a perfect candidate for the title of "homeschooling mom". Over the years the title has varied from being an all consuming definition of who I am to a mere afterthought. My children have seen my supermom phase and my complete burnout and they have lived to tell about it. There have been heaps of blessings and many forks in the road. Not a single day has ever quite turned out the way I thought it would. I have simply learned to leave each day in the hands of God and wait for the answers somewhere along the road.