My Morning

an OrsiniFamily.net site!

'Sit in the ugly green chair in my living room and

take a look another never-quite-ordinary day!

This morning, I heard of Karen Andreola's fictional account of the daily life of a homeschooling mother, and I read that it includes detailed descriptions of how they live, including precise examples, even with the Latin terminology her children use to describe nature. Her book is encouraging and exciting, the reviewers say, because it shows that we can do it even when life is tough, which it often is. I thought I'd try my hand at writing my own story before I read hers. Then, I'll read and talk about her here. For now, though, let's get on with the introduction to mine!

As an individual with a mind that just seems to soak up learning from textbooks, I longed for a definitive manual on homeschooling. I wanted someone, like a new member on one of my yahoogroups said, to tell me how to homeschool. When a friend told me there's no way to tell someone else how to do it, I thought she was being modest about her methods. Now, however, I realize her answer was dead-on right. So stop reading now. ~tee hee~

Okay, I kept reading anyway, which was the best possible thing I could have done. I read books on every theory, every style, and even differing ideologies. Yet, even after I check out a few that even followed the traditional textbook format, I eventually realized that the books that stayed with me were not the wonderfully informative manuals, but the chatty, example-filled stories of how mothers pulled it off.

I liked Luanne Shackelford's style of writing, for instance. I also liked well-reasoned, confrontational writing about why homeschooling was THE way to educate our children. Gregg Harris is a great example of excellence in this area. (Why, you ask? Well, I was a very young mother, and I have a tendency to go with the strongest current. So, since so many people were vitriolic in their hatred of homeschooling, even when they knew nothing about it, I needed something equally strong to edge me back to my original decision.)

Now, I know that blogging has opened up living rooms and schoolrooms all over the world for us to use to learn about the day-to-day struggles of many home educators, but I didn't want to take a casual look now and then at a homeschooler's life, only seeing what they let me see. Instead, I wanted to walk into the house of a homeschooling family, sit down in a corner, and observe how Mama pulled it all off.

I wanted to see the milk spilling all over the floor that morning, and her swift efforts to wipe it all up. I wanted to smell the faint, cheesy odor days later that clued her in to the liquid she missed, rotten milk now pooled under the stove. How about the interruption from a friendly, compassionate, highly confused Jehovah's Witness at the door on a day when all her kids are lying around the house ill and half-naked. Did we mention that the couch cushions are covered with fresh vomit from a 20-second-ago episode?

I want to see her bending to retrieve the dead mouse from under the hutch while trying to keep the kids from squealing or making gross sounds to further turn her stomach, which has been weakened from the dead-mouse smell permeating her entire house. (She had not been able to find the mouse despite exhaustive searches all week long.) I wanted to know she was doing all this while reading aloud during the day and attending to Daddy in the evenings.

Finally, as a working mother now, I'd like to see her pull off homeschooling while also holding down a job. Why? Because I need to know that there are other people out there struggling just like me, in the real world of cockroaches, unwashed laundry, and bathrooms housing mystery odors. (More about that follows later.) For my sanity, I wanted to see someone else try and fail, then try and fail again, and finally just keep trying because it becomes a habit to get back up after each fall and to (in the words of the French Peas), keep walking.

Is there anyone else out there who feels that sometimes it's just willpower holding us up? And then realizing, like me, that it is, instead, the gracious hand of God, the heavenly father who sees our needs and fills them, not our way but his way. Is anyone else full of doubts, but also so sure that the God who called them to this walk will enable them to fulfill the calling with excellence? Has anyone taken a blind leap of faith in this direction, still unsure how it will all end? I think we all have, and yet I don't read about it enough.

What you won't see in this narrative is excellent grammar. I am going to write the way I speak, because this isn't just another textbook or even a chatty instruction manual. It's an opening of my heart and home, and if you're going to sit in my ugly green chair and watch me live my day, you're going to get a glimpse of the real me, a woman who wants to teach like Charlotte Mason, but ends us just being Stephanie. Will you read on and join me in my guided tour of one homeschooler who isn't doing it all right, but who might be able to give you a clue about how to get it right enough?

Then, read on!

~Stephanie~

aka. The Story Making Mother

www.oocities.org/storymakingmotheronline

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