Posted in Me

Tonight I told my husband about the conclusion I had reached in this post that this year just ending was the hardest homeschooling year ever.  I told him, "I don't know what I was thinking.  I thought that this school year we would do tons of schoolwork, join activities, make friends, do a science coop, and basically be perfect homeschoolers, WHEN I HAD JUST HAD A BABY!"

He just rolled his eyes and said, "What am I going to do with you?"

This gap between my expectations and my reality is very hard to deal with, because I waste time feeling bad that I haven't met my incredibly unrealistic goals, and that energy could go toward actually working on them!  As an even more dramatic example, I could share the list of goals I made up for last summer.

Keep in mind that I was in my third trimester and had a four year old and two year old twins, and somehow I thought I was going to accomplish twenty-one goals in six different areas. In two months. Hugely pregnant. With my oldest preparing to leave for college.

I'm insane.  But I can only see it in retrospect!  How can I bring my expectations in line with what I can truly accomplish?  Maybe I don't understand goal-setting?

And I find myself, yet again, working on a schedule.  Is it a good idea? I don't know.  I just reread A Mother's Rule of Life and I noticed something I never had before, a critical couple of lines that I had overlooked.  "A Rule of Life is not just a schedule, not just a collection of activities organized into a set pattern for efficient repetition.  A Rule is an organization of everything that has to do with your vocation, based on a hierarchy of the priorities that define the vocation and done with the intent to please God.  It deals with the essential responsibilities of your state of life, organized to ensure their fulfillment.  The activities worked into the Rule are determined by the specific calling, charism, and apostolate of the person living the Rule." (emphasis added)

I think that before I was confused and thought that, because Holly Pierlot was a Catholic homeschooling mother, and because I was a Catholic homeschooling mother, my rule would look like hers, perhaps with minor variations.  I thought that her vocation was my vocation, but it's not.  *I* am called to do things she is not, and she is called to do things I am not.  At this point I almost wish she had not put her example in the book, and had put more examples of religious life in the book.

I started to realize that, even though all nuns have similar-looking vocations, the orders are different.  The Rules are different.    They have different callings and charisms.  Making my own rule is not just a matter of plugging my specifics into Holly's framework - *I* need to sit down and understand what *my* vocation is and how best to fulfill it.  I need to discern what *my* daily duties are. Then I need to develop self-discipline to do what God has called me to do. 

When I am goal-setting or schedule-making, I need to know that God has called me to do those things, not that I am making some crazy list of 21 things I'll never get to that He didn't want me to do anyway.