Messy, Beautiful: Thoughts After 25 Years of Homeschooling

Image by Andreas Lischka from Pixabay

It happened so gradually that I almost missed it.

Our second youngest, Raphael, was a homeschooled high school senior this past school year. He was technically “homeschooled,” but he worked independently, and I didn't do much. My biggest responsibility in his last semester was filling out a FAFSA and creating a transcript for him. Our youngest, Danny, just finished his junior year at our local high school and plans to attend there for his senior year as well.

And so I’m done. Just like that, 25 years of homeschooling have come to an end. We transitioned into summer schedules, and a stack of books sits silently in the corner of the living room–they’re all I have to show.

But not really. They’re not all I have to show.

I’ve always called myself a “reluctant homeschooler,” which is fair. I have been reluctant, not because homeschooling is not fantastic–it is. I have been reluctant only because it is so very hard. At least for me, it was. I have never been one of those moms who get excited about curriculum planning or flashcards. I’m not inspired by the idea of making a world history timeline that winds around our dining room walls. I like learning, and I like my kids, but I’m not a natural teacher. I mean, isn’t that what we have schools for?

I remember one year, when our family had a particularly stressful end of summer, a sweet friend offered to help by “planning the school year” for me. I politely declined. I had seen the history timeline in her dining room and didn’t need that kind of pressure.

But what does help?

I have been thinking about this question recently as I watch younger moms gear up for a new school year, and I can feel their anxiety. They’re discussing curricula, textbooks, software, and co-ops. There are so many different ways of homeschooling, and I have established myself as not an authority on curriculum, but my 25 years have taught me some things about homeschooling that I think are worth sharing:

It’s not about school. It’s about family culture. And it’s messy.

It’s not about school.

First of all, it’s not about school. I used to think it was, and I lived in fear of failing. I once woke up in the middle of the night in an all-out panic over Latin flashcards. I thought homeschooling was about creating a “school” experience at home, successfully filling our kids’ heads with facts, and I didn’t feel very good at that.

When our oldest was four, I felt that we were already behind. She was bright and learning to read, but she did not like to sit down with a pencil and a stack of workbooks, which was what I thought kindergarten needed to look like. She liked exploring the woods and catching frogs. She liked baking muffins with me. She loved picture books and would listen to us read E. B. White for hours. I can look back now and see what a success and joy it was to live that sweet, simple life together. But I was so worried about “school,” I couldn't see it back then.

Of course, things changed when the kids grew older, and eventually, more structure became necessary in our homeschooling. We even have a room in our home that we call the “classroom,” and my husband Dan did teach some algebra in there, using the enormous whiteboard on the wall. But I never used it much, and the kids were more likely to sit with piles of books on the living room couches or at the dining room table. 

It’s about family culture.

In practice, I have come to understand the importance of the home part of homeschooling, not just the school. That brings us to the idea that homeschooling is about family culture. 

Do you think about your family culture? I’ll admit that I did not think a lot about family culture when my kids were small. I was too busy making giant pots of spaghetti, searching for missing buckle shoes, and trying not to drown. Dan has always talked about family culture, though, and I have grown in understanding its infinite value. Family culture is made up of those principles and values your family lives by, which are such an organic part of the way you live that perhaps you have never even articulated them. 

And this is the important stuff. This is the secret sauce. 

When people hear about my upbringing in a faithful Catholic family with eight siblings and how I have held onto my faith through all these years, they sometimes want to know the secret formula. But I don’t have one to share. Though there is no secret formula for raising kids in the faith, it is true that my Catholic faith was an indisputable core part of my identity growing up. 

That’s the goal, right? Family culture is how you do that. 

Though we did learn to read and write, add and subtract in our homeschool, the more important lessons we learned were taught through the way we lived our life together. We prayed and went to Mass together. We talked about God, in big and small ways, every day. We read so many books, but we also spent time outdoors. We raised pigs and chickens. We rode horses. We played sports. We spent hours at the lake, swimming, fishing, and listening for loons. We still do these things, and some of my young adult kids are doing them now with families of their own.

Homeschooling allowed us to set our own priorities and explore the world together. We learned what’s important and what we value by spending time together. This is how human relationships work, growing and developing inside of shared space and a shared life over long stretches of time. We had the richness and luxury that time together can give us with our kids, and they had that with each other. That can happen in many ways, but homeschooling is one of the ways God meant for it to happen for our family.

It’s messy.

But that doesn’t mean it was perfect. Which brings us to the it’s messy part. If you homeschool, you already know that it’s messy, but I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be OK. 

The son who needs to repeat freshman year of high school because he didn’t really accomplish much the first time around, and you were too busy folding laundry and teaching fractions to force him to do his work? He’s going to be OK. 

The daughter that you pressured to take an online Mandarin class for her foreign language credit, and now she wants to quit life because it’s way too hard and THIS CLASS WILL NEVER END? She’s going to be OK. 

The second grader who draws a pooping skeleton in the margins of his spelling book and sneaks onto the computer to play on PBS Kids while you’re discussing Roman history with one of his siblings? He’s going to be OK.

And you will be, too. 

We need God.

It’s easy to focus on the gaps and all the ways we fall short. The geography you didn’t teach, the days you were pregnant and cranky, the times when you actually succeeded at the school stuff, but now laundry is piled in every corner of the house, the baby is sitting in a dirty diaper under the dining room table eating the Cheezits he finds there, and there’s no plan for dinner because…guess what? There’s only one of you.

It’s messy. But homeschooling or not, those gaps are part of life. All the ways we fall short of perfection are part of how we teach our kids and teach ourselves that we cannot do all things. We need God. We need grace. These are the most important things any of us will ever learn.

I guess there won’t be a ceremony. I kind of feel like I’ve earned a cap and gown, a party and a cake, but my homeschool graduation looks more like a quiet moving on to the next things. There’s plenty of life left to live. We still have the chickens, but the classroom is now a spare bedroom and part-time gym. I’ve given away many of the books, but I’m holding onto E. B. White.

As challenging as it was and as reluctant as I may have been, homeschooling was a gift. I can see that now. A messy, beautiful gift that has changed us and helped shape us into the messy, beautiful people we are today. School may be closed, but we’re still here, growing and changing, learning as we go.