We took a break from homeschooling for a while. It was so hard for me to do but I put my kids in a private school for a while. The first few weeks of school were very hard on my kids. My son would cry almost every day and he didn’t want to go. I felt terrible because this wasn’t what I wanted for my kids but I felt like I was in over my head with homeschooling, I had no support from family or friends, and I was beginning to get very depressed about homeschooling. So one day I just did it, I registered them for school. They got used to going to school and actually liked it a lot.
We decided to start homeschooling again this year and withdrew the kids from school. And it was equally hard on my kids taking them out of school as it was putting them in. One of my kids really likes homeschooling so he was okay with it but was sad about leaving his friends. My daughter, on the other hand, was really upset about it and wanted to go back to school. This is where my conflicted feelings have stemmed from. I feel really weird about homeschooling at the moment.
I always thought homeschooling was the best thing you could do for your kids. That is, until I actually did it. And what I found is, there are not a lot of activities for homeschoolers to do. Even if you live an area with an active support group, they still don’t compare to the amount of things they get to do at school. The support group I belong to meets twice a month. I had the kids in a homeschool gym class but it didn’t last long. The homeschoolers that went to it slowly but surely all started dropping the class until there weren’t many left. Eventually it got cancelled. I haven’t really connected with any homeschooling families that I really fit in with. I want homeschooling to work but I must admit I am concerned about my kids not having any friends and not having the social connections that I think they need. Things aren’t like they were for me growing up. I knew lots of homeschoolers and they were all pretty much normal.
I think this may be because I used to be involved in a church. I don’t go to church now although I am thinking about going again. My husband isn’t a Christian and really I am very lost spiritually. I wouldn’t call myself an atheist because I believe there is a God, or maybe I just want to believe that, but I can’t quite make myself dive into the whole Christian thing again.
I find myself not fitting in with the religious homeschooling moms because, well, I think a lot of them are weird. I don’t want my kids to grow up not being allowed to watch tv or video games or any of the other extremist stuff I see in the homeschooling movement. But I don’t really fit in with the secular homeschoolers either. The secular homeschoolers I have met were weirder than the religious ones. I met one lady whose daughter supposedly was schizophrenic and that is why there were homeschooling. From what I could see, though, the daughter wasn’t the crazy one in the family.
So here I am going through the motions with homeschool. I know that I don’t want my kids in school but I wish that there was more out there for homeschoolers. I also wish there was more time in the day for me to do everything I really wanted to do with homeschooling. I get really jealous of the homeschooling moms that seem to be on top of things and always are up to something cool.
