Throughout our years on earth, we all find our footsteps set on various paths of life and we aren’t always sure how we got headed that way. We ended up home schooling our children and the question directed at us the most often was ‘why did you decide to home school?’
I found myself in a discussion group, one time, and the moderator decided to pass this quesiton down the line as part of the introduction for each mother. I started to feel very unworthy as I listened to each person related how they discerned God’s Will in their lives and came to the decision to home school. Everyone seemed to have had a personal message from God which sounded (as they spoke) very direct, holy, and to the point. For the most part, I was happy to have discovered home schooling for my children but I got the message in a more indirect way.
When we were first married, my husband and I each brought to the union an old, rattletrap automobile. Although the elderly cars were much-loved, their years were very evident and there were many parts that didn’t work and hadn’t worked for more years than we liked to think about. Their one virtue was that we held the pink slips on both of them. Eventually, we acquired another used car and disposed of my husband’s white elephant. Since I was pregnant, he took over my 1969 stick shit, Volkswagen Bug.
The Volkswagen didn’t have air conditioning, the heater worked best in the summer, and the seats had a bucolic design as most of the straw stuffing was on the outside of the upholstery. The radio only worked on one channel. It was a Protestant broadcast but, in desperation, my husband often listened to it on his way to work, sometimes arguing out loud when he didn’t agree with some viewpoint presented. The car was paid for so we could afford to be ecumenical!
I was about eight months along in my pregnancy when my husband came home and asked if I had ever heard about something called home schooling. He had heard it discussed on the one, lone radio station on the way to work that morning and was intrigued. We lived within waking distance of a public school but weren’t sure our future child would be happy there. I tucked the information in the back of my mind, wondering where one could discover more about this concept. God used the mailman as the next day, I saw an ad about Catholic home schooling in a magazine. I cut it out, sent for the brochure and filed it away until my as yet unborn son was five years old. The rest, as they say is history.
The years have flown by and my four children are long gone from the kitchen table school room. They have degrees from college. There were many ups and downs in the home schooling process. Would I do it, again? I’m really not sure. Would I recommend it to another. I’m really not sure but if directly asked, I would give them the information to research and discover this for themselves. It takes strong personalities to home school and when you have a group of home schooling families together, many of these personalities come to light. My older son resented being homeschooled but at the ripe, old age of 28, told me that although he would have rather been in the traditional school situation, he realized I had done my best.
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